cropping

Good day. Full of people, which was strangely fulfilling for me. Yeah. I'm a little surprised, but happy.

So, I was thinking as I was prowling for photos. When I'm looking for beauty, framing up a photo, there's a lot of cropping that goes on. I adjust the angle a bit to cut out that pile of trash or this crumbling sidewalk. And sometimes I crop the photo further in photoshop once it's in my computer. Tweak the colors, bump up the saturation. Just a little, nothing drastic. But it does enhance the beauty. I never alter the actual contents of the photo (no cutting, pasting, erasing or painting over)—that would somehow feel dishonest to the spirit of the experiment. But that being said, I use some artistic discretion in how I frame and crop the actual shot.

But life is not a series of still shots, is it? You can't really crop out parts of life that aren't nice or comfortable or pretty, can you? No, we just have to take whatever life dishes out to us, minute by minute, step by step. Wave after wave, time washes over us, bringing both pain and beauty. You can't shut your heart to one without deadening it to the other as well. Life is not as neat and tidy as a photograph.

So, today my Mr. got a phone call. Someone overwhelmed and in crisis, wondering if my Mr. could go and intervene. Twelve years in this devastated country have taught us not all crises are what they seem, nor are we as critical to the solution as the other person often imagines we are. Hesitant to jump into someone else's chaos, Mr. asked for time to think and pray about it. A few hours later they called again, saying they had found someone else to do it.

But is that a form of cropping? We are so careful now about taking on the problems of others. We have very little interest in taking on another's stress as our own, even less interest in being "needed". I know we appear hard-hearted to some. Jaded to others, lazy to a few. Some would call it having boundaries, being prudent. Maybe it's cropping.

So, a close-up on a humorous incident today: I was making lunch at the stove, and the cat was watching from atop a chest of drawers nearby. All of a sudden I felt the briefest brush of paws on my heiney, and then claws digging into my shoulders, one paw on either side of my neck. Luckily I did not spill the pot of boiling water nor did I fling the spoon and lid I was holding. Unfortunately neither did I have hands with which to amend the situation. So, the kitty clawed her way up the back of my shirt with her hind legs until she was perched on one of my shoulders. She stayed there a good five minutes or so, observing all that was going on. Scratched shoulders and all, I loved the moment.