Photographer switches to Writing

Saged Intentions

bendinggrass — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:51:00 GMT

I stare aimlessly at my computer screen wondering how to direct this post. I am failing over and over again and just end up rambling on like I am now. Last night I sat down with three of my best girlfriends, bending over my computer screen with a glass of wine close by, doing the exact same thing, roaming through JPEG files on my lap top and clicking away at website domains to pull up some info on Nepal and Kashmir for them to see. "Where IS Nepal??" they asked. And that's just fine, because a few years ago I would have asked the same question. It was pretty incredible to see them tracing their fingers over India, Pakistan, Bhutan and Nepal. "OH, THAT'S where Tibet is!" Kate yelled. THAT is priceless for all the right reasons.

It's been quite hard to explain to my family and friends, back on the East Coast, just exactly where it is that I will be heading to and WHY. The other night I sat in the hot seat, my uncle, sister and brother in law beaming red eyes at me demanding answers to the endless questions that bounced back and forth across the table at which we dined. Actually, I didn't dine at all, for lack of appetite and language to communicate with. It's hard to explain what it is that I am doing and why I am doing it. I lead a very different life and speak, metaphorically speaking, an entirely different language then the rest of my family. How do I explain, after years of formal education, that I am going to go trek some shoes into regions of the World they have never even heard of OR why I am about to place myself in sticky political situation in Kashmir to get some answers to some questions I have: How can I help supply hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris, with clean water using solar energy. They think I am crazy. I think nothing of it.

A lot has happened these past couple of weeks. Logistics have drastically changed. Airlines have backed out on their word for luggage allowance, shoes have been miss routed, and when things seem to just get absolutely impossible, I reevaluate the situation and realize a disaster isn't a disaster at all but a blessing. Quite often we wrap ourselves around an idea, or a goal to achieve and THEN, we plan out exactly how it's going to happen. I laugh out loud at that because that plan almost always fails, due to expectation or just plain foolishness, to think that WE can plan all the beautiful details. We may chose to have an experience, but the journey that takes us there is not ours to control. Choosing whether that experience or journey is positive or negative IS ours to control, but to try and control the journey will just leave us feeling drained and disappointed.

So I guess this has turned into a post about expectation, control and surrender.

The other day I was on the beach with a friend, a soul sister of sorts, and we often get together once a year and do a "sage intention" ritual. The ritual is to consciously contemplate the things that have gone on this past year and to recognize there are things we will need to let go of in order to grow. Kind of like cleaning out the closet but different. We let go of ex boyfriends, negative and old thought patterns, bad habits, etc. Things we would like to let in would be things like love, abundance, peace, laughter and such. We individually think about our specific intentions and write it down on separate pieces of paper. We then speak it out loud to each other, validating it some how, and wrap them together, tuck in some sage and burn it. Sound hippie enough to you? I think so.

A big process of the journey is to surrender to it; have a goal in mind and then surrender. It's almost like writing a "Christmas list" and handing it over to the universe, God, guru, or temple of worship, and say, "Here. This is what I want. Figure it out. Make it happen. I'll be open to receiving it." My Christmas List has just a few things including shoes, safe travels, lightness and laughter. The shoes won't get to their final destination without safe travels and lightness wouldn't happen without laughter.

Over the years our list of intentions grow smaller and smaller, more concise and less specific. BUT to have an idea of what we want and what we don't want allows us to focus our energy on making the things we want happen, and the ones we don't, well, we don't focus on those and they just end up turning into the wind. We are growing beings, ever evolving, and constantly changing our minds and our thoughts. It's important to be ok with that. To not judge it but to accept it and surrender to it.

I surrender to the fact that I am difficult to understand; in my families eyes. I surrender to the fact that this journey is NOTHING how I imagine it will be. I surrender to the fact that my life, as beautiful as it is, will have it's own agenda, rainy days and closed doors. But it's in those times that I will have to get out my map, trace my fingers along some lines, and create a new plan, one that will most diffidently stay liquid.

I am going to leave you all with a glimpse of my intentions.

Lose fear.
Welcome in possibility.

Let go of Loss.
Let in abundance.

Release used up tears.
Gather in laughter.

Create the grandest expression of yourself.
Inspire other's to do the same.

A SERIOUS Maya of Life

bendinggrass — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:49:00 GMT

The appreciation that these Tibetan people eluded was incredible. I have never felt so at peace and so grateful for their hospitality during the trip. My guide Tsering Passang (shown in red and blue jacket) was incredible and although we both lacked each others first language, which proved to be a huge emotional headache at times, he provided outstanding assistance in guiding me to the people who needed our donations the most.

this is the reason why Upper Dolpa was our destination

altitude sickness on one of many 17,000 ft passes ( these three photographs were provided by http://www.solbeam.com/ because she rocks and my camera broke)

I have just recently re-emerged from "the upper dolpa" as I call it, with a fresh new perspective on life and just straight up love for it. The time in the mountains rocked me to the very core and it's just too hard for me to explain how that happened, and I am sure you will learn of it more in my future posts. It's taken some days to get back into civilization but it has been all too easy to eat anything but dal bhat and enjoy simple things like calling friends and family, telling them that I love them, catching up over e mail, and reading about what has been taking place within the rest of the world while I was lost in my own great nook of it. A nook that now holds all of my fears and dreams in the cracks of the dirt, roaring rivers, and spirits that guard each pass.

You know you have shead some serious layers both physically and emotionally when you stroll into town, ask for the nearest international phone, and call home; caked with dirt, hair mated to my head, trekking pants being held up by an extra shoe lace, and my emotions SO raw that tears strolled down my face as soon as my sister and mom both answered the phone 5am east coast time. "I am out, that was the most difficult and scary thing I have ever endured. I messed up my ankle, but I am fine. I am changing my flight and will see you in August. I love you." was pretty much all I could muster up and say before the connection was pretty much lost within a crackling line and 15 Nepali men eyeing me like hawks.

And while there are just too many stories to get lost in on one post, and this might excite you, I have decided to update more frequently with hysterical and emotional dailies of sorts so that you can feel like you yourselves were on the roller coaster of a journey.

I am still recovering from a retched bout of food poisoning, which by the way I got our first day out of the wilds and into an actual "town" which was more like a village gone mad and trying to become a town. Electricity and cellphones, refrigerators but still cooking on a clay oven using fire. Tibetan based hardboard beds and National Geographic on TV. Yeah, National Geographic TV, is in a village in Lower Dolpa. It was nice though, red bucket to my right and a NG special on rare alligator species.

Please stay tuned for another "story" in a day or so.

Same Same BUT Different

bendinggrass — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:46:00 GMT

I hate to say it but I A. don't have their names and B. I can't tell if the computer made these photographs too dark or I did. Either way, will modify them when I can.

At the very beginning of my trip I noticed, and wrote an earlier post about it, my lack of motivation to photograph the people that covered the streets of Nepal. The lack of motivation wasn't actually due to physical stamina, although I wish it had been, but by the overwhelming guilt that I had for the richness of my life AND the severe poverty that lingered around every corner and crack that I came across.

In those around me, I was painted with an air of wealth and instead of my usual roaming eyes, they stayed secure to the ground in front of me. Roaring with sadness and helplessness I turned off my camera and hid it in a bag in my hotel room. For over a month both camera and heart remained in hiding. Partially due to malfunction, the obvious of what happens to a camera when it sits in rainwater for a night in a leaky tent and partially due to the hardness that took over and the walls that I built in order to keep my tears under control.

No matter where I stepped or what road I traveled down, my pant legs and arms were tugged at by little hands covered in dust and sticky with sweat and fruit juice. They roamed the streets eager to find a foreigner with some extra rupees tucked deep in their pockets. I was once convinced of buying a tattered book after I had stupidly asked to take a look at it while my cab driver sat in traffic. A book that turned out to be fairly interesting but seemed to be lacking pages 130-172 and then consistently being out of order there after. By the way, I highly recommend bypassing buying books from kids selling them in the middle of street lanes, during rush hour traffic in Delhi. While I got accustomed to over tipping rickshaw drivers and buying extra bananas at the local veggie stand so that I could hand them out on my way home, I never could get accustomed to my lack of eagerness to sit beside these people and learn of their stories. And no matter how many times I walked passed the same person on the street to say namaste or give away some food, I never quite got the courage to take their photograph.

Present Day.

The same three smiling men walk or hobble up and down one main street in Dharamsala, India. I walk by them daily in my mad dash to my Thangka painting class. The first few times I smiled, my hands to my heart, bowed, and not out of character, kept my eyes to the ground. The next few times I would walk by them afraid to dig through my change providing either too little or too much of what I had. The other night I knew I had a bill of 500, ran into one of them, told them that I would find them tomorrow, then felt guilty and ran to the nearest store to grab some smaller bills and chased him down.

Today I took a seat next to two of them, names of which I will have to add later, my Hindi isn't the best and I say that with a smirk. There were onlookers and those who didn't notice, but we slowly began talking a bit about their conditions. One, a man who loves to talk to you in Hindi even though he knows I don't have much concept of what he is saying, I can read his gestures. In his broken English he told me he has a little boy of six years who attends school and is looked after by his mother. His hands have been filed away to near stubs as his feet showed the same condition. Leprosy is his genetic curse, a disease that often casts one out of society and leaves them fending for themselves in the street. It's been 11 long years.

The other man had to have his leg removed when he was 24 years old. He was hit by a truck and a very old prosthetic hitches on to the very top of his left thigh baring the little he has left. He is 39 years old. The third, of who I have yet to get his full story from, I find out, had polio at a young age. Bow legged and large square blocks as feet, he moves unsteadily on his crutches. A tin can is always clutched in one hand along with a beautiful crooked, toothless smile. Unable to open or carry an umbrella when the monsoon rains fall, he moves quietly drenched in downpour. He is the one that moves me the most. Hearing their stories I nod in apology as If I had something to do with their misfortunes and then we all nod together in understanding. Such is life.

Feeling like I had just made some friends I asked to photograph them, explaining that I write about my travels and the people I encounter and that I would like to write about them. I told them that once it was up on the computer I would take them into a Internet cafe and show them the "article". Which I still plan to do. The photographs are haunting and graceful. Full of laughter, sorrow and sometimes awkwardness of the camera that seeks to capture something no words or image could capture. (I provided you with a few, there are more in my care which I may or may not share with you.)

I do not have missing limbs and do not need to beg for money on the street, but there is a saying here in this part of the world. "Same same. But different." We are all the same experiencing this life but no doubt in different ways. We have ups and downs, joys and sorrows, mothers and fathers who are still with us or who have passed on. Children in school, brothers and sisters in different towns or on different continents.

If one looked at some of the photographs of these men they would see two ragged beings, mangled limbs and begging for a better way of life. But if one would just look a bit longer, a bit deeper, they would see a story of two beings that are very much like everyone else. We all have a history, a story that goes along with the life that is present. I no longer see poverty and mutation as sad or even hard to look at. These men have made me see the absolute beauty even in all of their pain. They smile with each other OFTEN. They collect money for their families, for their children's education and more food on their plates. And while I once thought that I could never even begin to make a difference within the lives over here, my eagerness to ask them questions and to sit with them, to not just throw them some change but to engage with them, has made all the difference in the world. They have a story to tell and few who will listen. I was able to provide an outlet for that.

Nearing to the end of my trip my walls no longer hang too high. My camera and I have reunited and my sadness doesn't take me by surprise like it once had. I have learned to fight my way around the traffic of cars that crowd the narrow streets, banging on the side to let the driver know I am passing them. I no longer jump when a jeep or bus horn blasts in the back of my head, but move quickly and unfazed out of the way. My eyes no longer search for something more pleasant to keep it's gaze but more often find their way into the soft and kind eyes that sit in contentment on a side stoop.

I can never again judge a book by it's cover. I can never again just hand out a banana or some spare change. My journey has proved successful because I have been forever changed. I have not mastered, but understood that underneath all the pain still lies the beauty and while pages often go missing the overall story stays the same.

Uploading My Life

bendinggrass — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:44:00 GMT

Uploading photographs on a slow Internet connection is kind of what it feels like to be in my head right now. I have tried to wrap my hands around the life that I have been living the past year. Kind of like the way a piece of seaweed clutches to sticky rice. The rice being the experience and the seaweed my hands..... the experience isn't sticky enough for my hands to grasp, nothing has settled, and so everything just kind of hangs there, uncomfortable with the obvious.

I now sit in a small, white, rocking chair out on open marsh land in St. Michael's, Maryland. The Chesapeake Bay stretches across the horizon, my lap top stretches across my exposed thighs. Fireflies latch on to my obnoxiously bright screen and little itchy red bites forming around my ankles due to the beloved mosquito. I upload my photographs like I upload my thoughts and every now and then the connection shows four bars instead of one, and then all is lost. My reality is all jumbled up in a field of wild flowers. It smells beautiful, it looks beautiful and it is beautiful, but by the gift of chance.

This is my life. The photographs posted happen to be part of it and the only thing I can share with you during my one bar time.

ma jut.tah li.nu Dolpo

bendinggrass — Tue, 20 May 2008 19:54:00 GMT

little girl and her grandmother, or so i guess

Ma jut.tah li.nu Dolpo literally translates to "I shoes to take Dolpo" which I proudly taught myself this morning. This is what I will tell people when I am asked why I am here in Nepal. I haven't had the chance to use it yet, although I did manage to ask for some green tea this morning in Nepali. A HUGE accomplishment for me.

i am not going to capitalize anything, as the shift key is nearly impossible to hold down. AND i was told no more uploading of photographs so unfortunately this photograph here is the only one you get to see. FOR NOW.

yesterday morning my intentions were clear. get up and write a post up on my blog. i have been skipping around this task for the past few days. a question that keeps popping up in my head, and there are quite a few these days, is, "how do i write this experience, in words, to those back home" the day before that, i took out Christina's computer and hacked away, fingers moving ever so fast, but glitches have it, i couldn't transfer the material over onto a disk, and so there i was, with a pen in hand, slowly writing it down.

and NOW, sitting in front of a slow computer trying helpless to get a post up before i have a meeting with my dolpo guides assistant, Sunil.

as i completed my walk around the Boudhanath stupa i noticed all the monks from a nearby monastery take a seat in front of the stupa. ( boudha is where i am staying at the moment, and nath, i have been told, means street) they chanted away as hundreds of candles were lit. a foreigner leaned into an elder monk, i presumed asked to take a photograph, and without a hint of hesitation, this photographer stuck his camera in the face of the monk and began shooting away. i slowly crept back behind the crowd of monks and put down my camera. thoughts of unworthiness settled in and all of a sudden i rethought my my duties of sponsorship. i don't have it in me. i don't have that kind of confidence and arrogance to stick my camera in someones face, into a people i don't understand, into a religion i have only begun to grasp, where a language and culture are my main barriers.

"my lens doesn't do justice of the intimacy that i need to capture" i constantly remind myself. i am NOT the photographer i thought i was or still hope i could maybe be. to capture an emotion or mood is to NOT stick a camera in a face, as the moment is then lost and the emotion is soon suppressed. my zoom is small and in order to really capture a persons face i need to step it up. a photograph can say a thousand words and yet nothing at all. a true photographer can capture all of the human senses in just one shot. the rest of us just as well put our third eye down. i struggle with the ability to humbly take a portrait. why? because sometimes i feel like it would be going into the slums of nyc and putting my lens in the face of a homeless person and then just walking away. even if the photograph comes with a few rupee bills, what? money for your pain? or is the pain my own to and the ego to think that they ARE in pain?

while i was sitting on these steps contemplating my situation, two very young girls came up to me and started motioning for the camera. i took some random photographs and pressed replay for them to see. i then motioned to see if i could take a photograph of them and they easily smiled and posed for the shot. a few moments later, their grandmother came over and sat down next to them. she then motioned for me to take their photograph. she asked in nepali, or tibetan, i am still unclear of which and smiled with incredible gratitude. she told her eldest granddaughter to sit still and took the smallest child and placed her on her lap., then told her friend to come and sit as well. there were no forced smiles, although i did occasionally get some genuine grins from the youngest. the "grandmother", reminded me of my own grandmother, bossing all the grandchildren around. it's quite the same here in that respect and i absolutely love it.

"su. dar" " rahm.ro" she said, meaning beautiful and good in nepali.

i am completely take by the people here. they are so very kind and are so beautiful that i lack the words to express just how kind and just how beautiful. to have been asked to take their photograph was just short of incredible, and actually really good luck, because i need to show that i am working on some level :)

tourists, come, eat, look, shop, put their arms around old monks while friends take their photograph. which by the way DID happen and i was so appalled all i could do was stare. i am not a tourist. i am in no rush to wiz in and out of this place. for now, kathmandu is home to me and home is a place with friends. i device of a new plan. i will sit and become situated with these people, finding out their names, families, and stories. i will communicate in their language and allow them to feel comfortable with me. i will become their friend. taking someones photograph is very personal and i have not yet mastered it but, if the opportunity arises, like the little girls and women on the stoop, then i will gratefully take their photograph. BUT only if time allows.

this is all for now. nameste.