God lives, I think, in the small moments.

Americans have complex lives to manage. They have to manage poisonous overdoses of news. They have to manage a hostile, confusing and expensive health care system. They have to manage a difficult economy, and they have to manage increasingly diverse and difficult technological lives.

Nowhere, perhaps is spirituality more tested than in the handling of machines, with their problems, glitches, and the inaccessible, irresponsible and difficult to reach corporations that make them. Every day in my life, something goes wrong. Every day there is a frustration at dealing with it. This is the nature of it.

So every time something goes wrong, I look for the message in it. I make sure to be decent and civil to the people I get on the phone, I hold my breath if I feel the anger and frustration rising, I remember that there are human beings at every end of the spectrum, and I remind myself that I will figure it out. All of my photos are now stuck in a computer photo program, and we hope to get them out. If I do, that will be great. If I don’t, then I will start anew, always a gift when it comes to creativity. My life is not tied up in images, only part of it.

And this is forcing me to think differently about new photos and to look back over the few photos I still have access to. I am grateful to them. Managing this sort of up and down roller coaster with technology is now part of life in America. I accept it and see it as an opportunity to grow and think differently about my victim tales. Many people in America feel like David’s against Goliath and there is truth in that. But I don’t want wars raging in my head.