Documentaries and Documenting Life

Today I am grateful for safe travels, a visit with my mom and a few other family members, and the beauty of the Iowa countryside. 

Mom's nursing home was able to start porch visits again, after weathering a COVID-19 outbreak, so I wanted to get there for a visit. Darcy and Sam joined me. We kept our trip short and our contacts limited, but the connections made are treasured today as I sit in my own home and welcome a new day.

A couple weeks ago we watched the Bee Gees documentary How Can You Mend a Broken Heart and have since watched three more: Michelle Obama's Becoming, Dolly Parton's Here I Am and last night it was Robin's Wish about Robin Williams. They each captured and held our attention and interest in different ways and we will likely continue to find biographical documentaries to view. 

Life as documentary. People, places, and events that have a far-reaching impact, either over time or in a moment in time, tend to be the ones that films are made about. Aren't each of us living our own documentary though?  Aren't we all witnessing the lives of our family members and friends as they unfold?

Life as documentary. How do you keep record?  Where can we look to put together the key parts that make you who you are and your life what it is? These are deep questions, and yet obvious ones. I encourage you to look at the record. Your own life's recording. What will you find, recover, discover? 

My writings and the thousands and thousands of photos I have taken over the decades of my life are significant records of my life. I pull words and pictures out here and there and honor them in various ways. My hope is to have time in the next years to do more reviewing of what I have compiled and composed in this often amazing, sometimes very painful, journey I have been on.

Here are three photos from yesterday, from the family farm, an Iowa winterscape. They document home and heart in ways only places and spaces can.