No longer whole
Quebec City, QC, July 2011
Please note: This photo wraps up our "flash of color" theme. Our next theme, "seeing red", launches tonight at 7:00 p.m. Eastern. Last-minute submissions for "flash of color" are being accepted here. Otherwise, hope you'll pop in tonight for some reddish fun.I'll admit this picture isn't the happiest one in my archives. It suggests irreversible breakage, ignorance of social norms, urban grittiness, some kind of loss. It's always jarring to come across glass on the ground. I worry the kids or the dog will cut themselves on it. I wonder what went on in this place before we arrived. I wonder if anything else will happen here if we hang around for too long.
Yet in the scattered remnants of what once was and will probably never again be, there remains a certain something that almost forces me to stare. The glass glints in the sun as it sits on sun-baked asphalt that's probably a decade past its best before date. There's nothing about this general area that suggests it's anything but a rough-hewn stretch of a forgotten street in a dusty part of town, but I still can't stop looking at the bright green slices at my feet.
Maybe there's hope in this reflected color. Beyond this particular scene, in everything I come across, maybe I need to be looking more carefully for other signs of hope. I let that thought sink in as I slowly walk away and rejoin my family.
Your turn: Where do you find hope?
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8 comments:
That's a hard one, Carmi... I try to look at the more positive and yet sometimes the 'shattered' comes back ..
Broken glass is a big problem where I live, My pooch had cut his paw on it as well. Even so glass fragments do have a kind of beauty especially when the sun strikes the in the right way I just don't want to see it littering ours streets.
I find my hope in the coming together of great people to help put the pieces back together in the best way possible! Re-build it and they will come. Besides the collection of broken glass can be melted down the built back up. You just have to want to take the first step....
In light of your photographic subject, I find hope in the rare folks who clean up messes like this one -- who take a walk with gloves and a trash bag.
In a more general sense, hope is found in each new dawning day... a positive attitude... a kind word or touch... a new life.
Facing brokeness ( for me anyway) is cathartic and gives that lens of my life a sharp twist of reality.
However there is the workd of difference between something being broken and something just being spoiled.
The one is jarring and final...the other is sad, but reclaimable.
I hate and loath broken glass.
If only because at my lowest and most broken the only way that i could cope was to quite deliberatly take a glass bottle to the end of my garden and smash it. The glass shards then had to be swept up and the yard cleared.
Until the next day.
In the circumstances, it was the least destructive thing that I could think to do...and I had a most understanding milkman.
There is always hope, you just have to look for it and recognize and appreciate it among the rubble.
Johnina
Little moments of hope and faith come at me off and on all day, Carmi, usually when I least expect them.
LOVE that color of green.
Funny you ask where, actually right there in your photo...that has to be pretty much my favorite color of green.....nothing like discovering auto-glass, you know for sure what has happened when you stroll upon that, but the manner you shot this if you hadn't mentioned where it was, one might think, it's modern art...depicting our everyday life....
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