G. Steve Journal

Try To Imagine

There are as many reasons that humans feel the need to express themselves creatively as there are humans, but one significant one – to try and create the world we wish to live in – was described in very real terms by writer Mohsin Hamid as an antidote to the anxiety one is likely to feel in a place like the Middle East:

And for me, writing books and being, you know, someone who's politically active is part of that. I don't want to be anxious on my day-to-day life. I want to try to imagine a future I'd like to live in and then write books and do things that, in my own small way, make it more likely that that future will come to exist.

[via]

Just Do It

After viewing the incredibly well done documentary "I Am Another You" I wanted to learn more about filmmaker Nanfu Wang and found this posted on her website:

My company is called A Little Horse Crossing The River, and it's from a story that my dad told me when I was six or seven, and he passed away when I was 12. So in my whole life, I always wanted a father figure that could tell me, "Hey, this is the right thing to do," or, "This is the wrong thing to do." But I never had that. But the story he told always stayed with me.

The story is about a little horse, and one day the mother horse asked the little horse to go across the river to get something, but the little horse had never crossed the river and he went and came back in a few minutes and the mother horse said, "Did you get the thing that I asked you for?" And he said, "No, because I didn't go," and the mother went, "Why?" And he replied, "I got to the river, yet the squirrel in the tree yelled at me and said, 'You will drown in the river, my father even died, it's so deep,'" And he stepped back, and the buffalo in the river said, "No, no. It's okay. You can cross easily. The level of the water is only at my ankles."  And so he didn't know what to do and he came back to ask the mom.

My dad told me, "Lots of people will tell you advice based on their own experience, what they think is right. And oftentimes that advice would be contradictory, and you only need to try it yourself to find it out." And I felt that was true with every stage as I was making the film, because from pre-production to distribution, you get all the people's opinions, and I feel you need to follow your heart and just do it and find it out yourself. That's my advice. 

 

Hold Onto This

Recently listened to a fascinating interview on the TED radio hour with music director and conductor Michael Tilson Thomas.  Towards the end of the interview, he reflects on the powerful emotional response that music is able to elicit and his observations made me wonder if the desire to preserve a treasured moment is perhaps the basis of art.  It certainly describes the feeling that compelled me in my attempts to capture the stunning natural beauty of the Shawangunk Ridge:

Very often when people experience something which is profoundly beautiful, which seems to be right on the edge of the highest perfection one can imagine, that they have this experience of tears coming into their eyes — maybe they’re smiling but they still have tears in their eyes. I’ve always asked myself: “Why is that?” And I think it’s because in the contemplation of something that is perfection, that something in our mortal nature says, “And this can’t possibly last. As much as I would like to hold onto this and be in it forever I know that that can’t be so, so there’s this sense of loss and some kind of underlying sense of longing, of wishing one could somehow hold onto it or be assured of returning to it.

[via]