Archive for March 29th, 2009
Return to the Sea
I have to admit that I didn’t take this photograph. My wife took it while we were in Goa, India following a three week tour of Rajasthan. Rarely does my camera leave my hands during our travels, but every once in a while she points the camera in my direction so that there is proof that she hasn’t been to all of these places alone. I take MANY photos of her. And, for the most part, she loves it. Usually pictures of me turn out to be snapshots, uninteresting pictures that do the task of recording my physical presence. This picture is different. It caught something much deeper. A second note, this photo was taken with my last camera which has since been given away, a Sony DSC-H5 last year in February.
In many ways, this is very representative of what is happening now to me and by influence, those immediately around me. I know that each change within me ripples out to affect others in my orbit. This is all part of something called Chaos Theory. In the world of the psyche, the collective unconscious substrate becomes activated by the appearance of certain events or conditions, something nowhere in the range of being predictable. Strange attractors pull things slightly askew with significant affect. Then with the initial disturbance receding, our psyche attempts to return to a normal pattern – only the normal pattern is ever-so-slightly altered. We can never return exactly to where we have been. Others in relation to us can never attain the same relationship to us. All is altered, maybe for the better, maybe for the worse in terms of those relationships.
Perhaps that is why we become strangers to those who thought they have known us for so long, why they become strangers to us. Do we ever really know another person?
