"There is a crack in everything - that's how the light gets in" Leonard Cohen, ANTHEM
In August 2013 darkness threatened to seep through the cracks in my life.
.
I’d spent 10 days in hospital to find the cause of what, for over a year, doctors had told me was a bad back (I was a TV news cameraman and bad backs went with the territory). But a professor of neurology had just told me I had MND – AKA motor neurone disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS, PLS, maladie de Charcot.
It has many names, but it meant one thing: I would relentlessly become more and more disabled, possibly ending up with a fully functioning mind trapped inside a paralysed but fully feeling body.
“Keep off the internet” said the consultant...
Yeah, right – after being very shocked at what I found on the internet about MND, I vowed to appreciate and enjoy every moment of life I had left.
I turned to my more than 10 years of buddhist meditation practice for comfort and help; I completed 4 months of intensive mindfulness courses; I enjoyed my wife’s 50th birthday in Venice with our daughter. With the help of drugs and crutches, I was able to stumble around the beautiful lagoon “at one with my camera” and I took these beautiful images (click HERE to see them).
I’m lucky that I went to Venice when I did, because since then I’ve become restricted to a mobility scooter – Venice was not built for the disabled photographer!
I now take photographs much more locally from my mobility scooter and publish them on a blog called Scooter Shooter. I’m also very involved in a photography project aiming to raise awareness of MND and funding for the MND Association called 26Miles4MND.
In a lot of ways, I’m happier with my Scooter Shooter images than the ones I took in Venice – it’s more of a challenge to see the extraordinary in the ordinary – the Venetian lagoon is certainly not ordinary!
I’ll still be updating Mindful Photos but for the time being here is a gallery of some of the photographs I’ve taken in my alter-ego as the Scooter Shooter (sounds a bit like a super hero doesn’t it). Enjoy!
(click on any picture to enter the gallery)
Words and pictures © all rights reserved Miles Pilling
Some more great eye candy here. I really like Sartorial Gent, Tea Rooms, Green Screen, Green Feeling, Figurehead, No Entry, Wot You Looking At, and the featured image at top. So many good shots… it’s such a pleasure looking at them.
Thanks so much. I’m really glad you enjoyed looking at them.