films, girls, and social change…

“Water Meets The Sky”  is a film created via the efforts of the organization Camfed- a UK/US based non-profit which supports educational opportunities for girls in Africa.  The film is the result of Camfed’s belief that films can be a deeply important piece of social change.  The film was made by a group of women in a remote region of northern Zambia, most of whom are very poor, illiterate, and have rarely seen film before. They worked with two filmmakers to learn how to make a film as a way to speak out about their lives.  The women chose the topic, an issue that had been traumatic for them all, and also one that was rarely spoken about:  the challenge of young women orphaned by AIDS.

The project began as a workshop about filmmaking, but evolved to become, as the site professes, “a journey in empowerment”as the women challenge long-standing silence about the issue, “and press their community to change.”  Such work is becoming more and more prevalent throughout the world, as non-profits, NGO’s, and advocacy groups utilize the tools of telling stories- film, audio, photography and social networks- to share the stories of their lives.

Camfed | Where the Water Meets the Sky | Home | Play the trailer

Camfed | Where the Water Meets the Sky | Home | Play the trailer

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inspiration and affirmation, anderson ranch

Intensive, affirming, humbling:  my recent week long workshop immersion at the beautiful Anderson Ranch near Aspen, Colorado.

The focus of the class was digital video editing.  The intent was to have each participant create a small piece from one to three minutes long by the end of the week, a short piece focused on the theme of remembering. How we remember a person, a place, an experience of life.  How we deconstruct those memories, piecing them down into ideas and feelings so that we can then piece them back together – representing them in photographs, small segments of narrative and spoken word, text, or small segments of video, all weaved together into a final piece.

The people in the workshop had a wide range of backgrounds:  amateur artists to one photographer who had worked on stories with National Geographic for twenty years. The final short pieces which each person created were wonderful in some way:  either as deeply moving stories, or  simple explorations of sheer beauty.

My own piece took me back through six years and seven trips with the non-profit organization Interplast, a group comprised of interchanging physicians, nurses, and translators who volunteer their time several weeks a year to travel around the world providing free reconstructive surgeries for children suffering from burns or congenital disfigurements.  I wanted to revisit the rich depth of stories I had the joy to experience by working with this group. I wanted to explore the impact these experiences  had on my own life; how they mirrored aspects of my own journey. I played with words and still images from the trips I photographed for Interplast,  trying to create a small, poetic memory of the feelings it engendered as a springboard for a longer piece.

The affirmation of the experience comes from several levels. It was deeply important to be,  once again, in an environment filled with other creatives, other photographers who understand, at a deep, core level,  what I am also passionate about.  Watching photographs I’ve made move people deeply : that feeling of- yes, it worked. Yes, these stories mean something. As do these lives of the children featured within their frames.  All photographers engaged in this work need a dose of that, like any other artist.  A place which supports the vision, and the work.

desert redux….

Just in from trip number two to the desert.  What an amazing amount of beautiful terrain we toured through. Becoming one with your bike- as Eric says.  Ten through twelve hour days in the saddle will do that to you.  Bike Zen.

It’s once again time for The 45 Hours of Eric’s Birthday event:  Day 5, and we are up to hour 40, thanks to two amazing tours on the east and west sides. Unplanned adventures:  the best kind, when the weather stays within the range your outerwear is meant for and the calories and H20 are …just enough.  So that you are famished, dusty, worked, and deeply thirsty- in that cleaning-you-, out kind of way and not stretched so far past your limit you are incoherent.

Old and now new favorites:  discovering the world’s longest ‘downhill’ when my 6 hour mountain bike ride + run turned into the discovery that we were at the top of the new singletrack  above the UPS trail in Moab.  Up, up, up all morning- 27 miles from town to Warner Lake high in the La Sals, then down , down, down Hazzard Mountain trail to Kokopelli to UPS to LPS to Porcupine to the highway and back up to our campsite on Sand Flats.  Sixty miles of amazing views and singletrack:  paintbrush and wild cliffrose and penstemon blooming all over lower down, then up into wild iris, golden banner, delphinium.  So incredibly beautiful.  An amazing day.  To pedal into town and slam down 24 oz of cold, cold carbonated Coke after a day like that:  the best feeling in the world.

Yesterday: another adventure:  our ride over Hurrah Pass to Lockhart aborted at Hurrah when the rain we’d been riding in for an hour turned into a wall of endless gray to the south and west.  Riding back down into the valley, the rain let up and we decided to head down Kane Springs Canyon just to add in a few more miles.  The rain made the sand tolerable, the rain let up, and the canyon narrowed to an intrigue and temptation:  so on we went.  All the way out to Hwy 191 and Hole in the Rock. Early morning birds in the tamarisk and cottonwoods along the narrow winding creek sounded like the Amazon: warbling and singing and tweeting.  Sweet smells of rose and tamarisk.  Eric has always wanted to see Beyond the Rocks, so we rode back over to Pritchett Canyon and back out.  Deep, dark, omninously brooding clouds gathered over the La Sals all day:  riding out through Pritchett, lightening and thunder and dark sky mixing with beautiful afternoon light.  Another 10 hour day of beauty and wonder.  We get to do this, says EB, reminding me.  Yes, I think. How incredibly, incredibly lucky we are. To  get to do this.

on not running…….

It’s such a bummer.  I’m thinking this again now as I watch my favorite running buddy in the world have to be on leash duty. Something’s up with his hip and leg:  it looks like a doggy ACL, the bane of mud season for all mountain dogs.

I often call Toby my four footed godchild.  I was sharing a house with Megan November when she brought this handsome, intriguing, curious, spirited and friendly guy home from the shelter.  She was only going to look. But it was obvious right away that she was meant to be Toby’s Human.  He knew that immediately.  Luckily, Megan picked up on this during the first visit, even though she planned on actually getting a dog six months down the road.

The house we shared was Megan’s parents, a beautiful cabin high up on Hoosier Pass, at 11,000 feet.  I worked from home then, as a photographer:  Toby spent his first six to seven months with me daily while his real mom went into town to work.  Every morning, if we hadn’t been out the door for a run by 9 am,  a dark wet nose would politely and delicately plant itself on my right leg while I worked on my computer, editing images and writing.  If the nose hadn’t been attended to my 9:20 am or so, it would begin to push and prod a bit, followed by a hopeful smile and tail wag.  By 9:30 am, all bets were off for any more accomplishment at the desk. It was time to go out and say hello to the spruce trees and tundra, chase some more squirrels (Toby had already been out once at 6:30 am with his mom) and see what was going on in the big outside world.

Like all good mountain dogs, Toby gets to run and ski nearly daily, hiking up with his mom or dad in the brisk winter mornings and joyfully skiing the powder down. Running up Quandary, running French Pass, chasing squirrels and smelling all manner of great things.  Spring brings with it amazing smells as everything begins to melt away from the winter snows, but also the postholing treacherous to mountain dogs and their knees.

Meg and her husband took off for a trip last week, and my role as aunt/godmother gives me first call on any opportunities to dog sit my old friend. This time, Meg noticed he was limping before they took off.  And so Toby was constrained:  to walks on leash, a four letter phrase for any mountain dog worth his salt.   I share his sentiments exactly.  Being constrained is such a bummer .

I just finished up seven months of rehab, and now it looks like Toby will likely also be on the mend. Its going to be the Cone for my little buddy this summer, for awhile, I’m afraid.  He’ll have to learn patience, and look forward to a beautiful fall.

on not leaving…

A gem from the novel The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak:

“A DEFINITION NOT FOUND IN THE DICTIONARY:

Not leaving: an act of trust and love. often deciphered by children.”

These words strike a like a mainline to the heart, from a hundred angles.

The power of words can move one to tears: a certain shift in perspective, a connection of beauty,  a recognition of a truth one believes with all one’s knowing, a resonance with an experience of life.

Sometimes the smallest acts and offerings are our greatest kindnesses.

I think of Raimundo, traveling with his sons from some small village in the state of Rio Branco, Brazil.  He passes them off to strangers, who take his small sons into the foreign worlds of operating rooms, sewing back together the clefts in their palates that keep them from being whole. When they wake up from anesthesia, he is there.

I think of the young adults in Mississippi and Arkansas, working for Save The Children, returning to burnt out, prejudiced, tired and frayed communities to mentor children younger than themselves, showing a pathway out.

I photographed Roberto, in Maine, the Colombian street kid whose life was changed dramatically with his own adoption and migration to the U.S., who ended up embracing every new immigrant child he later met in Portland Maine, children from Somalia, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Serbia, Guatemala, Vietnam.

All these stories of kindness, and connection, small acts of simple grace.

But what happens when leaving happens instead of not leaving? This question haunts me.  Can a late in life reparation- like the surgeries that bridge these children’s structural gaps- cross over the distance, healing what has never felt whole?

Cameras and words skim over the surface, wondering, seeking, searching for answers that lie buried beyond years.  If what is missing in your life was a belief in yourself that was never instilled by others- than turn that lacking into a passion that shifts that chasm for other young people, towards hearts full of hope.

Its’ my own heart’s belief that all good things in this world grow with patience, and time, with depth, quietness, and a deep humility.  First is one’s own sense of peace, solid foundations and grace. Next comes the ripple in the world that you will send out towards others, all part of the same weave of life as ourselves.  A friend passed on a blog which reminded me of this quote about doing any kind of aid work:

“Go to the people. Live with them. Learn from them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have. But with the best leaders, when the work is done, the task accomplished, the people will say ‘We have done this ourselves.’”

One of the main characters in Zusak’s novel has “silver eyes of kindness” .  His incredibly brave, direct acts of kindness go unnoticed by much of the world he lives within, and are, in fact, in Nazi Germany, shunned and at times berated.  But his ripple of goodness he left behind saved two lives of quiet goodness.  Perhaps it is enough to see the world through silver eyes of kindness, and use that view to stretch oneself towards the good you can do in a handful of lives.

sandstone rituals and rejeuvation….

Just back from another road trip to Moab.  It’s becoming a ritual each spring and fall:  to return to this Utah landscape of sandstone, sun, rivers, and sky.

I’ve spent much of my life seeking connection to landscape:  the high mountains are home.  I write often and have created many photography projects around the theme of community:  exploring the idea of how long term inhabitance develops a deep connection to one’s place.  Each time I return from the desert, I feel a resonance grow:  the idea of returning, as a visitor, to a landscape again and again can also grow a deep thread of connection.

We come here, to pursue the R’s.  On the surface, it’s for recreation:  just two of the thousands who run, ride, climb and boat through this sere, elemental landscape, warming our bodies after months of snow, frigid mornings, and wind chill.  But something deeper also drives us:  a desire for rejevenation, renewal.  A rekindling of our spirits.  A reflection on our lives, and how we might live them with consciousness, clarity, and grace.

This trip is no different:  we camp under the stars,  the full moon.  The desert comes exuberantly alive with color:  each root drawing up life affirming water from the rains and the river, swelling with run-off from the mountains we have temporarily escaped.  This trip, we run by the crimson of Utah penstemon, paintbrush,  and scarlet gilia, purple hues of lupine and delphinium,  orange globemallow, sunbursts of Indian plume and sunflowers.  Sun burnishes our bodies and burns our winter skin; red sand works its way into everything.  We slap on running shoes and travel early, and light:  leaving at daybreak to commune again with favorite canyons and mesas, and exploring new ones to add to our list.  Sunburnt, dusty, bug bitten, and exhausted:  our spent bodies sweat out the stifled desires and frustrations of darkness, winters, and feeling stuck in our lives. The bikes let us travel further:  four, six, seven hours- we see a largess of terrain that reminds us that the possibilities of our own lives are likewise as vast. Traveling solo, or just the two of us, we travel humbly, respectfully, aware we are crossing ground that is elemental, even sacred if you look hard, and approach quietly, with a sense of gratitude for what might be found there.

Renewal.

reconnecting the threads..

Yesterday, I pulled out a file of black and white photographs from several years ago.  The images were from work I shot for many years for the non-profit humanitarian group Interplast.   Consisting of interchanging teams of volunteer surgeons, anesthesiologists, pediatricians and nurses, the organization has been providing reconstructive surgeries to children suffering from severe burns and congenital deformities in sites around the world for nearly 40 years.  A major component of their work is now also offering education to the physicians and ancillary medical personnel who work in these countries so that they may do more of these surgeries on their own.

The photographs bring a piercing zing of memories- of the rich, vital deeply humbling experience it is to work on this type of project, to have a daily engagement with so many gracious, beautiful people whose lives are engaged in a momentous daily struggle simply to exist.  The pungent smell of the humid tropics existant in so many of the countries we worked in; the rich, vibrant colors of mango and hibiscus;  the panorama of hopeful faces; the stories of small, tiny acts of generosity extended to those in need, along the tales of inhumanity breached upon these same families.

The photos each bring their own sharp memory:  there’s Rosa, burned in a kerosene accident in Peru,  a shy, sweet young presence whose deep bond with her young mother was so evident each day I visited the patients rooms.

There’s Milagros, whose mother left her behind when she saw the vast cleft splitting her lip and palate into two, and the grandmother who stepped into fill the gap, figuratively and literally.

There’s Cesar: also burned in an accident when the candle his relative was carrying ignited a volatile substance used in his father’ work as a shoemaker. Juan, also burned with a lantern.  There’s Francisco, in Brazil, back in Rio Branco for his third surgery with Interplast, this time to repair a palate cleaved wide with space at birth.  There’s Bounevane, in Laos, and Delmira, in Ecuador.  So many hopeful faces, so many dreams:  that the threads of skin torn apart and disconnected can be made whole again.  And with that tangible connection of skin to skin- the repair of a chasm and gap that has separated them from the normalcy of life where they live.

I traveled seven times with Interplast, to five different countries around the world.  And while the stories of all of these children tugged deeply at my heartstrings for all of the obvious reasons, I always wondered if there was something else that drove me so passionately to learn about and share these children’s stories again and again.

A photography mentor once told me that our cameras always lead us where we need to go; that we are moved to engage in stories that will teach us what we need to learn about our own lives, even while engaged in the apparent process of telling the stories of others. Watching the surgeons reconnect what was broken held a type of magic for me:  how it was that something so fragmented was sewn back together in a way that could withstand the challenges thrown at it down the road.  And how such reconnection of a sometimes tiny gap made all the difference in a life:  opening up worlds of possibilty, possibilities seemingly unattainable before the bridging of that gap.

francisco in brazil

running and returning….

Today I ran through my backyard:  the singletrack trails of the Back Ranch, near Keystone, Colorado.  Tiny shoots of green valiantly poked up amid the receding snowdrifts.  Small bunches of spring beauties bloomed in patches in the forest where the snow had already melted out.

It’s mud season, but I love this time of year here.  Living at 10,000 feet necessitates a love for snow, and wind, and frigid cold. We learn to love the blizzards:  they mean new snow, and preferably, feet of it.  We slap on our boards and skin up the peaks in the mornings, carving turns in powder on the way down: turns so joyful, we ache from the grinning.  There are the quieter snows that barely register on the daily snow report, but which fill us with peace while  walking on a dark mid winter night,  flakes softly falling all around. But what I miss is color- for so many months of the year.   And so those tiny unfurlings of green come May or June fill my heart to bursting.

This year brings with it the extra joy of running- again.  Seven months off from a 30 year passion was a new type of challenge, requiring patience, an acceptance of bike trainers, and acceptance of not defining myself by what I thought was a key piece of my identity for years. The mother of one friend thought I was pregnant when I didn’t toe the line at a beautiful 50k in Moab last November:  the reality was much more banal.  Achilles tendonitis, ignored for a year, had blossomed into small tendon tears.  Even walking became painful.  The verdict from the doctor and the physical therapist last October was 6 months to a year off.

It was two months before I could hike or skin up Peak 8 on my tele skis pain free.  I didn’t get in any real powder days until April, and got permission (#2) to begin to run a month and a half ago.  Its been a slow return to any semblence of shape:  my normal modis operandi is to jumpstart the long winter hiatus with accelerated running regimes starting in March.  This year, that program is doomed to failure:  this reality painfully reinforced when I set myself back a month with a pre-emptory three hour circuit up Green Mountain and Flagstaff and the Mesa Trail back in February.  It was just so hard to turn around, finally getting set free again.  Three miles, pointed out the therapist later, not three hours.  Three miles is hard to do.  You get nowhere.

So now its back to patience again, and slowing down.  The silver lining is the extra time to notice the beauty, and also, the daily, visceral remembrance of what a gift it is … to run.  At all.  A recently ended three year stint in ER – a stint that deeply confirmed that photography, documentary and creative work really are my passion and life path- did also give me the gift of deep appreciation for a physical body that functions well.  So many end up without that gift: its one we can take for granted, until its taken away.  Recently, many friends have begun struggling with life-shifting illnesses, and several other friends have died. Friends whose lives have until recently been filled with the exact kind of daily passion and joy for skiing, running, riding, and the beauty of mountains and rivers that so many of our community find their life’s meaning in.

These friends journeys reinforce my own injury’s message that the gift to move through this beauty is truly a gift of grace bequeathed upon us, for an unknown spin of time.  I think of the words of Willie Stewart, a friend of my sisters who lost his arm years ago in an accident.  One-armed, Willie races mountain bikes and XTERRA’s; he is an amazing nordic skier and runner to boot.  He works with disabled athletes in California now, teaching them to adapt their new bodies to their old sports.  He once described, in an magazine article, how so often, on the starting line, he listens to all the sandbagging commentary:  how people didn’t get the sleep they needed for the race, or have the right gear, or the whole host of excuses we  make for the less than stellar performance we fear we are about to make.  But what people always forget is what an amazing gift and luxury it is, to get to do this at all.

We get to do this.  I get to do this.  Many good things in life unfurl slowly, that with patience, and diligence, and passion, and belief, grow to encompass vast terrain.

Paradox:  Solitude, Beauty, and Skiing Breckenridge ….

Closing weekend at Breckenridge. Despite the backpack full of camera gear, I never made it over to High Anxiety for the Bump Buffet. Instead, I skiied all over the mountain with my boyfriend.  Laps on the T-Bar, hikes out to Twin Chutes, where there was still some sweet stashes of powder, and then, for our final goodbye, a hike to the summit of Peak 8 just before ski patrol sweep.

We knew the snow off the south side would be manky, heavy mashed potatoes, but there’s something about the view into the basin below Lake Chutes  that always appeases my soul.  I could sit for hours watching the poetry of  changing light that begins in the late afternoons.

I have a friend who gives me no end of grief for skinning up Peak 8 so often, when there is so much other, wilder terrain around. But what I love is the transformation:  those moments when the switch from a mountain beseiged by masses of skiers and tourists and boarders suddenly turns back into itself.  Something about the  immediate juxtaposition of two worlds sharpens the edges of the solitude:  when the only noise is once again the cold wind through the spruce and pine. The light edges across the basins – and the mountain seems to breathe again, settling into it’s inherent grace.