A Decade In Search Of Truth

In 1999 I began one last project, one that I thought would define my career as a photographer, and nudge forward perhaps my career as a writer. It started off to be my journey, a last journey with cameras in hand. A few years later I was, I thought, embarking down Frost's road less traveled.

Now, a decade later, I found myself looking back to the future. Wild Orphans once again is surfacing as my photographic savior, my sanity check, I need it. As NY Times op-ed columnist Frank Rich, "A decade that began with the “reality” television craze exemplified by “American Idol” and “Survivor” — both blissfully devoid of any reality whatsoever — spiraled into a wholesale flight from truth." As the last hours of 2009 flicker out, I realize I need 2010 to be a flight back to truth.

Appropriately, the decade's last December epitomized our collective disengagement from the truth - Tiger Woods, the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen and the US sending 30,000 more troops to "win" a game that has no finish line, buzzer or top-of-the-ninth - or maybe our decade of delinquent decision-making was exclusively due to “bad intelligence,” (to coin a phrase by Bush administration alumni), that pushed us into these fiascoes. Unfortunately the tigers of truth, print journalists, are as rare as their Asian counterparts, and as the decade comes to a close, we are watch their habitat disappear as well. In Washington DC they opened the Newseum — "a 250,000-square-foot museum of news — offers visitors an experience that blends five centuries of news history with up-to-the-second technology and hands-on exhibits." As the director is quoted on the Newseum's own website, "Visitors will come away with a better understanding of news and the important role it plays in all of our lives,". Frighteningly we don't build museums to the living and vibrant, but to the vanishing and disappeared - is news habitat gone?

Much of 2010 I will be back on the road, exploring this planet, personal and public perambulations. In search of truth I already have some sense of where to look, but know many new roads will appear--filled with excitement and that tingling trepidation when perambulating on a precipice. But the search for truth will be alive, and that's what I crave and that's why so much of life is "blissfully devoid of any reality whatsoever — spiraled into a wholesale flight from truth." it's not alive. It's as if we have become our own avatars. Gleefully cocooning ourselves into our make-believe reality. And most frightening of all... as the climate conference in Copenhagen insanely pointed out - inside that reality we don't need to care.

I care. I have but this solitary existence. I have no guarantee of second chances, no do-overs,no redemption after missing the warning, or as the chorus rings out:

This is it
Make no mistake where you are
your back's to the corner
This is it
Don't be a fool anymore
This is it
the waiting is over

No room to run
No way to hide
No time for wondering why
It's here, the moment is now

So about Frost's road less traveled. I only know roads are man-made, and that any new road is not so much littered with leaves unworn by human footfalls, rather shiny tchotchkes of world blinded by it's own make-believe reality. "Follow them, use them and forget them.... Don't park. [roads] will get you there, but I tell you, don't ever try to arrive. Arrival is the death of inspiration." (Ernst Hass) Truth lives in inspiration.

A poster ad featuring Tiger Woods forebodingly chimes, "tougher than ever to be a Tiger." Paradoxically over the past decade the world has discovered that too, hiding from one lie, while not questioning the other. The caption on another Accenture Woods poster reads "It’s what you do next that counts." True enough for Tiger in 2010, but not just Tiger. Inside the cocoon I think it's easy for life to imitate art because you can never stand back far enough to get a proper perspective.

Nike’s chairman, Phil Knight, told The Sports Business Journal, in perhaps the most prophetic quote of the decade's closing month, that when Woods’s career "is over, you’ll look back on these indiscretions as a minor blip." Decades hence I think we will look back on this first ten year span of the new Millennium and realize there were too many "blips", I hope not too many for us too survive. Those blips, like the make-believe reality TV shows that launched the decade, held no truth.

Tomorrow morning is just another morning, but it begins a departure. I have reconstructed a camera bag - filled with all new Canon gear, three decades Nikon left behind; I have the love of my life that will see me through my days on this Earth; I travel first to India for a friend's wedding, a global wedding in a sense; then to Europe to understand why we are willing to suffering to know the truth about ourselves; and to East Africa in search of where all new roads began.

Wild Orphans specific website and blog

A few months ago I started this blog with a posting about my original Wild Orphans baby African elephant project. In that and subsequent blog postings I mentioned that I was exploring a return to Kenya and renew the Wild Orphans journey. The first steps in that journey are now a reality with the launch of a Wild Orphans specific website and a Wild Orphans specific blog. From this point on I will be posting most of the details, plans, thoughts and travels, along with photos and video relating to the Wild Orphans on those sites - please follow me there as well.

All rivers cut new courses

A bit of silence lately on this blog is going to be followed by a flurry. I'm taking sort of a hiatus from my work with GLOBIO to return to photography and videography and hopefully speak to the global issues of clean water access and need. My goal is to say something about water that brings it alive, makes it living water. What I was able to do through Wild Orphans was personalize conservation and our relationship to wildlife (elephants). The water journey has just started - making me rethink everything from travel to photographic equipt. to the larger issue of what water means emotionally to all living creatures. As that journey moves forward I'll share my thoughts here. One facet I am certain of - kids will be at the heart of the project - and for that twist in direction I thank good friend Dr. Ernie Meloche. And that is where this "hiatus" is tangential - since I have never believed photography was an end in itself, rather a vehicle for messaging, sharing, learning, and in the end, hopefully, a call to action - all that the project creates will run downstream through GLOBIO and to children worldwide. More very soon.

Wild Orphans Book Available

Yes - the Wild Orphans book is still out there - try here via Amazon for the few book dealers that have a copy. I am discussing reprinting the book with the publisher Welcome Books - I'll post something here when and if that occurs. Thanks to all who have asked.

Natumi - early days

In the beginning she was nearly invisible - not because of her diminutive size but her frail, shy manner. Not that any baby wants to be orphaned, but some you sensed were resigned to make the best of it from the moment they arrived and others, like Natumi, carried for days the feeling that this would all just go away if I don’t accept it. At first so many others were bolder, more precocious, warm, or needy. Natumi was definitely the little girl who I nearly missed entirely – until this photo emerged.

Who is Natumi?
She was born sometime in February 1999 and rescued in April. She was orphaned after falling down a dry well on the Eland Hollow Farm, near Nanyuki, in north-central part of Kenya, East Africa. (Dry wells are often the result of mature elephants digging into the sandy creek or river bottoms in water during periods of drought – in 1999 the number of such well ‘strandings’ became chronic as a period of several years without rain began forcing elephants to dig deeper and deeper in search of water – eventually such deep holes entrap tiny calves.)

Natumi

The reason for starting a blog... hmmm?
Several reasons I suppose, my friends, my staff, kind people who attend my speaking presentations and want to hear more stories, more thoughts - perambulations - about this planet and my journeys over and across it, and more photos and sounds, my snapshots of a life that becomes more amazing as I grow older and realize how lucky, genuinely special and rare it has been.

But its also inspired by a fellow earthling - a creature I share little and everything with - her name is Natumi. She is a African elephant, now going on 10 years old, and living happily in the arid wilds of Kenya's East Tsavo National Park. She was the cover girl of my 2001 book Wild Orphans, the four year story of her and seven other orphaned babies struggle to survive and the amazing effort of the folks at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust outside of Nairobi Kenya to keep these little floppy-eared alive. Over the next few weeks I'll post a collection of previous writings and new thoughts on Natumi and those days and what I think they mean now - a decade later. And to not bore everyone to death I'll post a wealth of photos and video as well.