I’m incredibly grateful, and humbled, to have had Deb from The Family We Keep ask me to contribute monthly to her Substack. This is a first for me, where up until now, writing has been something I do in the freer and quieter moments, largely for myself and my small readership at Light in the Corners.
I’ll be honest, I struggled a bit in deciding how to contribute to Deb’s publication. Do I need a new and fresh perspective? A different direction or voice? A separate vision?
Deb put my mind at ease and said, essentially, just do you. Write how you would for your own readers, but perhaps with a slightly alternative bent. Like Napoleon, “Just follow your heart. That’s what I do.”
Generally, when I write for Light in the Corners, I focus on the writing and then add in a visual, a photo or a short video, to accompany it. When I contribute to The Family We Keep, I’m going to flip it- start with a visual and then write from that. See where it takes me.
This initial post comes from one of the first short films I made, in our backyard. From it I wanted to explain why I often have my camera out, trying my best to not be intrusive, but getting in the way and recording anyway.
Thanks for coming along, to those who have faithfully followed me thus far, and to those who will be joining the story through Deb’s platform. I hope that you absorb all the Light I’m spilling out there, and continue to discover the beams in your own life, through the cracks and fissures of all we’re built up and in to. What a remarkable community this is.
There’s a movie playing in my head.
But they aren’t actors. It’s me. Us. Our family. Our dearest friends. We’re doing what we love, what inflates our lungs with life and bellows the fire within our bellies. The soundtrack are the songs that get stuck on loop in our subconscious, lulling us to sleep or willing us to wake and wonder.
Maybe it’s silly. Maybe I feel a little embarrassed to admit it. I’m an almost 40-year-old woman, mother nonetheless, and I haven’t grown out of these daydreams.
Maybe they’re an escape. Maybe they’re the antithesis to my stark discomfort in public speaking, sometimes just public being, this version of me or of us just…free. The freest versions of ourselves. The unhindered, unashamed, absolute purest forms of all that we believe in and hope for and erratically, awkwardly, work toward in reality.
It’s us, but the us of dreams.
So, I took up a camera. Years ago, then motherhood dismantled the hobby, but today it’s come back around as children are of an age where they need my tangible caring for less. I couldn’t afford the camera I wanted, the one with the lenses and the bag and the label of someone who’s serious about their craft- so I got an iPhone. A few accessories. And I just started filming.
It’s the ordinary that catches my attention. The way I want to remember how she smiled, or how her laugh made me laugh. The way his face looked through the haze of cigar smoke. The way light filtered through trees as we traced along highways.
It’s the days at home, now that my kids are nearing teen and then adulthood, where the days finally feel numbered and if I don’t record the mess of books on the homeschool table, the steam coming off of steeping tea, or the congregation of children on the trampoline, it’ll be like it never happened.
And I know that’s not true- but still, I must see it through my lens, because my memory is poked through with holes, and I often walk into a room and forget what it is I came for.
The birthing of babies and the birthday parties, the community dinners and backyard bonfires, the gathering of friends for vacations we plan and pine for, to make up for the distance that separates us the rest of the year round- these are the moments that form us without our even knowing it.
Recording and reliving and sharing, so that we can laugh again, cry again, reminisce and be there again, if only for the briefest pause. That we can leave a piece of ourselves, a reminder that we were here and this is how we lived, for whomever may need that reminder or find it significant.
A bookmark, a scrawling within the margins, that there existed these people, at this point, for this purpose.
So, here’s a short film. It’s most of my family, our dog, chickens in the background. We’re building a fire. It’s just that.
But the ordinary is what we make of it. And I might lurk in the background, phone in hand, and if you happen to be in the frame, maybe you’ll understand why now.
I’m letting the daydreams out.
Share this post