Seeing stuff is not about tricks, tools, skill, or technique. An unrelenting thirst to understand the sparks of people in motion dwarfs these learned variables. How someone wants to be seen cannot resist the effect of the one who wishes to see. Depth of field, lighting, lenses, and props are like textbooks in the course of graduate study, like a veneer on what I came here with. Curiosity, wonder, and a learned realization that we are all like fingerprints, or Rorschach protocols led me first to psychology and an obsessive love affair with ten ink blots.

When a visceral, unthinkable tragedy left me speechless and immobilized, I could not depend on words, thoughts or any form of analysis to hold the pieces of me. The tonnage of grief ravaged what I had learned and I returned, slowly, to art and the love of photography. Not coincidentally, my want for visual images took hold when I was 16, the same age of my only child when she died. She too was a photographer, moviemaker, and artist, known for flipping a camera around her long fingers, capturing angles and depths of what she saw.

I recently had a conversation with an important and insightful friend about sticking to that one thing in life, and how envious we are of those who look to be so goal directed. I realize how this would have held my skin together and perhaps provided navigation during such darkness. Both of us have shifted directions in very different ways, but both could be seen as searching. My particular brand of wandering looks irresponsible, flakey and inconsistent, truths I internalized.

Only in the forced slowing of grief have I opened my eyes again. Settling on an answer without openness to change is impossible . Us seekers, lookers, and perceivers are often misunderstood in the frustrating behaviors of our restless investigation. It is why we are artists, creators, or crafters of motion, description and color.

Choosing a path and staying on it is highly valued, certainly much safer and profitable. How then to plug into the rewards of predictability will never be my strength. In fact it is a significant weakness so, once at rock bottom, a circle joined ends. There is no desire to fight my own temperament, hard wiring and experience.

I was once the steady therapist on whom others depended for form and containment. Now I have lost my own irreplaceable container and am defined regularly by my tears. I am amorphous, but dynamic, an artist who has returned to the beginning, and also the end.

Capturing essence of the present moment now past is of course fluid, and biased by the relationship. Although our creature-preference is to rely on what does not change, anything and everything does. Creating an expression of this requires a diverse array of fascinations, a willingness to look at a moving object while moving, and mostly no fear of being moved.

My daughter was 14 when a well-known photographer asked if she would mind being the model in a creative shoot at a local cemetery. This brilliant photographer used a story line for the day and this is what it was: “You have died in a car accident but you don’t know you are dead yet.”

I have owned and used cameras all of my life, developed my own film as a teenager, and now the instant gratification of the digital world comes not a moment too soon.

My camera is where I love to go with you, or without you. It is now where she and I meet in the best, most productive ways possible.