Depth of Field
A free verse poem
Can Souls be stolen by a photo taken?
Crazy horse believed it to be so.
To think with just a click
we see ourselves
in the eye of the beholder,
the photographer;
… or us on the end of a selfie stick.
Made in God's image.
You in my eye and I in yours
… a myriad reflection.
Just a 2D slice of physical form.
A pattern of pixels
that arrange this view
in an instant.
Coded
Easily fragmented,
corrupted,
manipulated
or distorted.
This is man's image,
not God's.
We have been captured
not stolen.
Imprisoned
by a societal view.
Long gone are the days
of being captured on film,
which seemed more solid,
timeless.
Now,
trapped in people's perceptions,
in a snap, insta or a flicker.
Judged,
as an influencer
or yesterday's pariah.
Developed by process.
Rods and cones react
to the light and colour
and converted
into electrochemical signals.
Parsing by neurons
looking for edges
between the points
of colour and light.
Filling our visual field
with the line and shape
that creates the form of you.
This is how we see
with our eyes.
Physics, biology, chemistry
and society's dictation and adaptation.
But what of our soul?
Is that part of the science?
Certainly our soul is not molded
by the societal standard.
Hopefully,
that remains beyond
societies grasp and conditioning.
How does one measure that,
by the emotion we feel
upon viewing a photo of a loved one
or of someone that inflicted harm or shame.
Memory that clicks off several frames
in our head,
of the moments leading up to and after
that frozen moment in time.
A full length fluid motion picture
of life flashed before us
inciting waves of emotion and physical sensation.
So can one's soul
be captured in a still,
when viewed by those
that love us or hate us?
No,
because our essence,
good or bad exists in their hearts.
Not in the physical vessel
whose walls are just a biological given
but within the spiritual vessel,
where no walls exist
as it is just a wide open auric field.
Love
and
Hate
Neither can exist without each other,
just like how light and shadow must coexist
in order to form the images we see before us.
