Naming Things…

The most interesting thing happened a while back, actually a long while back, at the start of organizing my pictures on our picture site, long before this whole thing morphed into a Family, Picture project… Years.

I began to think about how would I categorize pictures, I just had a huge collection, in my head, of just ‘Pictures’ and that would be confusing in so many ways… So there was a lot of work tagging pictures, and changing tagging because of more clear direction unfolding. Changing my picture site to match the new tagging. Then doing that again several times. It still goes on today albeit I don’t have to redesign the thing anymore… yet.

I looked at my collection and the first 4 or 5 were easy, but as I added more things that described what I had, I began to see new ideas opening up in my mind if I created this tag say Windmills. I noticed that just a tag, a name for a grouping helped me find more windmill pictures I already had. Really it happened like that, as soon as I saw a pattern, and created a tag, I began to remember other pictures. It was interesting to me to see that unfold.

From a tag name being created, windmills began to show up in the landscape. the physical world around us as Leisha and I would look for pictures to take. Next, I began to have other ideas like hmm I found this process to turn a photo into a Vincent Van Gogh starry night scene, by then I had tagged quite a few windmills and this project came out of this process, a collection of starry night scenes for windmills.

As a side note, having processed quite a few windmills specifically for a Starry Night picture I have learned several techniques I have to use at the point of pushing the shutter button.

Now as we are driving Leisha will often tell me, there is a cool windmill and I do the same for her tags. She is really into Barbwire, I know that… Claire, Black and White Cows. LOL

Starry Night Pictures
Barbwire
Black and White Cows

At some point in this mental journey, I began to think about Adam naming animals and really more so on how early that occurred in the bible story, at the very beginning. Then I had this idea, that naming, and categorizing things is a fundamental step in so many efforts in our lives. I think we do it without thinking about it most of the time. Having written software since 1988, it’s a very big part of that kind of work and really you spend a lot of time redefining the names of things over and over. We call that ‘Refactoring the code’. To the user, it’s a major update, with new features AND new problems, No? We refactor the data or better said work with our customers to help them do that, as we write and often rewrite code for new taggings. It’s a legitimate way we spend our time making a living.

I really like the practical viewpoint given me in this experience into what I do believe is a love letter from the creator discussing all sorts of parts of being human. I no longer blow past this naming thing, thinking it’s a silly story. I don’t need for this idea to be part of the evolution of humans, it might be, I really don’t care if it’s not. I get tremendous value out of believing this is just a part of being human. Personally, I need that connection between being human and God’s Word.

Anyway, this could just be ADD/Neuro Divergent thinking, I don’t know. But this has been a big part of my thinking for quite some time, like decades once I saw into this.

God Gave Names to All the Animals