Thought Tapestries

What makes you nervous?

What makes me nervous is wondering whether I’m spending too much time behind the camera and not enough time simply living in the moment. This poem captures that quiet tension I feel as a photographer—always chasing the perfect shot while the real experience slips quietly by.

Between the Wave and the Frame

The wave curls in without announcement,
gray-green muscle rolling under a sky bruised with rain,
and for once the hands stay empty—no glass rectangle raised,
no thumb hovering to freeze the curl before it breaks.
Just the cold slap on bare ankles, the roar filling the chest
like breath held too long, released only when the foam hisses back.
This is the older way: the body drinks the scene whole,
no filter, no crop, no second screen to mediate the salt sting
or the sudden gull cry slicing through.
The moment lodges deep, unphotographed,
a private archive of texture and ache
that no battery can drain, no algorithm can rank.

Yet later, walking the driftwood scatter,
a different hunger stirs—the wish to hand this wildness
to someone not here, to say look, feel this too,
to bridge the miles with a captured shard of light.
The phone comes out then, small and insistent,
and the world narrows to a viewfinder:
horizon leveled, exposure nudged, the perfect instant
snatched from flux. The shutter clicks like a held breath released,
and something is saved—color, composition, proof of being there—
ready to travel, to spark a distant smile or quiet envy,
to say I was alive in this place, and here is evidence.

Neither triumphs.
The undistracted immersion carves deeper grooves in memory,
raw and multisensory, a living echo that needs no replay button.
But the image, flat and shareable, carries the moment outward,
multiplies its reach, turns solitude into quiet communion.
One keeps the soul fed in silence; the other keeps the soul connected.
To choose one fully is to lose the other’s gift—
the private blaze versus the shared spark—
and so the tension hums, unresolved,
like the tide that pulls in and pulls out forever.

In the end, perhaps the richest days hold both:
a few frames offered to the world,
and many more surrendered wholly to the mind’s unguarded eye.