Outside, outside

Birds hide above me somewhere. Their song fills the green spaces like batting, like goose down in a comforter. It's morning, and the sun breaks through tree limbs and leaves, cascading like smooth-edged glass polygons. The world does not really care if I'm here. Tripod leveled on uneven ground, I'm the one who'll have to adjust to fit in.

There are no pachyderms on the horizon. There are no Acacia trees casting patches of shade beneath an equatorial sun. I'm just down the road from my house, standing on the edge of a frontage zone where an uncountable row of steel towers suspends high tension electrical wires like tightropes in the sky. But I'm outside. There are no computer screens; there are clouds.

Does the furtive chipmunk I just saw dashing from one mound to another have any place in the creation of digital media? Not specifically perhaps. Not directly. But to spend a portion of your life outside is to remind yourself about a vital perspective when so many modern careers and school activities and urban obligations force us inside. Standing here surrounded by coarse, ankle high grasses, I find the natural world gently chiding me, reminding that it will simply continue into the future no matter what deadlines our company may be facing, nor what demands our clients, or families, or neighbors maybe asking. The forecast calls for rain tomorrow, but it will rain whether there is a forecast or not. If rain comes at noon or rain comes in the evening evening, it will just come. Or it won't. Things will change, and things will continue. Deadlines have no place here.

Most days, we at 1AU spend inventing the largely artificial world of modern media. The great irony is, I love that space, no matter how unnatural it may be. But the jangling din quiets when I feel a breeze on my face, propelled only by rising convection zones from the nearby hills. It's ironic, but out here everyone clambers for advantage just as aggressively as they do in the city. Out here, however, it's a bird looking for a grub, or that chipmunk, now hidden, grabbing a nut that might have gone to a slightly slower squirrel. Fast-growing vines compete for water sources that choke off slower growing blooming plants. Aged trees send roots deep into the earth, selecting slow, strong strategies to outlast competitors.

Here's the epiphany: it's a riot of creativity. Human perspective changes like a kaleidoscope outside. On a tough day, the natural world is a seething cauldron of violence, each life form angling for vicious advantage, each disinterested in the success of the other. On a good day, the outdoors is a teeming garden of life's great promise, of endless possibility and endless variations and romantic ideals literally taking wing.

I suppose I'm a part of all this. We all are. For many minutes, I forget my camera altogether. It's my camera perhaps and maybe these few words that allow me to bring a spark of the natural world into my more typical electronic, human created spaces. But life is short, and standing here I cannot help but notice that in its most ordinary expressions, life is everywhere. Speaking for myself, I find a utility and deep value in the abandonment of all human all tools for a few minutes at least. It's good to stand still and simply be a part of the natural world, even as those overhead electrical lines remind me how much humanity in general, and therefore myself as an individual, cannot separate human history from natural history.

--MS

City, Breathing

CITY, BREATHING

Foot on the brake two cars back from the red light, I catch a flash of motion over my left shoulder. A bicycle messenger glides past at high speed like a barracuda, snapping his head left and right to see if the coast is clear. He hardly slows down, dashing through the intersection. A woman in a sleek navy suit, waiting for the light at the crosswalk, checks her smart phone with one hand. It's 6:45 in the city and the morning sun angles orange between the gray cement edifices like the day's first jolt of caffeine.

The city is its own organism. It hums, it seethes, it moves on its own power. City councils and zoning boards, police and fire departments, laws and courts and the unspoken social order that keeps hotdog vendors on their own respective corners barely begin to describe the essential nature of the city. As the saying goes, the sum is greater than the parts. Those people ostensibly in charge can only influence the works when it comes right down to it. They do not decide; they cajole. The nudge. They try, try, try. Cities take lives and characters of their own depending on endless factors, just like the history of anyone you've ever met takes on his or her character from a lifetime of influences and experiences.

The ambient jangle of cities can lull the people inside them into a kind of hypnotic, buzzy trance. It's easy to see why. If a city visitor or resident didn't somehow compartmentalize the input of disparate signals, he or she wouldn't be able to function. There would be no music in the symphony; there would simply be a cacophony of sounds, unrelated.

But today I'm sitting in traffic, absorbing the buzz differently. The barracuda bicyclist has a beauty to him completely different from the Mondrian formality of cold architectural blocks. Each car at this busy intersection is a cell in the bloodstream, containing singular, discrete stories, all heading somewhere, somewhere, always somewhere. There's salsa music coming from the truck just in front of me, there's a police whistle a block or two away, there's the drum of my own heart beat, keeping an eye on the crowded intersection two cars up.

The light goes green, and my thrumming traffic lane slides into motion. Things are happening today. Aware that I've filled my car filled with thousands of dollars of camera gear and rigging, I smile at the duality represented by the simple action of easing my foot off the brake. Today I'm here to capture some essential aspect of the living, ungraspable life of the city, an observer recording what he sees. But I am also aware that in doing so, I am very much a part of the cellular corpus that makes the city breathe in the first place, and therefore one tiny, participant reason why it's the city holds mystery, edgy promise, and endless potential.

-MS

P.S. Next week's post: life outside the city.