There’s a horse barn near where we live. Last year Leah went there a couple of hours each week to muck stalls. This was not a job she did to earn big money. She worked at the barn to be near the horses, and because hanging out at the barn is more Leah’s style than, say, shopping for shoes at Nordstrom.
I tagged along on trips to the barn, not only to visit with the horses, but also to just take it all in--to say hey to the barn cat, Hercules, and to walk around with a camera and play my photographer’s game of what-do-I-see-today? It is the best and most challenging game I know. It is a kind of note-taking, photographer-style.
I like what the writer Anne Lamott says about her early attempts at learning her craft: “I took notes on the people around me, in my town, in my family, in my memory. I took notes on my own state of mind, my grandiosity, the low self-esteem. I wrote down funny stuff I overheard. I learned to be like a ship’s rat, veined ears trembling, and I learned to scribble it all down.”
I am amazed and thankful at my good fortune, because I discovered at an early age that a camera --and sometimes words--can record what I see and help me sort it all out. Today I read a news story about a guy who won the Lottery. The guy says he'll continue to go to work at what strikes me as a mundane job. For a moment, I thought that was one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard. Then I realized that maybe that guy simply enjoys his job. I know that if someone handed me a big bag of money, I’d just continue to look for photographs.
One of my favorite writers, Barbara Kingsolver, says “My way of finding a place in this world is to write one. This work is less about making a living, really, than about finding a way to be alive.”
