Recently, I started taking one photograph each day, of something in my home environment, to chronicle otherwise forgotten moments. I print a copy of the photo and paste it into a journal with the date the photo was taken and (if necessary) a title. It is remarkable how much beauty exists in ordinary things; and how much creative inspiration, for writing and painting, this beauty provides. The first photograph I took was of our small dog, Bear. I used that photo to complete the painting in this post.

After I’d started this project, I read the following in the Camont Journals by Kate Hills: “Finding one’s voice as a writer, an artist, a photographer, or any other human is less an exercise in filling notebooks and journals, but more about living each day fully and as it presents itself—fractured, in pieces, broken by shards of light that are the glory moments remembered forever”.

This quote from Kate describes the essence of my effort: keeping moments of ordinary glory, from my ordinary life, remembered; perhaps not forever, but at least for a time. Hence the following poem:

Capture it early,
when the sun climbs in the East,
one photo every day
saving one moment,
otherwise unnoticed,
but now the most important thing,
an unforgotten intention
to preserve time.