zen = amnesia = book = notes = type = profile = nhwc = px
43things = soma = three dog party = fotolog = host

thursday

1. you are slumped at your desk exhausted, when one of your 10 year-old students surprises you with a conch shell from the canal near his house. between the cacophony of classes you hold it to your ear, the sound of the displaced imprisoned ocean a whisper that you want to crawl into. you feel your childhood pulse in that sound, the memories coming up like an overdue tide.

2. walking home after work, you briefly shadow a young boy riding his bike, intermittently invisible between the revelation of streetlights. his arms are outstretched in the april air, fingers entwined with the darkness, handlebars steered by faith alone, the prodigious backpack on his frail body a long-forgotten weight. the angle of his reverie makes you long for the peculiar illusion of flight childhood sometimes offers -- knowledge of parents waiting at home and you reach just a little for a place they cannot grasp.

3. a tiny homeless dog loiters in the middle of the road, his frayed collar a relic of a past life where human hands touched him.

4. what the boy dreams of, what the dog dreams of, inetersect before you and for a moment it is all one thing--one love and one longing and one breath.

5. you stopped compulsively carrying your camera around in an attempt to archive life months ago because the substance of these moments (and so infinitely many more) is incapable of passing through an ordinary aperature. your heart is the only lens that can capture them.

before = after