Last summer our family went to the beach. As we were walking up to the waves, I admonished my children from taking their disposable cameras into the water. Literally within thirty seconds of offering this bit of parental wisdom, I immediately proceeded to go into the water, bend down to pick up a shell, and have a wave hit my own (six-month old) digital camera which was hanging from my neck on a strap. I then did the worst thing imaginable, which was to turn the camera on and off multiple times, shorting it out permanently. I immediately sensed my photo Mojo disappearing from my soul like water leaving a sieve. That was some six or seven months ago, and I haven’t been able to recover it. I still own a digital camera, the one with which I took most of the pictures on this blog. But I am still lacking not only the desire to take pictures but also the eye. Before the incident, I was beginning to view the world as a photographer; now, I have no eye for composition. Very sad. How does one recover Mojo? Is it the case, once lost forever lost? In tribute to my lost camera, I post here one of the first pictures I took with it. Marbles in a mason-jar lid, resting on the bathroom floor and lit by a flashlight.
Happy Valentine's Day. Here's what my seven year old daughter wrote today about love, copied here verbatim. "There is lots of love in the world. People get married, kids get adopted by nice people, cousins kiss, Grand Parents hug and bake choclet cakes before relatives ariving. But if you mesure up all the love in the world it won't mesure to God's love. He put his only son on earth to die on the cross to take the place of even the worst men in the whole world! He loves you more than you think he does. He loves you more than your parents love you. No matter how many bad things you do God loves you just as much. He loves everybody equally! Thats some love all right!"
This photograph is all sharp angles and primary colors. One can be driven to madness as a parent thinking of all the possible ways in which the hard, sharp angles of the world can bring violence to our children's (and our own) comparatively forgiving tissue and blood. The hearth in my home is (I just know it) a trip to the emergency room waiting to happen.
So I was waiting for my wife to pick me up at work and, bored, I wandered over to look at a tree. Looked at all the moss and lichens and began to wonder: How many living organisms are on this tree! How does one count the number of moss? And how about stuff sharing the same root structure? Are they one or a bunch? Or just a living glob? Now surely any decent biologists could answer these questions—and of course are welcome to do so--but the deeper question of how we distinguish between closely connected things is a real one, not so easily answered. 
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