Jared Kruger's photostream

I had planned on uploading these as a diptych, but some part of their story was lost in physically pairing them.

I had planned on uploading these as a diptych, but some part of their story was lost in physically pairing them.

I miss the wind.
But the new colors are here.

It was my twenty-first birthday a few weeks back and I had been thinking of uploading a self-portrait-of-the-young-man kind of thing and pairing it with some short and eloquent posting concerning how, after twenty-one years, I've had so little experience and so few thoughts. I was going to attempt to reveal some part of myself with a picture taken by and of me and words written by me. It was going to be about me. Yes, it might have been able to capture some more extensive part of humanity by extrapolation, but I was not busying myself worrying about that.

If there is any one thing I have learned about life in the last twenty-one years, it is that the thing isn't about me. My life should never really be about me. Because, though I sometimes fancy myself the exemplar of the young man, I am no better than the guy thumping his car's bass at the intersection or the one flirting his way downtown on the bus.

A life is best defined by the ones it associates itself with.

So, I'm twenty-one. And here's one of my good friends--her smile will tell you a whole lot more than any essay of mine could, if you look.

I enjoy looking back.
Some of the students from class and I had walked a while on this path. I was ecstatic - it was cold out, but just cold enough to remind us that here we could not conquer with walls and roofs and heating units, the needles and leaves were all but dancing in the typical Oregonian diffused light and as they moved they sang: the breeze whistled airily and all types of woodland creatures joined in the reverie. I was caught up in all this around me. As my mind raced on its track of ideas I thought to look back. And I stopped. I stopped to see again what I had already seen, retouch what I had already felt, rethink what I had already pondered. And it was all the better this time, I saw and felt and thought in a new and fuller context.
So look back I will. Not just under dancing trees and not merely in forests' trails, but under looming deadlines and in hospital hallways leading to deathbeds. It might just be that new and fuller context gained from looking back, from hindsight, will teach me of the few steps I still have in front of me.