Lyrics: "Birds flying high you know how I feel,
Sun in the sky you know how I feel,
Reeds driftin on by you know how I feel" - Nina Simone
Hello friends!!!
Here we go again with the travel blogging that most of you were exposed to in 2007. As a brief introduction to what is coming, here is the summer plan (= happiness):
June 1st – June 27th – the motherland, seeing Moscow, visiting St. Petersburg, getting my passport and inheritance paperwork in order (involving weeks of frustration with Russian bureaucracy. I love Communist leftovers.)
June 27th - June 30th – visiting people I miss in Paris!
June 30th - August 30th – at J. Walter Thompson in Cape Town, South Africa. I was also lucky enough to pull of an apprenticeship with Tracey Derrick, a renowned freelance photographer whose work has been exhibited around the world. Lastly, I may be doing some photography work for Filmmakers Against Racism, a newly launched initiative intended to make six documentaries as a response to the recent xenophobia/immigration issues in South Africa.
August 30th - September 15th – Home, wonderful home
I will not have a reliable internet connection for the entirety of my stay in Russia, so you will most likely hear about that after July. And as usual, photos have been and will be updated on the link in the right column of this page!
At the moment, I am still at home, trying to settle down from the frantic process of helping my mother pack, running a myriad little errands, and unpacking and repacking myself (not surprisingly for me, with a lot of washing and ironing in between). I have not had the opportunity to let go of the anxiety of the last few months of school, and my usual tension-relieving method – two-hour long runs in FL humidity – is just giving me headaches this time. My body is not ready.
At the moment I am sitting on my back patio on an unusually cool night for May in Miami. I am alone except for my cat, blasting a play list of
Nina Simone and Buddy guy throughout the house, munching on raspberries, and moving on to my second glass of a White Zinfandel. An evening of some of my favorite things (the Sound of Music quotation was not intentional). It is dark, but the light from inside the house is enough for me to keep reading a book of collected Seamus Heaney poetry. “Opened Ground.” It occurs to me that I should probably decide between listening to music and reading poetry, since the overlap of the two seems to be detracting from the enjoyment of the other.It is drizzling. I love rain. I love cities in rain, especially, because the water punctures the rigidity of the concrete or cobblestone, affirms the mortality of what cities actually are: a collection of man-made things. Florida is a little different because it tricks you into believing that the lake in my backyard is natural and the “preserve” in the middle of it is actually preserving some endangered species of heron or spoonbill or otter, when in actuality it is just a clump of slowly growing trees planted in fake sediment in an attempt to make homeowners feel more at home in this completely ersatz “landscape.” But tonight, the rain does make it feel natural, although not in the way that certain parts of Russia feels natural to me, with fields of wheat, and mushrooms waiting to be picked in forests, and potatoes you have to dig out yourself.
On the topic of Russia, I am anxious about going, more so than on other occasions, because dealing with inheritance paperwork is actually dangerous in a country that is generally corrupt and so filled with desperate immigrants from the ex-Soviet republics, that the intersection of the two forces can easily become a black hole (without the whole absence of space thing). And I am somewhat in awe that my father is allowing me to travel to South Africa under the present circumstances of life there, especially since he looks sad and nervous to be doing so. Although I am happy to be going, grateful to have somewhat made yet another insane idea work itself into a reality (thanks largely to the generosity and kindness of many people), and incredibly excited, all of these positive emotions are somewhat tempered by the realization that I have had to wear my family down over the years in order to do so. They have accepted that my perception of risk is different from theirs and that my definition of comfort is completely worth throwing out the window if I can exchange it for something worth living through, but they are still afraid and very anxious, and I can understand why.
And on that note, I will resume my reading and leave you with a Heaney poem I like.
An Artist
Seamus Heaney
I love the thought of his anger.
His obstinacy against the rock, his coercion
of the substance from green apples.
The way he was a dog barking
at the image of himself barking.
And his hatred of his own embrace
of working as the only thing that worked –
the vulgarity of expecting never
gratitude or admiration, which
would mean a stealing from him.
The way his fortitude held and hardened
because he did what he knew.
His forehead like a hurdled boule
traveling unpainted space
behind the apple and behind the mountain.
