Pathways

by Dotti

Our goal is to create a caring community for people who are passionate about photography and life. We hope this will be a place that will inspire, teach, nurture, support and accept one another; a place where we can grow in our craft and as individuals.  Welcome and thank you for visiting.

This is the Focusing on Life mission statement, the one we adapted when we started our blog more than five years ago. Five days a week, we strive to fulfill this pledge to you, our readers. But there is more to us than what you see on the pages of our blogs, more than our words, more than our photos.

Each of us, the collaborators and the readers, is on our own pathway through life. Sometimes that pathway is smooth, sometimes it veers in unexpected directions, and sometimes it seems to be all uphill.

Right now, several of us here at FOL are on our own uphill pathways: aging and ailing parents, parents passing away, dealing with our own health issues, the long term challenge of spouses or other close friends and family who have  chronic and debilitating illnesses. The list goes on. 

Yes. You see, behind the scenes, our lives mirror yours.

Most of the time, we can juggle these concerns and we find that in addition to our caring relationships, our creative spark and camera therapy can see us through many of life’s stressful times. We’ve often talked on our pages about how effective camera therapy is for us as photographers.

But what happens when that’s not enough? When life’s challenges are just so hard that these things don’t work? When you just can’t muster the energy to lift your camera to your eye?

Terri and I were chatting about this just a few days ago and she reminded me that sometimes we just need to stop, feather our nests, concentrate on self care and allow ourselves time to heal.

Oh, yes! That’s something else we talk about a lot in our pages, too, isn’t it? Self care. But somehow, we too often forget to practice it for ourselves. I’m grateful to Terri for reminding me that this is what I need in my life right now. So today I’m reminding myself and each one of you to remember to concentrate on self care, not just when the going gets tough but every day to build our emotional and spiritual strength for those uphill pathways that will come our way.

We also talk a lot about practicing gratitude as a way to heal. Today I would like to express my gratitude to each of the FOL sisters and to each FOL reader for the love and support you bring to our community. One of the things I value most about FOL is that we are a caring community; we reach out in love and concern when one of us is hurting. There are not enough words to tell you how much that means to each of us.

So I’ll just say, “thank you”.