"One of you routs a thousand, because the LORD your God fights for you, just as he promised." – Joshua 23:10

Sometimes all you really need to do is have fun, and not care about being the most creative, the most avant-garde, or the next new flavour on the block. It’s not even about being better than the next photographer who drops names like Annie Leibovitz, Richard Avedon or Mario Testino.

It’s not even about getting better at it.

And it’s okay even if you don’t know what you’re doing. Take the big leap. Take that first step. Take that tiny gasp into the unknown. You never know when you’ll stumble into something wonderful or extraordinary, like a special laugh, or a perfect moment, or a facet of yourself you hadn’t realised before.

Just never lose that joy of discovery, of being able to laugh at yourself, that inner knowing that the next day will be better, and brighter. When you let go of the unnecessary things, like one-upping, or comparison, or self-criticism, of needing to perform to some imaginary standard, you start to breathe easy. Live light.

Because when you learn to see through His eyes, and nothing will ever look old or ordinary. It is always beautiful.

So these are things I want to remind myself of every day.

by Yosh

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“The dogmas of the quiet past are  inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion… As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.”

This is a post I’ve been afraid to write for three years.

Maybe this is as good a time as any. Maybe not. Do I have anything different to say, three years later? I don’t know. But even with all this time passed, it hasn’t got any easier.

It’s never easy, trying to remember things best left as long-buried memories.  Forget what people tell you. Forget what you know. Forget your walls and your defenses, forget your resolutions and remonstrances. Forget everything.

And then remember.

Reach in and rummage through the soft detritus of your heart, the frail and stubborn sting of regrets, the foolish escapades of youth, the smiles of long-gone former lovers; find that place, that place that belongs to you and God alone: it’s a place inside of you that cannot be written into words, nor spun into song, not even shared with fellow sufferers. I know some of you have lost a father, or a mother, but I cannot know the same pain as you do.

This place — it’s a place where there will be no future memories. It’s a place where my children will never know their grandfather. It’s a place where I will look at that empty seat at the tea ceremony, the glaring absence in the customary family photograph, and the surge of anguish will strike my heart when I least expect it.

Words, eventually, become useless. But I want to remember, even if words are the only things left in me that can somehow allow my memory of him to live on, to continue.

My father never enjoyed the limelight. There’s this oft-repeated line of his that he once said, when asked why he never sought to get published: “I write not because I want to make a name for myself, but because I have something to say.”

I am the same in that respect, I imagine, preferring to remain in the background, behind the camera, behind a wall of words. I like to think that of all my siblings, I am the one most like him: heavily-built, loving everything to do with words, fascinated by the camera, reticient. To me, he was a towering figure, a mountain of a man, hewn out of solid oak. To see him wasted away by cancer was one of the most painful things I had to witness. He was featherlight, with chapped skin over protuding bones, when I lifted him from his bed, it was a shock that reverberated throughout my entire being.

It’s a sobering thing.

Now that it’s been three years since I last wrote, what is it that I can tell you? What’s different? What’s changed? Would you be proud of the man I am today, of the man I am going to be? The choices I have made, the things I have done?

I have no answers tonight. Not even my words, that fail me so terribly now, drifting into empty spaces.

A few days ago, I had a conversation with a friend about the musical:

“The leads are the stars, and the stage is their sky.” I said. “So that’s where they belong.”

“Then what about the directors, the songwriters, the crew that makes everything happen? Are they not above the stars when they paint the sky?”

“No. They can be above the stars if they like,” I replied. “But I’ll be the earth, the ground the people can walk or lie on, to watch the skies, gaze at the stars.”

Maybe that is why I can call myself my father’s son.