When illness imprisons you, you have to break free!
IMPORTANT NOTE: All pictures were taken by me, Naomi Lipson, during May 2013, in the park of the hospital I was staying in at the time. All rights reserved. Please ask for permission before using. thank you.
I think and read a lot about happiness, and I am pretty sure I am not alone in this. Two regular reads of mine on the Happiness subject are:
* Gretchen Rubin's famous Happiness Project
* Maria Popova's Brain Pickings blog, which deals quite a lot with the issue of happiness, too.
I am forever indebted to the lovely Jane Flanagan, who, through her delightful blog, made me aware of the ideas goldmine that is the Brain pickings website.
About my own "Happiness Project" - and what it has to do with ghosts.
First of all, you might be aware that I suffer from a chronic kind of illness, which means I have to check into a hospital, from time to time. This is a chronic illness, I have to live with it, but it is not life-threatening... Anyway...
As I am currently in a hospital, I wanted to describe through photography the long, not-so-often taken path from misery to recovery. In my initial project, I wanted to take pictures of a patient whose face I found particularly interesting, but after a few days of reflection, he shied away altogether from the project. He looked a bit like this:
photo (c) Naomi Lipson, 1999-2000.
So what I did is take pictures anyway, of all the places I wanted to take *his* photograph in, except he will be no longer there, except as a ghostly presence.
These are the photographs I came up with...
At first, you are behind the bars of illness and misery, you are a prisoner of depression (or any other illness). Can you see the unhappy ghost behind those rusty bars?
Then, through a more or less intricate labyrinth or maze (which symbolizes any kind of path, like undertaking therapy, you are chosing to get yourself out of misery), you try to set yourself free:
On the long, complicated journey from misery to happiness, you might find different landscapes, open gates that symbolize opportunity, such as this one:
Sometimes, on this long and difficult journey, you may need some rest and will sit down on these scattered rocks:
I guess you get the picture now...
More photos available at my flickr photo set called: "The Ghost Project".
Naomi of TeaButterfly.
