I spotted this on the bathroom wall at the Montague Bookmill in Massachusetts (yes, apparently I have become the kind of person who takes pictures in bathrooms, please start planning your intervention now). I’ve always been fascinated by graffiti of any kind, scrawled in public places, snippets of thought or art, left for others, unclaimed. Something about this touched me. Had the author reached the other side of a long road and left a breadcrumb, saying I have been in pieces and in case you are there too, trust me, there is beauty still. Or is it a mantra, scratched into a bathroom wall in the midst of an undoing, an attempt to will it into truth.

It reminds me of a series of photographs I took right after my friend Sara died. It was one of my first forays into creating art through photography, as I tried to capture an emotion so that I could move through it. They were self-portraits, though they didn’t show my face, taken with my point-and-shoot on autotimer. Across one I wrote “Life is Still Beautiful.” It was certainly a mantra, I repeated it constantly, hoping that one day I could wake up and feel that it was true, and say it with conviction.

And that is the way that I’ve come to think of this blog, as my testimony to the beauty of every day, a record of where and who I have been, a way to leave scribblings for someone to stumble across…

• May 9th, 2008
• musings, travels, with music
• 1 comment
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