"...you're a crazy breed..."
I guess that was partly due to the fact that Amanda had so beautifully added that song into our yoga practice the night before (just one more reason to fall in love with her and all her Aussie-ness, if you hadn't done so already).
Coincidentally, I just came back from the Jacob Burns Film Center where I watched, dumbstruck, as Andrew Young brought us with him to Focus on Nature.
Naturally, that song began humming in my ears as I visited the bears in Alaska with one of the most captivating nature cinematographers in the world and I longed for the days when I had lived vicariously through Alexander Supertramp.
What a brilliant, brilliant man. Andrew Young had me leaned forward in my seat, smiling from ear to ear, wiping tears, and turning to my right to share expressions of "holy crap!" with my little sister.
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| Andrew in the Congo |
You know when people ask you as a kid, "If you could be an animal, would you be: a monkey or a dolphin?"
Andrew made me want to be a Salmon.
I am so overwhelmed with emotion that my fingers keep reaching for letters but my thoughts are carrying faster than my hands can capture.
Phrases from Andrew's storytelling flash across the empty space in front of my eyes...
You have to inhabit their world.
When you get down to the level of the animals, you can become involved. You can involve the audience.
The elders are the experts.
Conservation.
Outsiders came in and captured this amazing footage and then it was brought back to their homes and shared in their lands.
She allows herself to die.
What lives right around us, takes a little more effort to see.
We assume we already know.
Beautiful things happen often; perhaps when we are not looking, perhaps when we are asleep, or perhaps we don't look.
Any other Peace Corps volunteers out there saying, "Cabal!" along with me?
I have to smile when I think back to my conversations with my older sister about storytelling; about putting a face to things and the ability to create feeling. I have to smile when I think back to the storytelling session at a recent Think Lab I attended with Coburn Ventures. I have to smile when I think of tonight's closing remarks about the beauty of storytelling and how storytelling is "how we participate in life".
Andrew Young is brilliant in so many ways, but it is his honest nature, passionate perception of life and exquisite ability to make you a Salmon that makes him incredible.
I have spent some of my days in nature; I, too, have explored the bat caves- none with airborne rabies or 4 feet deep of feces, but I had my own adventure in it's own, (now very adventure-less-feeling), way. I, too, have swum with sharks, but have no footage to prove it...and again, I'd now rather swim with the salmon.
But I have learned so much tonight through the eyes (and lens) and stories of Andrew. I am inspired to learn more.
The night ended before I got my chance, but I wanted to ask Andrew Young afterwards:
When and how did this become your life?
Did you ever feel tempted to let go of your passion for a more practical life?
How has nature and the animals changed you?
You said, "you realized you had to get down to the level of the animals"... (Integration)...
His ability to story-tell was such that you were so living in his moment, there alongside the beaver and the wood ducks, the salmon and the bats, and you could also internalize. You could feel in such a way that you could relate.
I thought of when I last had that feeling. I still find it often, but not in the way that it stayed with me while I was in El Salvador.
It was there that it really hit me one day, no one will ever get it, neither they nor I, nor the rest of the world, if I don't become a Salvadoran. To know something, you have to get on it's level.
And so, as Andrew Young made me a salmon, El Salvador made me a pansita-bearing robust lady, a tortilla-maker, a "va-pues"-speaking local and a hardworking empowered woman.
And if it weren't for that, I would, in no way, today be able to share with you the life as it is below the border. I could not speak honestly about a day in the life of the thumb of Central America. I could not ask you to support me/us in the ways you have because I would not have known the way.
There is so much truth that we don't know about the world. And seeing a bit of it, only awakens us to how much we hardly know at all.
And so, you are humbled to the fact that the world, nature, the animals- have so much to teach us.
Do you have any idea how a Salvadoran woman can balance a basket full of vegetables upon her head as she walks barefoot down a pebbly-road, while keeping track of 6 wandering children?
Do you have any idea how a bat can recognize her one newborn child amongst millions of identical babies, trapped in a black cave? Do you know what it means to breathe the life force of a Salmon as it attempts to cross the treacherous bar of the stream? Do you feel the valor of a one-day-old wood duck, as it leaps fearlessly from a 70ft tall tree?
Watching that footage- how inspiring, how humbling, how truthful.
What beauty, understanding, inspiration and information the natural world has to offer.
Yet often, we're not looking.
Or, worse yet, we are killing the fern that feeds the flies, as we burn them with our cigarettes. We have wiped out the beaver in southern New York, as we skin them shamelessly for fur. We have given cancer to the salmon of Canada, as we poison the streams with our chemicals.
"Lead a more curious, observant life," he said.
And I namaste'd.
Maybe if you can see the treasure that is all around us, you will start to reap it's gold.
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