Life source

Alone with a toddler in a very old house with a semi-neglected garden, I’ve started picking weeds and trimming branches.

My partner, Alex, is back in the city for work, so I’m the only playmate for Ever, our 3 year-old daughter. After playing in the dirt, making “snail soup with saucisson,” filling and re-filling containers with her, I get the itch to make things. I photograph her often, when it’s not too interruptive to our play and her concentration. Photographing her, I feel the most like myself, during this time of being in a parentheses of our lives. When many things are on hold, making pictures is a reassuring lifeline, one of the main roots at the center of who I am.

Today I started picking at a bush that the neighbours told me is seringas, or mock orange. Its flowers smell divine, but the bush is full of dead-looking branches, and I couldn’t resist pulling them out. When I dragged this long dry branch out and saw a gorgeous flower growing on what I perceived as dead, I stopped. My first thought was, “Shit! I didn’t know you were there! I just cut you off from your life source!”

But then I was simply in awe. It seemed a symbol for this time in our world. So much feels cut off from its life source, disconnected and very far from what nature intended. And yet. There’s this gorgeous flower perfuming the air, in a place that looks totally lifeless. It reminded me of possibility. It’s all possible. All the dreams, all the changes we want to see happen. All of it. You gotta believe it to see it.