the rebirth

People seem to really like this photo so I figured I'd explain a little bit about it being that I'm in a rare talkative (heh) sharing mood.

I took this photo in the summer of 2005, June to be exact. It was two months after someone I loved cheated on me and broke my heart. First real love and all, I took it rather hard and was devastated by the betrayal, selfishness, insults, and worst of all, his blame for his actions.

I was spiraling out of control and it came to me that I should take a photo. I had been a photographer many years before in the 90s and I always found a kind of calmness whenever I held a camera in my hands. My first published photos were in a amateur teen magazine called Sassy and beyond that I've had little successes here and there but nothing solid as my attentions were drawn elsewhere eventually. But at that moment I knew one thing for certain, if I focused on photography, it would be something that I could grasp onto to help regain the equilibrium that I needed at the time. So I found my camera, put on my favorite bodice, thew my head and hair back and snap! Took the picture. It was the first one I took. The best one. My favorite and apparently yours as well.

I like to think of this photo as a sort of rebirth for me. I felt like a phoenix rising from the flame full of anger and rage, angst and sorrow, endings and new beginnings. I think it captures it all. All that raw emotion I was feeling at the time. All that pain. And how fitting that aside from photography, fire - because I love it so - was the thing that helped me live again. Helped me breathe.... "And like a phoenix I arise."

I've long since forgiven my ex. Forgiveness btw does not mean forgetting. It just means that my life is so much better without all the complications of his world in it. It means that I've been given a chance to be as I once was before that union and then some. Alive and healthy, happy and beautiful, surrounded by my family, the 'community', a place full of lights, love, creativity, encouragement, support, positive energy and fire. And so far... It's been a pretty wonderful ride.

I'm a extremely lucky girl to have been given this gift.

And I would not change a thing.