In an effort to keep things light-hearted and be a proponent of adding beauty without ignorance to everything we take in, this is the first in a series of Street (Kid) Style posts I'll be doing while here at MITS. Enjoy!
Have Life & Have it Abundantly
“Your crown has been bought and paid for.
All you must do is put it on your head.” - James Baldwin
A lot has happened since I arrived in Kamulu, Kenya just two Sundays ago. One of those things includes falling off the face of the Earth for a short period of time (sorry, worriers!). There has been a lot to process already, a lot of good, and, of course, some difficulty. I PROMISE I’ll try to get to all the important stuff while I play catch-up communication this week, but for now, one word has haunted me since my arrival at Made in the Streets.
Abundance.
Solo Zion Mini-trip || I’ll Move Mountains
But from the outside looking in,
Inspiration for this post brought to you with the help of I’ll Move Mountains by Roo Panes. His other music is also roadtripfully delightful.
So it’s officially my last winter break and obviously I made no plans. After a few hours deliberation, I decided to embark on a 2-week trip from LA –> Vegas –> Utah –> Denver –> Phoenix –> SD –> LA to visit various friends and see awesome sights that I’ve only dreamed of (okay, Pinterested). So i left on a whim to see Cirque du Soleil in Vegas. It was on my childhood bucket list to see every Cirque show produced.
After missing my showtime due to traffic, being given a ticket for an even better seat for a late showtime, and thus getting to sleep at 2 AM, I got my hour of rest and zombied out of the hotel at 3 AM to make it to Zion for sunrise! My first traffic ticket, 3 hours driving, and an hour of lost time later, I made it. And it was beautiful.
I have a problem with selfies in that I’m incredibly awkward. But these locations were just TOO GOOD. So I decided to let my pride stay in Vegas (questionable?), set up my tripod, and got my shutter release good to go so I could get a shadow of the shots that I would have loved to get if I had a model with me. Oh, and I did it in my slippers.
Here are some of my favorite shots from my first few hours, which included Canyon Overlook, scenic drive, tunnels, SNOW!!!!, buffalo, ponies, and a magical fairyland of a European-esque village.
I think I’m getting closer to knowing what love is.
For the rest of the set, check out my collection: http://www.littleboatphotography.com/zion-solo-roadtrip
A Little Unsteady
Like I’ve written before, my creative mind is a marriage of music and photographs. The song, “Unsteady,” by X Ambassadors is one that got those gears going enough that I actually decided I should start writing again. It’s been a while!
Approaching real life has strangely gotten me thinking a lot about hands. It sounds strange, but hands tell stories. Every crease has a memory of a held hand, a clenched fist, a rock climbed, a piece of art/writing created. The things I love and want to build into my future– photography, ad art directing, writing, climbing, travel– seem to require a pair of decently functional hands. And what would I do if I lost that? What’s my back-up dream?
We all have dreams, and if we’re being honest, they all have the capacity to be lost. Bones break, business plans fail, and priorities change. Some of of us will tend toward safety. We will hold on to the progress we’ve made, the degrees we obtain, and the experiences we’ve built and made familiar. We will choose a lit path, the one with opportunities and a bright future. And for a lot of us, that will be our dream, fulfilled.
A lot of us will default to that plan, or try to, once we come to the conclusion that it is easier to choose the back-up dream to begin with than it is to choose the dream and risk failure. We reject the dream before it can reject us. Some of us are pretty good at convincing ourselves the back-up was the front-runner dream the whole time anyway.
Some of us will choose the dream, the mysterious path of possibility, and fail, and have to choose to persist or start all over again. And some of us will choose the dream, and find out it’s everything we ever wanted and more.
I’ve gone cliff-jumping a handful of times in my life. I want to jump, I want to be the kind of person who jumps, and I want to be able to tell people I jumped. I have always jumped. And almost every time, I’ve gotten hurt. But it’s not the cliff, the water below, or the friends cheering me on that are the cause. It’s the fact that I rush to the edge with all the adrenaline-infused enthusiasm, hesitate and falter the moment I need to leap, and in that moment of paralyzing fear, I fall. Strange thing is I still haven’t stopped.
I haven’t been very encouraging thus far, but I’m getting there, I promise!
A lot of us are on that edge right now. We are approaching the moment where we choose to leap into the great unknown or to hold our ground and continue building what we know.
We are unsteady. In that moment, will you jump or hold on?
The dreamer in me says, “Duh, jump.” If I’m ever going to be a travel photographer, I better risk being pretty broke and homeless to dive into that dream and make it a successful reality half a decade down the road. It might pan out, it might not.
The doer in me says, “Duh, hold on.” I’m not going to pay off student loans bumming around the world, and I know I will be SO happy building foundations as part of the creative advertising world. It’s everything I’ve worked so hard for the past four years.
I’m not the authority to say which is right and which isn’t. I have a shot of living THE real life dream if I risk everything, and I have a shot of living another dream if I risk little. I have a shot of losing everything either way.
My point is that the courage isn’t in the leap. It’s in the moment you choose.
It takes courage to choose to leap; we all know that. However, it takes just as much as it takes courage to choose to hold on. It takes courage to be so self-aware to accept that we won’t all be thriving artists, rock stars, astronauts, and presidents. It takes courage to commit to responsibility, to realities that we might want farther down the road, like financial support for your future children.
I have utmost respect for people who are confident as to where they are called. I have such admiration (and envy for) my friend who is traveling the world with the one she loves and taking photographs. I have admiration for the peer who accepted a cubicle job and has already started saving college funds for the children he doesn’t have with the wife he doesn’t yet know.
I have been unsteady. But I hope I jump. But if I jump, I know I need to do it with my entire being. My hope is not that you will choose to jump, or choose to hold on, but that you will choose, period. That is where courage lies. If we choose with conviction and confidence, before we get to that point where the choice is made for us, we’ll thrive.
“The dance between darkness and light will always remain— the stars and the moon will always need the darkness to be seen, the darkness will just not be worth having without the moon and the stars.” – C. JoyBell C.
Woman sitting at the University of al-Karaouine steps in Fes, Morocco - Traveler Photo Contest 2014 - National Geographic →
Full honey moon on Friday the 13th in Joshua Tree
Things I love:
Stars
Climbing
Spontaneous Adventures
New friends
Night photography
Lyrics
As you can imagine then, I was pretty pleased when Jake, Dan, Aaron, and I set out for Joshua Tree on Friday night to celebrate Jake’s birthday by meeting with 3 climber friends and night climbing during the full honey moon. We arrived at 12 AM and stayed until 6 AM. Although I did find myself, semi-deleriously napping on a rock at one point, it was pretty ideal.
I also love finding the music in my art and photography. Here are some favorites from the trip:
Photo Contest
Currently entering a photo contest and the rules state that it is only open to entrants who “do NOT reside in Cuba, Iran, New Jersey, North Korea, Sudan or Syria.”
One of these things is not like the other.
How The People We Once Loved Become Strangers Again →
Maybe it’s just that we’re all at the centers of our own little universes, and sometimes they overlap with other people’s, and that small bit of intersection leaves some part of it changed.
I recently came across this article and thought it was spot-on, bittersweet, and beautiful. This is one of the reasons I place so much value in photographs– because I place so much stock in the beautiful memories once woven with important individuals. If i ever forget what someone once meant to me, if that ever seems to fade away, I always have photographs to remind me and nudge me toward a catchup-over-coffee.
http://thoughtcatalog.com/brianna-wiest/2014/02/how-the-people-we-once-loved-become-strangers-again/
What is Tumblr
I’m doing everything backwards. I started with a photog portfolio, and figured a blog would be good to go with it. Next think you know I might even have a Twitter, Instagram, and maybe even an iPhone…
Anyway, I’ll try to keep it interesting:) Here’s something I made for work this week.