A Movement is Worth a Thousand Pictures

I have no pictures on my Zaadz site.  My excuse is that the network card in my laptop has failed, and that laptop is where all the pictures are.  The real reason is that I never like pictures of me.  When I look at myself, I see all the bad features.  The camera seems to point out all the things I don't like:  the shape of my nose, the odd way I hold my head, my too-long arms, my ever-widening hips.  These things are magnified and highlighted on film.

I go through pictures with a critical eye, tring to find one that captures the essence who I am and makes me look like Angelina Jolie.  It's an impossible task, and not just because I look nothing at all like Angelina Jolie.  No picture can truly show me, because my essence is movement.  Those static shots only convey where I was, what I was doing at an exact moment.  They don't show what I was thinking when the flash went off, what lead me to that place at that time, or where I was going next.  My life is not a moment, it is movement.  How we get from one moment to the next is what defines our lives.

There is movement even in the stillness of a yoga pose.  There is always the breath, flowing in and out.  It lifts and drops our chests.  Our bellies expand and contract.  When the right breath comes, we sink alittle deeper into the pose.  Thoughts float in and out, even if we don't focus on them.  Our hearts pump.  Our stomachs gurgle.  There is constant movement.

Movement makes life entertaining.  No one is born an astrophysicist.  We have to become.  We move and change and grow.  When the movement stops, life becomes much less interesting.

I love stories about people who had a variety of careers, who experimented with new things, who packed up and moved someplace they've never been before.  They inspire me out of ruts, so I always have movement in my life.  These people do not allow themselves to be defined by a job, a town, or lifestyle.  These are just moments.  The movements into and out of these moments are the exciting parts of the story.

No picture has ever captured how I feel about myself when I'm moving.  My imperfections get lost in the fluidity of a step, the power in lifting a child, the flow of stories through my head.  There are plenty of moments in my life, many that I don't want to remember, but they are just moments.  The movement in and out of the moments are what I write about.  If I was just holding a pose, I would have nothing to say.