Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Seeing the beauty in the mundane
Do you do something arty or crafty, or musical, or creative in some other way? Something that lets you express your feeling, hopes, and despairs in a non-verbal way? Does it help you cope with your illness?
Tell you what - I do. Actually I do all sorts of things depending on how the mood takes me and what my latest obsession is - beading, felting, painting... They all come and go, and I'm not terribly good at any of them, but the one constant, and the most therapeutic for me, is photography. I love taking photos. I have a camera the size of a pack of cards which I carry everywhere. I mean that pretty literally too - it lives in my handbag so I nearly always have it on hand. I also have a hulking old SLR. A trusty model created in the late 60s (yes, it's over a decade older than me!) that will probably be still going strong when the latest lot of digitals have all given up the ghost. I just bought 2 new lenses for it, which I am very excited about trying out!
Anyway, enough raving about my gorgeous photographic equipment, the point of all this is why I love photography so much. Because... (drum roll please)... It makes me see the beauty in the world around me. Sometimes, when my illness is getting me down, it can be hard to enjoy the world around me. But when you have a photographers eyes, you're always subconciously looking
for the beauty in things - be it the composition of a certain arrangement of buildings, or the colouring in a garden bed you walk past. And surprisingly there is always beauty to be seen in the most mundane seeming scenes. I love being able to see that.
Labels: art, beauty, CFS, chronic fatigue syndrome, creative
