A Practice of Shared Noticing

My mom and I are in a long-distance relationship. Her, Colorado. Me, Chicago. We’re no strangers to this setup. One of the longest stretches we endured was during the pandemic, when I was diligent about keeping her from leaving her four walls. During that time, we began swapping images of the moon.

Such a tricky thing to photograph. Yet day in and day out, for five years, at least every other day, there has been a notification of a photograph of the moon on our phones. It’s become a spiritual sign, so rooted in our relationship that we have matching stick-and-poke tattoos on our upper arms.

This past September, a new photo-trading pattern emerged: morning light. Organically, we began sharing the shifts and shapes of shadows as they danced across our homes. We stopped to take notice. Light, another difficult thing to photograph, was traded back and forth daily as we stood in awe of this seasonal, ephemeral phenomenon.