My family has a cabin in Helen, Ga, right on the Chattahoochee River. We would spend our weekends on the front porch watching the tubers with their cut off jeans on pulling their kids and a cooler of beer behind them. Inevitably in the murky waters and tiny rapids of the hooch, someone would lose their shoes. Maybe they flipped over trying to get out of their tube, and they lost their footing and the creepy velcro sandal that was on their left foot. And what about the idiot that wore flip flops. When have flip flops even stayed on your feet when you were walking down the street!? Or the guy who didn’t bring a pair of old shoes, so he had to go down the river in his New Balance. Well, wanna know what happens to all of those lost shoes?

What’s interesting to me is the phrasing of “lost soles”. Here is a collection of shoes, on showcase for everyone to see. The shoe collection has been growing for years, without anyone coming back to reclaim their “lost sole”.  It’s a beautiful representation of just how obvious “lost soul’s” are. They are walking around, with us, just waiting to be claimed. But many of them aren’t. Similar to standing in front of the shoes, where you recognize a shoe similar to one you may have, we stand in front of a broken person and recognize their story, but we walk on.

I think I should frame this picture. I’ll add it to my to-do list.