A Moment of Silence Please...

Oil Spills, Korean crisis, Jamaican death toll rises, Blast near NATO base in Kandahar, more after this pause to catch your breath.

And in other news.... The BBC reported today that, "The Alaotra grebe is extinct" ...going on to say, "The last known sighting of the bird was in 1985 and experts have now confirmed its demise, killed off by a combination of poaching and predatory fish."

You probably didn't know the lovely little bird, lived just around the corner, quiet fellow, so nice to the local kids, never really bothered anyone. Gosh, kinda wish we had gotten to know him before he died.

Painting of the Alaotra grebe by Chris Rose via the BBConline

Thinking about the cost of oil

"Today we know the price of everything, the value of nothing."
- Oscar Wilde

"better than anything I have ever seen. It will haunt you. trust me."

Everybody creates a world - shopping, working, eating, love, friends, experiences, passions, etc - it is something that we expose, like an image in a darkroom, over the passage of time, occasionally moments, brief and puctuating, more more often over months and years and seasons. Sometimes we are active participants in that creation and more often than not we are passengers, it just happens. I hate when it just happens. I have always want some say in the deal. Maybe that's the creative bit in me. The bit I keep chasing--like I just said to a friend in an email--like a firefly, on-off, on-off, it goes. And I keep chasing, sometimes where it's been, sometimes where I think it's going, and even sometimes where I hope it will go.

These past months I have spent increasingly engaged in creating my own new world; it has become a very active persuit, mentally, spiritually and physically. Part of that creative perambulation has been trying to experience the world not just through my own eyes, ears, and touch, but as well, the thoughts and writings and expressions of others. Today I was catching up on "others" and read Paul Melcher's "Thoughts of a Bohemian" blog, which is linked in the upper right of this blog. He has posted his thoughts and links to war photojournalist Ashley Gilbertson's NYTimes Magazine piece The Shrine Down the Hall - here are Melcher's words about the images:

"These images by Ashley Gilbertson are the most powerful images of war I have ever seen. They are dramatic by what they do not show: The fallen boys. Instead we see the remains of Life brutally interrupted, the trophies, posters, gadgets that once made them happy and proud. Suddenly, their absence within these personal space become unbearable. And death, the death of a US soldier takes a new dimension. It is no longer a soldier from within many, an anonymous face under a helmet, but a person, an individual, a life that is missing."

Even more powerful perhaps are a photographer's words in this amazing interview with VII The Magazine: The Consequences of War. Set your world aside for a few minutes and watch this. War is one of the most hideous acts we humans do, there is no reason for it, only excuses. I couldn't agree with Melcher more, this is, "better than anything I have ever seen. It will haunt you. trust me." Ashley you have my greatest respect for what you have created and are saying in words, pictures and actions.

Never there until you get there

Back from Europe and managed to scoot through a window. Planes, trains, security alerts, volcanic ash, mix with two quarts Perrier and you have it, a royal travel mess. Ah, international travel, how I've missed you so.

I started reflecting (while serpentining my way in a [in]security line) how things have changed since I started my traveling career. In the beginning it was simple, buy a ticket, get on a plane, land somewhere, travel around taking pictures and scribbling your impressions of the place, come back and do a story. Now it's wake up, pop the computer on, check seismic reports, read financial forecasts, survey the upper atmospheric wind patterns, check latest State Dept terrorist reports, load the iPhone with key destination apps, gather the dozen different chargers to keep my digital existence powered up, THEN, think about hitting the road and going to work.

But then I started thinking, hasn't that's always been the challenge for gypsies, staying fleet-a-foot and one step ahead of the obstacles. Just after the first of the year the word proprioception entered my weekly vocabulary. Up until now it was uttered as I gasped for air and dripped with sweat between sets of one exercise or another dished out by my fitness coach Phil. That proprioception directly connected to my spine and lower back, and their general inability to communicate with the rest of me. Proprioception popped up today as I juggled BBC volcanic ash reports, flight schedules and substituting TGV reservations for a hire car; in this case my brain communicating with the flexibility of my travel intentions.

'Travel proprioception' is something I got very good at long ago, but it came in other names and descriptions: A cameraman friend from LA use to describe it like this - our ability to eat most anything and not get sick, get toss around in a helicopter and not turn green and sleep not just anywhere, but everywhere. Another person put it "leaving your baggage behind." For the most part that's baggage filled with preconceived notions of what a people, place or thing should be - even what traveling there should be like. And as a wise, and oh so salty woman once said to me, "Want to be a good writer in this place [Africa], follow your nose, but keep your nose pointed down, out of the way."

Phil, loves to say, "sometimes ya gotta go slow to go fast" - I think it applies to travel proprioception as well. I have a bit of the Energizer bunny hopping about inside me - and it's taken 50 years to learn how to slow the little hopper down - and I still can't always catch the little hare. I once arrived in the mountains of Papua New Guinea and was still flying around in some artificially sped up world of my own; my metronome pulsing to beat of a world consumed by devices--computers, cell phones, deadlines, downloads, 24-hour news--and an elder I was suppose to meet with was not available; I was going nut. Two days later he said we could meet now, when I found him in his garden, leaning on his handmade hoe, mande tene wig slightly askew, but happily adorned with bright saffron-colored everlasting daisies, he said, "you are finally in time." I had no idea I wasn't until that moment. From that trip onwards I always took two days off before coming to the village - that's about what it took to reset my clock.

I use to have a saying when travel was my only way of life, "You're never there until you get there." People would ask me are you excited about going to this place or that, my reply, "after I get there, then I'll think about getting excited." Because the flip side of excited is total downer. It becomes a yo-yo ride that can spin out of control. On the other hand, if you are truly a journey-person not a destination-person then "there" may turn out to be a whole different place, and the place you really were destined to be. Not always an easy reality to wrap your mind, body and soul collectively around.

The one thing I have gotten smarter at is creating fertile fields for the "there" of which I had no reckoning. Heading for Belgium and France I was excited, mainly because my travel proprioception feels totally turned on, lit from within. When I first began traveling I intentionally cast my plans away from Europe, towards lands untamed, maps that still claimed "Here be dragons", places that struggled to be pronounced (like Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano - I mean, c'mon, that's a scrabble goldmine!). Europe is now a journey - I'm am excited - because I have no idea where it will eventually lead.