“What you produce is not necessarily always sacred, I realized, just because you think it’s sacred. What is sacred is the time that you spend working on the project, and what that time does to expand your imagination, and what that expanded imagination does to transform your life.”

― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

I spent a few hours one morning culling photos from the past few months. Some I moved to the cloud for safe keeping, others I moved to an external hard drive, in kin to the boxes under my bed which contain thousands of snapshots from when I shot film. What surprised me however was how many I just deleted.

I found a sort of desperation in so many of them, as if I was searching for anything to turn my camera on, pursuing anything that I thought might move me. It made me sad at first, so sad I considered keeping some of them and putting them into a book and calling it In Desperation, or maybe Agony, or better yet - What Was She Thinking. But the more I have thought about it over the past few days, I can see these past few months for what they were, damn hard. I am thankful I had the intuitiveness to keep at it, to spend my time searching for anything that might ease some of the aguish I was feeling. As I said a few post back, I wake now with a sense of purpose and anticipation and a better understanding of how to move forward in my life.

“Whatever you do, try not to dwell too long on your failures. You don’t need to conduct autopsies on your disasters.”

― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear