1000 words aren’t worth what they used to be.

It used to be that they were the given value for a well-taken picture.  But more and more we’d rather settle for the picture, no matter how meaningless or marginal or manipulated it is.  We take them.  We tweak them.  We scroll them.  We are saturated by them. 1000 words?  Not so much.

If you do any reading on how to write a blog, (guess what I’ve been doing a lot of lately), one of the first lessons you learn is that no one will pay attention long enough to read 1000 words. 

Half that…maybe.  Lots of pictures can take up the slack.

And so more and more, it seems to me, we shape and think about and live our lives out of a pictured world.  A flat world.  A world that is only worth a careless photo, shared even more carelessly.

Perhaps we are becoming pictures of careless lives, lived only on the surface of things, in two dimensions.

On my first backpacking trip to Yosemite, we set up camp about a half-mile upstream from the point where Yosemite Creek becomes Yosemite Falls.  We took a day trip, hiking upward further, past the falls, on up to Eagle Peak, just east of El Capitan.  John Muir called this “the most comprehensive of all the views” of the Yosemite Valley.  It is halting in its wideness, its depth, its utterly astounding beauty. You can’t help but be in awe.

I pulled out my camera and began shooting picture after picture, burning through the limited film I had.  (Yes, film.  My kids think I’m ancient.) I could not wait to share these photos with my friends, in the way that we used to share them: sitting on the couch, pulling them out of the envelope, flipping through them, holding the edges so as not to smudge their surfaces.

But when I got home, retrieved the photos from the local Foto Hut (which was a thing), and sat down with my friends, what I had in my hands were picture after picture that looked exactly the same.  Flat.  Bland.  Small.  Uninteresting.

Now…there are those that can take a picture in such a way as to capture a bit of the magnitude and glory of the Yosemite Valley.  But even those pictures can’t get at what someone like John Muir can get at with a thousand words.  Here’s a taste of his visit to the valley:

Awful in stern, immovable majesty, how softly these mountain rocks are adorned and how fine and reassuring the company they keep—their feet set in groves and gay emerald meadows, their brows in the thin blue sky, a thousand flowers leaning confidingly against their adamantine bosses, bathed in floods of booming water, floods of light, while snow, clouds, winds, avalanches, shine and sing and wreathe about them as the years go by! 

When John Muir writes, you get the sense that he is not simply talking about the soil of the place, but much more, the spirit that undergirds it. He talks in rocks and valleys and grasses and streams, but he is also opening us up to something much deeper, much truer, much more real.

And that usually takes at least a thousand words.

Which requires us sitting down, paying attention, and opening ourselves up to what photos can’t quite get at: a knowing that there is something more to who we are and what the world is than what a picture can capture.  There is more to who we are and what the world is than what we can touch and see and smell and surf through.

If you don’t believe me, I invite you to take the trailhead at the base of Yosemite Falls, follow it the 6 miles and 3500 feet to Eagle Peak, and peer into the great expanse below you.

Within you.