The Camera
Memories
Listen Here- Author Read Podcast Style
Nobody can commit photography alone.
Marshall McLuhan
Maybe we look back just to see how far we have come? In pictures. In words.
If a picture paints a thousand words, do words tell a different story?
The pen has been replaced by the keyboard and the poem got left behind.
The new language of the masses is now the photograph. The Pic. The photograph is the queen of the throne.
Do we create memories? Do memories create us?
Every phone is a camera. Digital point and shoot cameras have also returned to squeeze back into our overflowing pockets. Cameras have become the archetype and the symbol of our lives.
Every archetype has a light side and a shadow side. A positive and a negative expression. Cameras, capture beauty and legacy. Documenting. Are cameras becoming a barrier to presence? Editing out the gifts of imperfection? Seeking out the aesthetics of external visual validation as opposed to a sensual journey to be lived? Are we over sharing?
“Perspective paints perception,” she told me.
I was lifting her up as I leaned in to look into her eye spiralling up the dress of a braless breeze in the gust of a moment. We both tried to help each other focus into a sense of clarity. She looked back at me. I looked out through her. She looked in to me!
We both watched each other. A tension of opposites. Conscious and unconscious. Shadow and light. Masculine and feminine. Sun and moon.
What do I even see through her lens?
What does she see in me?
Can she even see herself?
Do I see me?
Is there even a we?
This camera and I.
I tried to hold her. Could she hold on to me?
Do we create memories? Do memories create us?
Are we conscious of this?
Who was taking the photos? Me or her? Maybe we both were? Maybe it comes down to intention? To grow. To become. Shifting away from a desire to know and to control. Towards a desire to resonate and to connect. Another way of seeing. Flesh and soul.
I in-quired - What does it mean to observe?
Is it just watching? Feeling? Being?
She answered, “It is all three. We call that awareness. Something naked not just nude. Bone and marrow. Picture the horizon. It moves from perception to perspective.
It’s all about depth. Compatibility. Harmonizing the whole.”
Smiling she explained, “We capture light. Photos are made from time and light. Time frozen in a moment of light. We create an image. We used to be a mirror,” she exclaimed, “but now things have become more mirrorless. More convenient but more misunderstood.”
She taught me how to see the shadows. The conflict. I helped her move towards the light. Reconciliation. We both gave each other a chance to see a different view.
The sun kissing the moon. We documented. We purposed.
We entered into a deeper conversation.
She shared her journey and her experiences. I shared mine. We met in the middle of the same questions. Wonder and awe. Dreams and reality. Love and fear.
Blood and brine. Flesh and soul.
Do we create memories? Do memories create us?
The unconscious wants to speak out too.
In the dim light, she whispered, “Even in the shadows there is still light. Light will shine through. Think of me as a bridge between what you can see and what you can’t see. I can see where you light up. When you light up. Once you feel into this union between the seen and unseen, the unconscious and the conscious you will create a whole new perspective. An expansion. 1+1=3. The third.”
A third? I stammered, confused….
“Life is a transcendent function,” she calmly shared, “Unconscious to conscious. Opposites. Tension. Remembering. Growth. Revealing. A process. A method. A journey. We are always becoming the third. Expansion and shadow. Conflict and creative. With our-self. With others. Before some thing can be seen, it needs to be unfolded . We grow unfolding one’s self and differentiating it from the collective. Consciously and unconsciously. That’s really hard to do these days in this big loud influential collective.”
Ripples of growth slowly become the waves of a new narrative. I real eyesed that some pictures arrive with more depth-ing. Pur-pose. Some more shallow. Just a pose. Every picture is a story. Who was telling it?
We sat down together to edit. The process is the method. Sculpting off the hard edges of becoming. The looking back. No expectations. No outcomes. The feeling into what the picture wanted to express. Never a monologue. A conversation.
Tension can play out as a conflict between a desire to be seen authentically and a deep-seated fear of being exposed. It is the dance between the rawness of documentary and the polished up portrait. A real conversation. We took turns listening to each other. Empathy holding hands with resonance. Loving kindness and compassion. We let the wrinkles smile without the filters and we let the stories unfold. Endings. Beginnings. It is about connection. An experience. A moment. 1+1=3. Witnessing together without judgement. We all seek expression. Our unique sacred expression.
Do we create memories? Do memories create us?
Maybe both.
It is an ineffable experience to expand into the light of the third. Speechless. We don’t measure growth in time. We measure growth in transformation. Resonance. HeArt.
Looking back to see just how far we’ve come. Some pictures may be painful. Some pictures are for growth. Some for awe.
A childhood photo. A scribbled note. A book. An old stone. A kiss. A poem. An energy. A moment. What do they bring? How are stories made?
Do we tell stories or does stories tell us?
Do we write stories or do stories write us?
Did the photographer take the picture? Did the camera? Did I?
Are we the dreamer, or the dreamed one?
Maybe the past, the present and the future all collide. As one.
At the right place, in the right circle, on the far side of the moon and the sun.
Who we were. Who we are. Who we are becoming.
Not everybody gets to share our story.
Do we create memories or do memories create us?
Memories.
Some just makes sense. Do we witness them? Did they witness us?
We hold on to them. Did they hold on to us? An image? A place? Words? A flower?
A feeling?
If only. Only if. For a moment.
The Camera
Looking back was our life a series of edits?
Did we miss the documentary?
The lens was always watching us.
What picture did she take? The pose
or the purpose?
Did we only look out through?
What looked in?
What picture did we take?
What picture did we give?
What picture did we receive?
A blue heron blending in-to the stillness
caught in a water of self reflection.
Being one with the scene.
The wafting wildflower
colourfully dressed
billowing into the wind.
Standing out from the crowd
with one eye in the mirror.
Posturing to be seen.
Who was the witness?
The mirror or the lens? What face did we see?
What do we remember?
A finger on a button. A screen
looking back. Our eyes
turning up the contrast and the shadow
while the light slowly came to pass.
What was seen? What did we create?
Content or conviction?
Did we hold the camera?
Was the camera holding us?
Looking in,
can we see beyond the skin of our eyes?
Can we taste the deep lips of purpose?
Looking out,
life doesn’t pose for the picture.
Can we capture time?
Looking back,
what got left behind?
A memory?
Or the ghost of a moment.
The blood from my nails
fresh on her back
as I tried to hold onto her
as she walked on- past.
© Jamie MillardThank you to all the psychologically informed creators here who are attempting to live into their own naked authentic spiritual sacred expression of wholeness. Self- awareness. A journey from flesh to soul. In moments. In days. Back-and-forth. Spiralling- into the now- of here. Meet you in the spaces of observation. At the doors of transformation. Thanks for Being- Here.
We are all writers, readers, and protagonists of an eternal story . We fabricate our reality, and we seek out the meaning of the mystery and the symbols that arrive for us. We arrive as we are ready. We are often cut short by some other supreme author. In our defeat, there does come a spark of something bigger. Something beyond us that we leave behind. A light that prevails at our expense. What we don’t realize is that that some of us are not changing the world today. Not even tomorrow. Some of us are changing the world generations away by what we are creating now. A new way of seeing. Beyond the instant gratification aesthetics of the masses. A scream for wholeness. For our children’s children’s children. A better future. A better world. Keep writing. We need you.
Lots of Love,
Jamie
Thanks @Elena Nicoleta Ene for the repost 🙏❤️
Oh wow, Jamie! In pure synchronicity, I return to this garden of light and delight this morning to gift you two photos taken in the Lake District. Seriously, you couldn't make this up! For bringing "Cuoreosity" to Castlerigg was pure joy. There I read three of your poems to the standing stones.
Your beautiful wise words and nod to Jung reverberates with the ache and awe of presence – a deep soul-song of seeing and being seen. Your final image leaves me breathless: the ghost of a moment, the blood, the parting. You write at the edge where Truth flickers and transforms. Thank you so much for calling us into deeper observation, into deeper conversation, for honouring the long arc of soul-making. We are listening. We are remembering. We are becoming.
And just as your lens beholds the flickering Truth, I too live alongside one whose eye captures the pulse of presence – the poet's wife, Lin, a photographer. For her gaze, like yours, doesn’t seek out perfection but essence. As I read your poems aloud to the Castlerigg stones – "Time", "The First Step Home" and "Destiny" – she stood near, not behind the camera but beside the mystery. We create in tandem I realise: her images and my words, a quiet duet of "Cuoreosity" and reverence.
Together we are the seer and the scribe. The ones who watch and the ones who witness. Where her shutter preserves a breath, my pen exhales what lingers. Together, I'm figuring out from your poem, we sculpt memory – not to hold time still, but to honour its flow.
Thank you so much for reminding me to touch what cannot be posed. That really caught my attention.
May we keep standing in sacred places dear poet – stones, poems, moments – and speak what stirs beneath the skin of time. And in witnessing each other, may we become the memory-makers of a more whole world. 🙏❤️📷