"if a picture paints a thousand words..."

"If a picture paints 

a thousand words, 

then why can't I paint you?

the words will never show,

the you i've come to know..." 

I remember the cover to this "Best of Bread" album, as if it were the face of a loved one.  I played it over and over again.  David Gates' beautiful vocals on "If," were filled with the kind of melancholy I was feeling that year. 

I was thinking about this song, recently, after my niece took a photograph of me.  

We were at a camp social and she had just received a new instamatic camera.  She quietly snapped a photo, waited for it to come out of the slot and then walked over and placed it in my shirt pocket for processing, and said, "I took a photo of you while you weren't looking."  I was in the middle of a conversation, and completely forgot about it until later that night. 

I have never liked having my photo taken.  It's hard to explain, but every photo I have ever seen of myself feels like a picture of someone I don't know.  Even photos of me, doing what I love most, feel like I am looking at someone else - a familiar face that I don't feel connected to. 

So it was strangely beautiful - when remembered my niece's photo in the pocket of my shirt - to find the perfect portrait of "the me" that I have come to know.  It wasn't a face, or a form -- it was a color.  

The entire image was a shade of blue.  A deep, achingly beautiful shade of blue.  And I felt it.  I felt so connected to that photo that I gasped, and then I cried - just a bit.  This little instagram photograph captured how I feel about myself.  It felt accurate and perceptive. It felt as if my niece had bored into my heart and discovered something hidden.  

And for the past few weeks, it has had me thinking about identity, perception, and image.  I have long-resisted identifying with a face in the mirror, the shape that I put clothing on, or the changing features that look back at me from my driver's license -- or any profile photo on Facebook or Instagram.  

Perhaps some of us aren't capable of simply being outlined by a layer of skin punctuated with features - eyes, nose, shoulders, etc.  What if we are not "that," -- whatever that is.  And what if, instead, I am best identified as a color, and you are a sound that makes birds sing, and someone else is the scent of cedar or cinnamon -- or both.  

Just as we often think that answered prayer will come in the form of words -- and so we let the deep feelings that have no words, or the sounds that cannot be described, pass through us without noting their message, while we wait for the illusive English text to float across the mental page.  In the same way, what if our faces and body shapes and hair color, are not necessarily the way we experience ourselves as God's image and likeness - most clearly.  What if it's a shade of blue, or a minor chord, or the taste of grapefruit, or the touch of a breeze, or the silence of a prayer...

In her compilation, Miscellaneous Writings 1883 - 1896, Mary Baker Eddy refers to a "fourth dimension "when she writes:  

"Christian Science translates Mind, God, to mortals.  It is the infinite calculus defining the line, plane, space, and fourth dimension of Spirit. It absolutely refutes the amalgamation, transmigration, absorption, or annihilation of individuality."  

and elsewhere she states: 

"Comeliness and grace are independent of matter.  Being possesses its qualities before they are perceived humanly. Beauty is a thing of life, which dwells forever in the eternal Mind and reflects the charms of His goodness in expression, form, outline, and color." 

What if our sense of who we are, and how we are defined to one another, that has been limited by a collectively agreed upon expectation that we are three dimensional humans form made up of lines, shapes, and features.  Or that this is the only way of experiencing and communicating our identities - our truth and beauty.  

What if deepening our color, or perfecting the pitch of our voice, or enriching the scent that we leave upon everything we touch, were as important to being known, as the cut of our hair, or the shape of our eyes, or the tilt of our head?

These are the questions I am in tonight.  In the meantime, I am so grateful that my niece was able to capture what no photographer has ever been able to do -- a photo of "the me I've come to know."  A perfect shade of blue.

Disclaimer:  if this post seems a bit abstract or out in left field -- i completely understand.  

offered with Love, 

Cate