Gratitude
the source of all healing
[All of the photos in this email are available in various sizes as museum-quality limited editions, signed and numbered by yours truly. Contact me if you’d like to learn more about any of them. And please check out my online gallery at jeffeinsteinart.com. This holiday season give the gift of fine art.]
Greetings!
My primary grievance with our media-induced culture of endless grievance is how little room it leaves in our hearts and minds for the most healing and most easily forgotten of all emotions: gratitude. Correspondingly, my new holiday resolution is to share only words and thoughts of gratitude for the people and things I’m most grateful for this holiday season, starting with this Thanksgiving, the perfect opportunity to share a few more moments with cherished friends and family.
One thing that my recent re-dedication to fine art photography has taught me is that our lives are defined far less by our spectacular successes and failures, and far more by the far more commonplace and pedestrian moments we experience in our day-to-day lives. These little snapshots in time are the real stuff of life and the stuff of all art. Individually and collectively they tap the essential rhythms of the universe, the lights and shadows that illuminate our lives, even for the briefest of moments: smiles and laughs and tears and victories and defeats that remain with us — as if on call — forever. Ephemeral, it seems, is never and always…
Never and always because each fleeting moment seems not to vanish in the winds of time but to burrow instead deep into the shadows and contours of our hearts and minds. There they reside in collective silent repose unless or until called upon by conscious or unconscious will to reassert themselves as color and texture and context for yet another fleeting moment. Together they are destined to be passed along for eons in the eternal consciousness of our genetic codes. Welcome or unwelcome as they may be, the ephemeral moments of our lives are — like the Internet — forever.
Think of each fleeting moment in time as but a single frame of an epic cinematic masterpiece, an exclusive opus for your eyes only. Like a piece of childhood trivia that seemingly appears out of nowhere in the middle of an adult conversation decades after the fact, then — once invoked — recedes again just as quickly into the encroaching shadows of memory.
Which leads me back to gratitude, perhaps the closest we can get to an applied appreciation for the never/always dynamic of ephemeral. Because the things that truly matter in our lives — our family and friends, our health, our communities, our nation, and our God-given freedoms — will always make themselves apparent, sometimes with their presence and sometimes in their absence. Our gratitude for them breathes life and corporeal substance into them — and imbues us in return with their strength and character. Be grateful for them despite their many flaws precisely because they are just like you: never and always ephemeral works in progress.
May you and yours be blessed with a warm and wondrous Thanksgiving. And with many cherished memories of forever fleeting moments…
Jeff