Collecting

I was walking through my dining room the other day, and a pop of color caught the corner of my eye. I happened to be carrying my phone, so I snapped this photo. I swear that bush wasn't red the day before. And that is one of my absolute favorite things about New England this time of year--so many different kinds of flora change costume and make you notice them. I went out for a walk the same day, and was delighted to find that the bushes that flank the entrance to the woods behind my house had also turned the same fiery color. I thought to myself, if I was my mother, I would know what to call this plant. 

But, alas, since I haven't spent the last twenty or so years of my life learning the names of plants like my mother, I couldn't do anything but stand there and admire. I remember standing in the garden as a child while my mother gardened, hearing her say lots of plant names that sounded mysterious and foreign and have mostly slipped from my memory: phlox, hydrangea,  I often find myself in these kinds of situations. I have friends who have dedicated themselves to learning about types of cameras, or types of herbs, or mixed drinks. I've never felt the need or desire to collect and catalogue knowledge about any one thing. I didn't have many collections of objects as a child. 

What I am, I think, is more of an observer and an experimenter than anything else. I prefer to meet the world as it comes to me, and synthesize it in little bits through writing or photography. If one was to call me a collector of anything, it would be of moments. Moments that I feel are worth writing about, moments that are worth capturing. I wrote a lot of fiction in college, and I often found that I had an uncanny ability to unearth small images and instances that blossomed out into larger imaginary worlds. In a way, I also treat physical spaces as moments to be captured: I am constantly aware of the spaces i inhabit and am always searching for ways to improve my living space and to make it a more unique expression of myself. Of course, this involves the collection of objects, but only in the service of a greater whole.

Virginia Woolf, one of my favorite writers, was also a collector of moments, or "moments of being," as she called them. In her work of the same name, she writes: "Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we--I mean all human beings--are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself." I empathize a lot with Woolf, as someone who also feels acutely aware of the possible significance and beauty contained in every single moment. It's an overwhelming and sometimes frustrating way to see the world.

However, I wouldn't trade the way I experience beauty for anything. I could have walked by my window the other day without even noticing the change in color outside. I could have passed through the archway into the woods without even thinking twice. But instead, I stopped, I observed, I thought. I let the deluge of associations that came to my mind wash over me. And all in an instant, a breath, a second. I didn't know what I was looking at, but it didn't matter. No, I wouldn't trade that for anything.