Water, waves, and spray
© Andrew Maier. All rights reserved. Used with permission

The associations I have with the word bliss are either bliss as being happy beyond Imagination or in the phrases such as ”ignorance is bliss”.

I do not consider ignorance as a virtue and certainly never as a way of obtaining happiness or bliss. On the contrary, I fully believe that knowledge is the way to becoming a better person and in the end be a happier person. Would I prefer to sometimes not know something, in particular something disturbing? Yes of course, it can temporarily comfort yourself, but in the long run, being ignorant will not save you from reality.

So what about bliss as this feeling of happiness beyond imagination? These are fleeting moments, which occur, for me at least, mostly as a memory of the events. The birth of our children for example, the day we got married, the 10th wedding anniversary, a spectacular sight or moment during holidays. Common to all these events is that they are all very personal, private moments, something I honestly do not want to share online. Instead, I want to focus on another common notion of bliss, the fuzzy feeling it creates that is difficult to explain. So my picture of today is not a picture of the many blissful moments in my life (of which I have quite a few), but the blur, the fuzziness, the unsharpness of the memory of these moments.

Todays picture shows the water of Lake Constance from the back of a ferry crossing the lake. It is blurry and unsharp, but goes from dark blues of the water to bright whites of the spray. It even may be, at first moment, be mistaken as a picture of the sky and covers the a powerful range of feelings associated with remembering a blissful moment.