57 Footsteps
The photo above was taken in the tiny remote village of Nosiala on the southeast coast of Madagascar. Colleagues and I from Washington University are engaged in a sequence of research projects and economic development initiatives there. We find ourselves in roles and situations that are often unplanned and unexpected. Even at 57 I still like it that way.
But that’s essentially a life story. I’ve never imagined myself as the same person twice. Seems like ever year I’ve taken a step in some new direction, good or bad, to explore an untested ability or, on some occasions, to answer a siren’s song. From music to comedy writing to advertising to teaching to film making to video art, just when I think I might have found myself I see another reflection in the mirror. I’m not discontented with my lot in life –– it’s just that there’s so much to learn and accomplish.
In my latest incarnation I’m a professor of communication design and, most days of late, a video documentarian.
My latest project is called Maturity and its Muse, a complex multimedia foray into the lives of aging visual artists. Last week I interviewed Arthur, an 80-some-year-old Japanese ceramicist. He told me the story that, as a boy, he became lazy in his father’s eyes. One morning his father led him out to the yard where a lone chicken stood, oblivious to observation, to threat, to the world around him. After several moments Arthur’s father abruptly grabbed the complacent bird and snapped off its head. “Do you see what happened to the chicken Arthur?”, his father asked. Arthur stared as the headless chicken ran berserk, then flopped over dead. “Unless I keep moving”, he thought, “I’ll lose my head.”
“To stop moving is to stop living,” Arthur concluded.
These were the most affirming words of my week.
One More Breath
This Malagasy gentlemen is a tribal leader in a village that both farms and raises cattle. We met after 8 days of constant cyclonic storms. Most of his crops were devastated by the rains and were under several feet of water. The people are cut off by floods from larger towns toward the north and south that are located off the single road that runs through this coastal region. The villagers offered to help me with a video that would talk about and demonstrate fire prevention. He grinned at me through broken teeth as we took pieces of boiled breadfruit from a large age-stained bowl set before us by his wife (holding the sleeping baby). We talked, through a translator, of imminent famine, the influx of rats driven to high ground by the floods, and various other daily struggles. “But you’re smiling”, I said. “Yes, because I am here to breath another day”, he answered.
I felt ashamed of my world that joy can be this simple.
