foolish and out of focus

Today I was a poser. I felt it from the borrowed nikon strapped across the front of my grey v-neck to my brown, traveling loafers and stained brown corduroys to the filthy once white, now asphalt-grey baseball cap over my hair. Every kurd walking the streets of the Sulaimaniyah bazaar must have thought the bearded young foreigner looked like a seasoned photojournalist patient to capture the life of one moment and show it to the world. Fil Haqeeqa, a rookie picture-taker walked lost around a mass of whirling urban activity hoping that one image in a days worth of attempts would yield at least a single image that reflected the image captured by his eye. 

Foolishly I labor briefly and sporadically in the world of art and I hope, or even expect, to breath an icon into existence; something that tangibly brings life to the soul of the one who “reads the image” I have created. I fail constantly.

But images impact me deeply. They pull me deep within the frame of their story, transferring their emotion directly to my soul, that part of me that relates to other things and other people. It is the communicative part of me, effectually a place of communion.

An image offers an invitation to share in its life. To share in its hopes, its dreams, its possibilities. To share in its hurts, its pains, its failures. To share communion.

I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection, sharing in his sufferings, and becoming like him in his death, and so somehow to attain the resurrection from the dead. 

I foolishly wish every image I create to reflect a communion with Jesus (whether a photo, a written piece or a watercolor). Then, I hope it imparts the same communion to the reader of the image. 

I think this is what an Icon was supposed to do. So, I will hope to create an Icon with every attempt at art, with every attempt at creation. Its a foolish hope.

But love lives in the realm of foolish hope.

So I will hope, I will keep writing and occasionally I borrow a camera.