He gets it

"Let no feeling of discouragement prey
upon you, and in the end you
are sure to succeed."
- Abraham Lincoln 

I've done a bit of research on Abe Lincoln.  I admire his tenacity and going forward against depression and a country torn by unrest and civil war.  His own tragedies to me makes him an authority on this statement.  He was once accused of being two faced and he replied, "If I was two faced, do you think I would be wearing this one?"  Lincoln is one of the people that I admire him for his courage in the face of so much.

Discouragement and depression are sometimes described as the 'black dog' that haunts and grays our vision.  It is insidious like a fog creeping over the landscape.  Some times no specific source just a grayness that blankets and flattens everything in my world.  For several years I took pictures of gray.  I made it a self rule that I couldn't photochop it to make it gray, the subject had to be gray in the first place.  Over a hundred pictures later I realized that even in grayness there are subtle differences, nuances of change that are hard to define.  I used several pages of gray pictures in my book trying to pin down this feeling that seems to envelope me completely until my mind and body can barely function.  Interesting how Lincoln describes this feeling as a predator...a destroyer.  Much of the world seeks happiness, a shield to protect me from the grayness.