A picture, A movie, A sentence, A sign, A cloud or a tree or a dream.

Shortly after the internet moved our consciousness online, we decided not only that we would cooperate, but that we actually liked it. We really liked it.  I started blogging  almost twenty years ago and there were aspects of the writing that I recognized.  

It was almost like looking for puddingstone on Drummond Island shores with my kids.  Most of the time you were hunched down just looking at all the rocks, but then you would see something and you'd reach down, hold it up into the light and then ask the others: What about this one?  Do you think this is puddingstone?  

All these eager writers were holding up rocks to the light of the internet.  What about this one?  Or this one? 

Along the way I started various collections which I would write about - the collections a kind of doorway to a deeper awareness of the human condition.  

I wrote two sentences summarizing my day every day for a year.  I took a picture every day for a year.  I started collecting old and unique signs in the rustbelt town where I live.  I snapped a picture of the courtyard just outside my work office every wednesday.  I photographed my substantial collection of ties mostly from the 1970s.  And there are many more. 

While my motivations for doing so have incrementally changed over time, they have continued to keep me grounded, keep me humble, make me curious, make me attentive, challenge my pre-conceptions and help me remember that...

this is just one moment, 

there will be many other moments in the future when I won't feel this way. 

Just like there were many other moments before when I felt many other things.