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3 Worthwhile Articles/Essays :: Humanity Edition

October 6, 2013

Okay, so 3 is a small number in the I’m-listing-things-on-a-blog world. But since each of these articles carries a heavy reading load, I’m stopping at 3.

Don’t let their length dissuade you, though. The writing in each is as appreciable as the story, and all are well worth the time.

And now, a little beauty for your day:

A Home at the End of Google Earth :: The one where a lost-child turned orphan finds his mother after 20 years using Google Earth. Vanity Fair, November 2012.

Venance Lafrance is Not Dead :: The one where I’m surprised to learn that many Omani myth-truths have a Haitian counterpart. And though the author does no “telling,” this is the best explanation of poverty-derived decision-making I’ve ever read. Men’s Journal, June 2010.

Pearls Before Breakfast :: The one where they station an internationally-acclaimed virtuoso in a metro station and we get a lot to reflect on. Tip: Indulge this as your reading soundtrack. Washington Post, April 2007.

Appendix:

A short film showing Saroo of the first article re-tracing his steps on Google Earth. Please read the article first. But either way, this will blow your mind.
This post is part of this month’s humanity series.

 

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Dark to Dawn

October 5, 2013

photos by Trey Hill

When I decided to explore humanity this month, I knew immediately I wanted to introduce you to two photographer friends of ours who “catch the wind” of this life regularly and invite other sojourners to see.

Today, I’d like you meet Trey. Later this month I hope to share with you his thoughts on seeing and sharing humanity (because they’re good, friends, soooo good), but today I’m inviting you view Dark to Dawn, his gallery show from this past week (digitally, of course), and breathe deep its breath. The images are from his time spent all over the globe walking in the footsteps of this organization, and they are well worth the wander.

These words from yesterday’s quote echo in my mind…

“In the history of the world, how many men and women have lived? How many moments have been seen?…”

Spend time see-ing life in the gallery. Imagine to yourself – I mean, really pause to imagine – what the eyes in these photographs have seen.

More and more I find myself a person of inaction where I have opportunity to be a person of action. When I imagine to what the poorest eyes could testify or the leper’s soul might spill, I flinch. I shrink back. I pull away. Tapping the next app is much easier than letting a miserable image hang in my mind. But if I gave it just a moment longer… who might I become instead?

I’ve included here only two photos among dozens because I hope you’ll take a closer look. (And yes, they’re available for purchase.) Wander through the gallery and let yourself marvel. Insert parentheses in whatever you’re doing this hour and spend five or ten minutes letting the living speak to you.

Don’t forget to tell me what they said.

(Check out more of Trey’s work here, and stop by his blog long enough to read this post which reflects on our visit to a teensie Omani village. Oh, and don’t miss his instagram feed, either.)

Untouchable by Trey Hill

This post is part of this month’s humanity series.

 

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Throwing Pebbles at the Lake… (a Quote)

October 4, 2013

Friday posts will be simple. The Dude and I rest intentionally on the “Sunday” of the Islamic world and I want to preserve that, even if attempting to blog every day.

The following quote is from Death by Living* by N.D. Wilson, a short full-of-life book we’re devouring right now. The author tells of watching swarms of tourists snap photos at the Vatican and reflecting on human attempts to capture the fleeting moments of our lives in stills…

In this world, there is no true freeze frame. Pictures do not escape time. But they do sit in it. Pictures are men grabbing at wind to make themselves feel less beaten by the driving current of this river. We pinch brushes to pinch moments, feelings, and . . . that thing that was just now but now it’s gone. Did you catch that? We push buttons and point electric boxes. Did you get that? And most of the time we never go back to look. I got it (I think). But we feel better, like fishermen hooking everything but reeling rarely.

In the history of the world, how many men and women have lived? How many moments have been seen? How much yearning drove how many people to paint how many pictures? To carve how many rocks? To snap how many shots?

Question: What percentage of the totality of man’s creations through all of time are now in museums?

Answer: Insert made-up number here.

Who cares? Is it a waste to grasp at moments? To try and catch the wind between my forefinger and my thumb? To feel and see and taste and touch the music of the world, to glimpse the transcendent in the simple and the simple in the transcendent, to shiver with awe at the sight of a child studying foot-pounded dust, while twisting slowly in the air above it, head and shoulders through a tire swing? To stare for an hour at the still, black surface of a lake, to marvel at the invention of water and my need to swallow it, feel it, and ride it?

I stretch my mouth wide with words until my jaw aches, and still I fail. I grab a pencil to sketch and I fail even faster. I stare at the slowly spinning child staring at the earth, and I know that if I reach for my phone, for the appropriate app, and worm forward to catch the appropriate angle, that I will not really capture this thing called now. I am only throwing a pebble at the lake, adding my little ripples. But I don’t care. I will have participated, I will have joined in the creation, like an ant leaning a leaf against a skyscraper and brushing off his forelegs, glad to have helped.

I love the way he is candid about the futility of the try-to-capture-it effort, and whole-heartedly embraces it at the same time. “I am only throwing a pebble at the lake, adding my little ripples. But I don’t care…”

Yes, yes, and YES! Live out, pour out, be here. I want this to sink deeper and deeper into my being.

You? Did anything resonate with you from this? I’d love to hear it!

 

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What Means This, “Humanity”?

October 3, 2013

In Omani Arabic, if you want to know what a word means, you say something like, “shoo ya-nee hatha, unknown-word?”. When this is directly translated, it comes out as “What means this, unknown-word?”

So around here, if people wanted to know what I meant by the word “humanity,” they might ask “What means this, ‘humanity'”?

Fair enough, because it is a word with a wide-ish range of meaning and I’m using it here with particular ideas in mind. So I might as well spell it out.

By my dictionary, “humanity” has three main threads:

  • the human race; human beings collectively
  • the fact or condition of being human; human nature, and
  • humaneness; benevolence

When I use “humanity” to describe this blog series, I’m including all of these, and then moving somewhat beyond them. I still chose the word “humanity” because I don’t know of a better English word that encompasses our shared human-ness and the infinite intersections of who we are and what we experience from beginning to end.

Have you ever seen a piece of art – a painting, a statue, a film, a dance, a vista – that hung in your mind long after you encountered it? Something was communicated from its creator to you, and that communication, for me, is rife with humanity.

No other species creates this way, or experiences created things this way. Only us. Only humans.

Have you ever turned your head and caught a scene that overwhelmed you with emotion? I mean the sort of emotion whose description is just beyond your grasp. You weren’t happy, exactly. Or delighted. Or sad. Just… overtaken with the experience of the emotion itself.

There it is again, humanity. Something of our human experience dawning wordlessly when encountering another human experience. This goes beyond “human beings collectively” or “the fact or condition of being human,” but whatever is more about it I haven’t a word for, and anything less about it will hardly do.

Whenever I see a handicapped person making their way in the world, I have that human-dawning-beyond-words experience. Like a blind man crossing the street, or a legless man working a consistent job, or a young child with half their body covered in burns. I don’t feel sad or angry exactly. It’s more like somewhere in the deepest of place of my existence I know that they are the greatest of my kind. What they will fight for in this life will make it so. And yet my kind will be the worst to them.

And at times, I will be one of them.

Humanity.

The best and worst is in each of us. It’s lovely and grotesque and simple and tricky and altogether haunting. For my part, I’m never more human than when I’m taking it all in.

And this month, I get to do that with you, dear reader. And I’m pretty excited.

Want the full scoop? Visit the 31 Days of Humanity Page here.

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Oh Dear, I’m taking the 31-Day Plunge.

October 2, 2013

I’m not one for challenges.

I mean, if you bet me I won’t eat the last cookie, I’ll probably take the dare. But big things at which I’m likely to fail? Not so much. Because I’m not much of a follow-through-er. So I make my own challenges that work with my life and they spur me on and all’s well that ends well, right?

So until this morning, I hadn’t even considered the October 31-day blog challenge (courtesy of the Nester) that so many bloggers participate in each year. I’d heard about it years past, and even contemplated participating once or twice, but I have both a focusing problem and a finishing problem and FP + FP does not equal 31 days straight of blogging.

Also, you can’t blog every day in October if you didn’t start on the first day of the month. Just saying.

But this year I hadn’t yet considered it because besides being relatively away from the blogosphere lately (my apologies to those of you whose blogs I love) and also because I didn’t even realize it was October. It’s still summer here, and ne’er a leaf shall turn, so August = September = October = November…

Then this morning I fired up Voxer to hear a few reading-group messages and one of the girls mentioned it (she’s not a blogger, btw, so that was odd), and then I came upon several “first day” posts, and then I got to thinking.

I also got scared.

This is not the month to be taking on a writing challenge. (Did I mention I don’t like challenges?) I’m going to be travelling, I’m stretching to make major strides with our business… and did I mention I have a focus problem and a finishing problem?

But there it is, this challenge, scurrying around in my mind. The main question being, “should I fail by trying or by not trying?”

I hate that question.

But there they were, topics demanding to be considered, uninvited guests of a well-over-fire-code brain party. I dismissed several feeling they weren’t really worth the sacrifice, not-so-secretly hoping nothing worthwhile would present itself so I could have an excuse to pass. But then emerged the one. The one that wouldn’t leave. The one I knew I needed to fail-by-trying at:

31 Days of Humanity

For all my far-reaching interests, I’ve discovered humanity is the common thread. Every iteration of my thinking about this blog (and the one before it) has had “humanity” in its description. I love history and languages and culture and travel and artifacts and people-watching and reading widely and staring out the window contemplating it all.

The things we share as humans,  our triumphs and tragedies, our desire for more and better and to be known, all of it… excite me, overcome me, ruin me. I’ll take 300 over Legally Blonde any day because the strength of human community and vision, enculturated and fed, the desire for glory and immortality, the temptation of comfort, and doubting it all is human through and through.

High heels and toy dogs? Not so much.

The problem with this theme, humanity, is that I’m not up to the task. What I want to shape with words about the universe and our pinhead piece of it is far, far beyond by ability. In so many ways.

Ira Glass discusses this problem in a now-famous bit he offers to storytellers but which applies to creative wannabees of all types. And his advice, the thing he implores of his hearers, is to create a volume of work. On a deadline. And another deadline. And another deadline.

So with oceans of trepidation I’m diving in. I have a few ideas, but many things will be taking shape as I explore and experience them. I’m travelling this month, after all; perhaps I’ll have a few stories to tell.

Here’s to failing by trying!

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It Finds Your Stuff?!! (The one where I’m first excited, then defeated)

September 26, 2013

A few days ago I came upon Tile, an in-development “tag” that will keep tabs on your stuff. You tag whatever you don’t want to lose track of and an app on your iPhone helps you find it.

The video is pretty smooth right? Want one!!

But as I began to pre-order I realized that, though I have to pay now, I may never actually see the product. Not because they have nefarious intentions, of course, just because “development” doesn’t always go as planned.

They also last only a year and then need to be replaced. Not my fave.

Then I saw a comment that mentioned a similar product already in production called “SticknFind.” It has different capabilities than Tile, but can do the basics I’d want from it like help me find my keys (the tag will beep, light up, or both) or letting me know when the Dude has wandered too far away from me in the Grand Bazaar.

And this one runs on a replaceable watch battery. Now that’s more my style.

But then I searched for the SticknFind on Amazon, and the reviews overwhelmingly said it didn’t work reliably!

Back to the drawing board.

Have you tried SticknFind or something similar? What are your tricks for finding lost things?

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Hi! I'm amber. And these are conversations on life, humanity, and other curiosities borne of my wandering mind and everyday life.
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