Tag Archives: photography

Technology and Philosophy

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old fashioned tv
photo by Sylvia

All of my computer files are gone.

This is not a poem, or my usual thoughts to 70’s music on an afternoon drive. My computer died and the files are gone.

The main lesson here is that my usual way of dealing with technology, which is not dealing with technology, is not a good idea (apparently I needed a catastrophic incident to actually understand this). After running through the sequence of disbelief, anger, remorse, and sorrow upon learning that all of my work of the past 6 years is gone, I am left with an existential lesson of impermanence.

I am left wondering, so what?

My work for my clients can (mostly) be recreated. My writing, for the blog and otherwise, can also be recreated if not exactly as it was, in a new and maybe even a better way. The writing is not for posterity after all, it is for the experience, for the visual pairing of photos with words; the release of creativity set free into the world.

Photos that my son took in Cambodia, in Nova Scotia, Canada, Pennsylvania, Arizona, California, are all gone. Those photos can’t be recreated exactly, but again, the lesson of all that is fluidly impermanent rattles our reality.

So I am forced to look at this dilemma through philosophical eyes:
Everyone makes mistakes and all is temporary after all.

Thoughts at the window

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pinkish forest
photo by Sylvia

I stand at the kitchen window on a winter afternoon when the sun is fading and the pink light reflects on the snow; soft, cottony pink and mauve with a blue tinge at the edges. I want to paint it, memorize it, eat it, inhale it, this tranquil light. As it grows darker, my reflection begins to materialize on the glass. Eventually, I’m left standing at the window facing an inky blue background behind the mirror image of my face, which looks old and tired; time has not been kind. But on this evening, it doesn’t matter–I am fortified by the light and the glow and the soft and graceful exit of the sacred winter sun.