Collage…. merely tangible memories?

….in Philadelphia and my cabin in Alaska I have had an eye for personal art and in particular the collage that adorned those walls. Looking up the definition of collage one finds it ‘officially’ is the collection of various things to make a new piece of art. To me it is mostly a collection over the years of photographs representing important things in my life…..basically my life at a glance.

Few of us have a collage on the walls where we live but I think I can say that everyone is walking around with a collage of sorts in their pocket, their cell phone. Even I who shunned the use of a smart phone and its camera now have some pictures stored on it. I am sure most of you have a good number of ‘important’ pictures, but important to who?

I have been on a minimalist bent since moving to Texas so a few days ago I looked around the apartment with an eye to eliminate some more unnecessary “stuff”. It was then I realized that I have just about reached the point of not having any junk laying around, and that all the unnecessary stuff I have left was now personal ‘memorabilia’. We all have stuff like that from the bride and groom off the top of our wedding cake to a flag from the casket of a deceased loved one

Now those important things we keep don’t have to be as monumental in our lives as a wedding or death but simply as mundane as a coffee cup from some exotic country we visited or a nice rock that caught our eye as we were on a new hike in the woods. Plus hundreds if not thousands of actual photographs taken before the digital camera was invented.

So what happens to all this ‘stuff’ when we too join the ranks of our long deceased relatives? I think we can get an idea of what happens by looking around ourselves and our family for memories passed down from generation to generation. Some people hold memories in high esteem and either carefully store them or reverently display them, whereas others put them in a box to be once again handed down until someone will open the box and not know why anyone bothered to save them.

A
collage
or a picture
is a frozen moment of our lives
for us to revel in
when we need
the touch
of
past happiness