This is it, friend.
The very last days of 2024.
Does it feel surreal? Anti-climactic? Bittersweet? Like a relief? Yep, probably all of those things at the very same time.
Anytime we dive into something as wholehearted as this, we eventually come to the end and we have a choice to make:
Can we be complete with ourselves and our work, no matter what?
Can we honor the journey itself, just as we honor the end, or the beginning?
No matter what your journey was, no matter how many frames you captured, take a moment today to celebrate what you've done.
For a year, you have used your photography as the pathway to noticing the abundance of your human experience.
For 365 days, you have found ways to attend to your creative spirit – no matter what the truth of life offered you.
On the hardest days, I hope you found an endless well of grace within yourself.
On the ease-full days, I hope you celebrated that magical feeling of flow that we are every-so-often gifted as a part of our creative work.
While our work together wasn't just about the photos, I hope you'll dive deep into the body of work you created and find a way to honor it too.
Print your work, frame it, share it with your beloveds. Save a few prints just for yourself, too – you might be surprised at what a salve it is to carry a few soon-to-be-dog-earred reminders of this work around just for yourself.
I am so proud of you, and so inspired by you.
In this wild year of beautiful, brutal struggle and joy, your commitment to feeling your way into noticing and capturing the beauty of our human lives lifted and carried me more than you'll ever know.
Your exploration, and curiosity, and love of YOUR world expanded my capacity to do the same for my own – every day.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for taking this journey alongside me.
May your 2025 be full of everything beautiful and human, and may your frames tell the truth of your documented heart in all its magical layers.
Keep your camera close, and don't be a stranger, darling.
Kristyn
Counting, This New Year's Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me
- Jane Hirshfield
The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?
I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands.
Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.
Can make black-eyed peas and collards.
Can make, from last year's late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.
Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light.
For four years, I woke each day first to the mountain,
then to the question.
The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,
and still they surprised.
I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea,
brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something.
Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.
Today, I woke without answer.
The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend
don't despair of this falling world, not yet
didn't it give you the asking
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