Pain

Pain comes in all forms: the small tinges, the little bit of soreness, the random pain – the normal pain we live with every day.  

Then there's the kind of pain you can't ignore. A level of pain so great that it blocks out anything else, that makes the rest of the world fade away, until all you can think about is how much you hurt.

Pain. We anaesthetize, ride it out, embrace it, ignore it. And for some of us the best way to manage pain is to just push through it. 

There are no solutions. No easy answers. You just breathe deep and wait for it to subside. 

Most of the time pain can be managed. But sometimes the pain gets to you when you least expect it. It hits way below the belt and doesn't let up. 

Pain. You just have to fight through because the truth is you can't run away from it. 

And life will always make more.

Winter Wonderland

Walking in a winter wonderland...

Branches

There is good and there is evil. Right and wrong.

And if we're blessed with wisdom, then there are glimpses between the cracks of each where light streams through.

Sunlight filters through the branches of evil. We wait in silence for these times when sense can be made, when meaningless existence comes into focus, and our purpose presents itself.

And if we have the strength to be honest, then what we find there, staring back at us, is our own reflection, bearing witness to the duality of life.

And each one of us is capable of both the dark and the light, of good and evil, of either, of all.

And destiny, while marching ever in our direction, can be rerouted by the choices we make.

By the love we hold onto and the promises we keep.

Earth

Unfurling.

Roses dropped petals that seemed as big and smooth as saucers, flame-red, moon-white, glossy, and unwrinkled..

"It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage.

"It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never uncoiled."

"It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness."

"It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next."

"All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction."

"Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial."

****

You may be thinking the captions for each of my pictures (apart from the first) are completely unrelated. Well, you're right. These quotes are from Charles Dicken's Hard Times, and they describe a hell-like town, an uninhabitable town. They are in complete contrast to the beauty of the photos, and I did this to represent the unbalanced place that is our world. Let me explain: There are places in the world which are beautiful, seemingly magical, perfect. There are places which contain unimaginable things, destructive and damaging things, poverty, things too terrible to describe. Just like the contrast between the pictures and the words, our world lives on with this constant sense of irregularity, and nothing can be done about it.