continued thoughts on faces and pictures...

winter has so many faces

            Even when my mother was living, I often had trouble picturing her face. That troubled me. How could I not see the face of my most beloved person? I was rarely happy with photographs of her either – they never looked like my mother. What I’ve come to realize is that what I saw when I looked at my mother was not how she looked. What I saw was her essence, her interior being, and I suppose I saw it with my heart, not with my eyes.
            A face reveals a lot, but it can never fully represent a soul. What we see is what we feel in their presence – the love, the devotion, the spark of life, the secret joy. You can’t really capture that  -- or maybe a true artist can, by slipping more than photographic representation into their portraiture. I wonder how I would paint my mother if I had the skill.
 
My 60th year in 60,000 words
Day 171: 154 words, TOTAL = 28,046; 31,954 remaining