HAZY

My sister got married last weekend, and she asked me to give a toast. Not at the wedding, but at the rehearsal, and even this I struggled to do.

I said yes because I want to be the person who shows up, who practices saying lovely and true words about people when we’re together, when it means the most and before it’s ever too late. I’m determined to become a human who uses her voice to connect to other people, and this was a chance to show up for that, and for one of my most treasured relationships.

But the words just wouldn’t come. The channel went quiet for the full ten days before we left for the wedding.

So I got on the airplane the day before the rehearsal with zero ideas of what to say, and a carry-on full of electronics with dead batteries, and there was nothing to do but spend the next three hours with a pen and paper.

After the first hour of trying to find words and meanings and putting down a sprinkling of ideas that didn’t make sense together, some deeper sense whispered that maybe it was time to let it go hazy. To imagine the words going soft, the ink of the pen soaking onto the page. That every letter was less important than what they represented as a whole.

Like explaining a dream that you can’t quite remember how things made sense but they did at the time or squinting your eyes and softening your vision, sometimes it’s easier to understand what’s beautiful or significant when nothing is perfectly crisp and clear, when it’s just a little out of focus. The lack of clarity leaves room for interpretation, for metaphors and meaning to emerge.

When I was seven years old, my parents (or one of my teachers?) noticed that I was squinting to see things far away. It wasn’t long after that I got my first pair of glasses. As we were driving home from the eye doctor, I marveled at all of the leaves on the trees that were no longer lost in clouds of green, how crisp and clear the world had become. Of course, I needed the glasses to navigate the world, but it was also a way that my body was deficient, that the way my body naturally experienced the world was flawed and needed to be fixed. While there are real practical uses for correcting my eyesight, I think there’s a part of me that loved the magic of seeing the world through my body’s distorted lenses. It wasn’t clear, but it inspired using my imagination to create the world I wanted to see. 

My inner perfectionist loves to attach herself to an ideal like having 20/20 vision and photos crisply in focus and full of rich detail or finding the perfect memory that encapsulates everything wonderful I could ever want to say about my sister at her wedding. But there’s something else – maybe it’s a type of intuition or true self – that is pulling me hard toward the soft and unclear, toward allowing things to blur together and not be completely sharp and known at all times.

I’m finding myself looking for ways to intentionally make some blurry photos – trying to decide if I should add some dream or prism filters to my collection of creative toys. Wanting to photograph everything on film, where the imperfections and softness are always magical. Craving haloed light, motion blur, distortion, double exposures, and objects to shoot through. I’m leaning into my hazy era to see what creating unfocused makes clear.

Of course, the speech came together just in time. Letting the words and ideas flow into each other made space for the threads that would weave them together to emerge. Sometimes I wonder if leaning into the uncertainty and unknown of what can’t be clearly seen is the secret to inviting and nurturing creativity.