They say a picture is worth a thousand words. This may in fact be true, but I’ve recently discovered that sometimes a thousand isn’t quite enough.
My Uncle (my Mom’s sisters, husband) has a good amount of acreage in Fancy Gap, Virginia. I’ve been coming up here with my family for the past 12 years. Sometimes we would go once a year, sometimes twice, and on a good year I get to make it up here three times in one year!
There are only a handful of places that feel like home to me. This is one of those few. It’s hard for me to understand sometimes, considering it’s not home. It’s not even my families; it doesn’t belong to me in any way.
Every time we make a trip up here, I go hiking around some of the land. I did the same thing this time, but I decided to take my camera along with me to try to get some nice pictures. I’d see something I liked and I snap a picture, I’d look at it, and then I’d say “eh…” I did this a couple of times before I realized that I was going to have a problem.
I quickly discovered that no picture I’d take would be able to capture how I felt about this place. A picture would never be able to capture the memories I had there, the beauty I found in it, or the love I had for it. Despite how I took it, the lighting, how I edited later, or how fast I made the shutter close, nothing would manage to express what I wanted it to. No photograph would be able to show what I saw, what I see.
Don’t get me wrong; I believe the power of a beautiful photograph is unmatched in its distinction. A stunning photograph can tell 1,000 different people 1,000 different stories. Maybe that’s why those pictures didn’t do it justice for me, cause they could never tell the perfect story; the stories that I lived out.
Looking back, I realize that I’ve run into this problem before. I just never realized what was happening. I believe that sometimes we see God in places, in people, in things. We don’t literally see him there, but we see his fingerprints, his brushstrokes, his creation. Sometimes a picture will never be able to show the beauty God allows us to see.
I don’t know why I wrote this, it was just something I felt like sharing
[insert what was supposed to be a link to the album on facebook, but I could never figure it out]
joe roy 
i love this post. i know what you mean, too. that’s how i feel about the farm. i’m not the kind of person that gets homesick. when i went to camp, i was never the kid that cried because they missed their mom and dad or their bed or their pet. i’ve never felt especially tied to any place i’ve been. except the farm.
there are days where i feel so homesick for it that i feel restless and desperate to get down there. it’s like there’s no place that heals my heart, soothes my hurts, or calms my stress like the brick steps to the barn or the front porch of the house. i can sit there for hours and be by myself and i’m completely happy. i’m completely protective over it. i don’t like to take people to it that won’t appreciate it. because, to me, it’s not just a farm. it’s home.
i don’t know if my love for photography triggered my love for the farm or if my love for the farm triggered my love for photography, but i feel like they’re tied together. it’s my favorite subject, my favorite backdrop and my favorite place. and clearly, i take pictures of it. but it means things to me that it means to no one else. i can take a picture of the pecan tree and see me and my grandma picking up pecans with those pesky pecan trappers. i can take a picture of the tractor and see the first (and only) time dad let me drive it around.
i can take a picture. i mean, i know that. you can take a picture. i can frame it, edit it, post process it into a work of art, but it still wouldn’t mean to anybody else what it means to me. because you can’t take pictures of memories. you can’t take pictures of feelings.
sorry that i wrote you a novel. i feel like i just word vomited all over your blog. but when i read this, i don’t know, it almost felt like you answered a question i’d been dwelling on for so long but didn’t know i was asking. so thanks for that bit of clarity. 🙂