BOULDER, Colo.—How do you write about a photograph? How do you capture with words what you captured with light? How do you capture with words exactly how you felt when you took the photo, when how you felt existed in your mind only for a flash?
There’s a curious thing that happens after you spend a chunk of your life writing: everything becomes writing. First, you realize that nothing is motionless, not even the rocks in this photo. Everything is always doing something — being something, and becoming something. Everything has meaning, and as a journalist you start to become aware of that meaning as though it were a special wavelength of light that’s always been there but which you only became aware of by writing, by absorbing it and then shining it back out through your pen or keyboard.
Writing is an act of feeling this light of meaning just as you might feel sunlight. The writer takes that light and turns it into something, as a plant uses light to make food.
Part of the meaning radiating from this photograph is a name: Jixuan. Jixuan is my friend. I met her on a snowy winter adventure to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in 2015. When I think of her and that trip I think of how I wrote in my journal as I sat in the back of my car as our mutual friend, Ji, drove. Joni Mitchell songs played in the car and I wrote about how the letters and words in my journal floated through space like the snowflakes fluttering about outside.
When I think of Jixuan I think of the joy that radiates from her, and I think of the joy I felt climbing a frozen waterfall with her. At the top of the waterfall I discovered a window in the ice that looked into the heart of the waterfall where water, like my unfrozen memory of our trip, poured down through the ice as though it were an artery of the forest around us — and, in a way, it was.
More of the meaning radiating from this photo is the memory of Jixuan’s voice telling me I could do things I didn’t think I could do. Rock climbing is hard and scary and once I was stuck at a spot on a wall and was ready to give up and fall when, from far below, there came a shout. “Commit!” Shouted Jixuan, and I committed and I made a rock climbing move I didn’t think I could make. That is the power of words from friends like Jixuan — you often don’t notice their precise effect, but in the right place at the right time they can help you fly.
When I snapped this photo I hadn’t seen Jixuan in over three years, and even then I only saw her for a day. It was a day in a red canyon somewhere near Las Vegas, where the light painted the rocks in different ways as the sun changed position, and Jixuan climbed the rock and it made you remember things.
The problem with feeling the meaning that’s in everything is that you feel it all the time. The world rushes past you, and everything and every person and every picture is telling you a good story, but you’ve barely heard the beginning of the story before the world flows past again and already you’re face-to-face with something new and with the devastating feeling that this new story will only just start before it leaves you, before you have time to fall in love with it. One of my favorite authors is Haruki Murakami, who wrote, in his book First Person Singular: “And perhaps our lives are merely decorative, expendable items, a burst of fleeting color and nothing more.” This sentence feels more and more true the more bursts of color I see, like this photograph, which after I see it disappears perhaps permanently to the vault of memory, never to return.
If we are just brief bursts of color then Jixuan is a rainbow. You wouldn’t know it by just glancing at this photograph, but if you knew her you would remember the word she spoke that helped you take flight. You’d remember the Christmas card she sent you, and you’d remember the notebook with a photo of a mountain on its cover that she sent you because she wanted you to keep writing things. You’d remember the calendar she sent you, one that the friends she made after moving away made for her, one that features photos of her and all the lovely things she might shout at you while rock climbing. Her words are their own bursts of color which, no matter how hard you try to write about them, will always mean something to you that only you understand, as though they exist inside of you in a language made without words. 
