My Eyes Are A Camera
my eyes are a camera
frost burning into mist
a mackerel sky, summoning
snow for the volcano gods
for the summer burned timberlands
matchstick scarred with charred trees
hundred foot cranes
carry metal TARDISes
gleaming over the Intel fab plant
blinding at dawn, the Morrigan
summons passenger pigeons
from extinction to write
her three-bird signature
in the un-wilded suburbs
we do what we must
I recently re-joined Instagram. I had a few good reasons, but it was a serious gamble.
In the past, Instagram has been an anxious thing for me. I fixated on all the ways in which I don’t live an Instagram-able life. I’m not alone in this. Instagram is infamous for presenting a distorted view of reality: Everything is beautiful. It’s always sunset at the beach. Everyone’s yoga poses are always perfect. No one actually lives like that, but it’s hard not to feel like that’s the way life should be and mourn the fact that it isn’t.
But, I wondered, what if I could use that distortion to change my mindset—or, at least, provide a counter-weight to my tendency to see things negatively? What if I created a practice of looking for the tiny moments when life is beautiful?
In other words, what if I used Instagram as a mindfulness practice?
It’s been less than 24 hours, but I see a change in my mindset.
This morning, my boyfriend was making breakfast. (I’m sorry. I need to pause here until the shock wears off: I have a boyfriend who makes me breakfast?!) I stood at the window with a cup of coffee looking out over his neighborhood, savoring the morning sunlight glinting off the metal chimneys of the houses and the cyberpunk black windows of the Intel factory.
I wished that I could capture the magic of that moment, but I knew that if I took pictures, they would be mundane: a line of identical suburban houses, an industrial construction site.
Instead, I wrote a poem on my drive home.
Poetry happens when I'm desperate. It happens when I see magic in a factory. It happens when I see the gods and know a camera would see a tree with pigeons in it.
Maybe if I was a better photographer, I wouldn't write. Maybe if the veil was thinner, I wouldn't be a Bard.
