Okay, so someone i don't know too very well but who I liked ENORMOUSLY, instantly, who was doing some filming for our Homer project in NYC, Jennifer Redfearn (and who also went on to get an Oscar Nomination for Documentary Short this year for her film "Sun Come Up" about the first peoples displaced by global warming!! -- I'm still so proud...such an awesome, adventuresome person!!!) Well, she posted this link on Facebook of another photographer's life work:
http://mediastorm.com/publication/african-air
It's beautiful and stunning. Oh the lives some people lead!
And how I perish to go to Africa! I think it is really the one thing I MUST, MUST do before I die.
I'm aiming for India in the short-term - also a place I must see.
But Africa (I'm not including Egypt here though that took my head off)... MUST, MUST get there before I die.
I should probably go sooner than later lest I get swept up in a hurricane:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcVrjktrJJw
um... that's in Massachusetts! - Harold Camping you might be right after all.
Anyway - I digress on my digression.
What blew me away about the Africa film was not just the extraordinary footage but... the guy! George! I almost, almost became his personal film/footage organizer in his home in Glen Ridge, NJ. He seemed very cool. Had a lot of recent photos of camels he had to climb giant cliffs and caverns to find in some remote part of Northern Africa. I'll try very hard now to remember why I didn't take that job..
Why didn't I take that job?
Maybe I just wanted to shoot, not sort.
I don't know.
I don't know if my life would have been very different. Yes. Who knows in what way?
I do know that I miss - more than anything - how you could just MEET people in New York who would offer you spots like this, who were ALIVE like this.
Another very thoughtful New York friend - was, after the Haiti earthquake, flying to florida and decided to go to Haiti right then and there - with that tank of gas - to help and has been involved there ever since, building schools, gardens, lives, hope ... Helping. Stunning. A case of sudden, intense and lasting incredible, tireless benevolence. http://www.wingsoverhaiti.org/Who_are_we_.html
The point in all cases (hurricane not included): do what you love, share what you can. Live.
Keep waking us up, over and over and over, to beauty with extraordinary effort and resilient vitality.
Role models. Powerful, kind and driven. Lives not wasted.
Truly: good work!
