I Need Your Love

Photoshop has been my latest obsession. It's been really nice to have something new to spurn motivation and channel my creative impulses into. I've woken up almost every morning with a new idea for a photo, or lain awake nights planning and plotting what possibilities I could explore next. I made a deal with a local antique store to rent props from, and have mapped out locations. This whole planning thing has been quite a new experience for me. Those of you who know me know that I prefer intuition to organization and structure. In the past all of my photography has been just that- I see something that looks nice and I take a picture of it. All of this planning and setting up scenes has, on the whole, been rather disappointing; but I think I'm getting better at it. The photos I've been coming away with are pretty terrible, but I'm really impressed with all I can do with them in Photoshop, and am ultimately rather pleased with the end results.

This past year I've really felt like my life has been in a slump. Maybe it's always been in a slump but I was too preoccupied with university to realize it. As of now I don't have that distraction anymore and certain things are really starting to get to me. I need some more light in my life. I need a place with more windows. I'm tired of living in this dung hole of an apartment. I'd always told myself that it was just a temporary way to save money until I finished my degree. Well, the degree is finished. Time to move. My current plans have failed, as the best laid plans so often do, and now I need to figure out the next step before I lose all momentum. This is difficult, because as I said before, I'm not a planner.

I've been listening to this song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFFul1nXwUY incessantly. Hawkmoon 269. I don't know about the video. It's the only way I can think of to get the song where you all can hear it. Just listen to the song. This song has come to characterize a lot of the image work I've been doing lately. After years of being an avid U2 fan, and careful scrutiny of their lyrics, I can say with confidence that this song is not about some girl withholding her love. It's a song about what I feel, what we should all be feeling deep down in our souls. It is the something which is missing in all of our lives. Even as Christians that sense of loss is there, that need, that desire. We're missing that perfect communion with God; love in its complete and perfect form. This world is such a dark place, and we're so used to it that we confuse the thinner linings of brighter clouds with the sun. A couple of my friends have expressed their concern that I've been producing a lot of dark and depressing stuff lately. I suppose I have. But in no way is any of it meant to be hopeless. It is simply that we who recognize this place as fallen, as a temporary home, we know what we're missing. We know what the rest of the world is missing. Why not express that?

For fear of becoming complacent, of forgetting, I need His love.
"For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together."