Genesis

Sebastiao Salgado

Oh, the news, the news, the news. It's hard to watch and harder to understand what the hell is going on, no? It's all so — puny. Pathetic. Lame. It makes one yearn for a Jonathan Swift to pen a satire. My inclination is to condescend, and who will be helped by that?

I think instead I'll tell you about last night. Last night I went to Santa Monica and met my Oldest Friend Moye for an evening with philosopher Pico Iyer and photographer Sebastiao Salgado. They were in conversation, sitting slanted toward one another in two big, easy chairs. Salgado came out first and introduced a slideshow of photos from his project called Genesis. The word slideshow is actually not an apt descriptor of what we experienced on the huge screen in the theater. While glorious music swelled and faded and then swelled again, we gazed on, literally, the wonders of the planet. This planet. Animals, both beast and human, landscapes and water and clouds and birds oh the birds. After a few minutes, I felt as if my back was pinned to the seat behind me, sort of like the amusement park ride called drunken barrel, where the centrifugal force and power allows you to stay suspended, the floor drops your jaw drops and everything, everything is spinning but you're absolutely still in wonder. Yes. That's what it was like.

Afterward, Pico and Sebastiao chatted and chuckled in their easy chairs, and we listened, rapt. Pico is a slight man with a quiet voice — he was exactly like I imagined he would be. Gentle. Quiet stillness. Salgado's accent is very thick, and I strained at times to understand what he was saying. When you strain like that, you can't stop straining because if you do, you miss everything. Do you know what I mean? He speaks with passion and humor and seriousness about the planet, about our need to go back to the planet, about our relationship to all living things, about healing the planet. He speaks of the dignity of all men and women. He shows us this dignity. He and his wife have planted over 2 million trees on his land in Brazil that was decimated by deforestation. Once a paradise and then a scene of barren degradation, his family home is nearly fully restored, a paradise again. We can all do this, he says. We can do this.

I felt exhausted at the end and exhilarated.

How can we pay attention to these pathetic, lame and puny excuses for human beings that are clogging our consciousness when so much work and beauty is out there to do and behold? Let's not. Let's heed Salgado. Let's go back to the planet.

Full-Assed Thoughts and Gratitude

Enough ranting and raving. Whew. It's been a weird few days, no? I told my good friend Tanya that I've got a million things going, but I don't feel like I'm doing any of them well. I'm half-assed, I told Tanya. I wish that expression could be literal as well as figurative, but my exercising is half-assed as well.

Today, though. Today. I kept Sophie home from school because she looked exhausted. She's been wakeful in the night, and this morning I found her stretched out on the floor of her room sleeping so soundly that even as I lifted her back into her bed and covered her up, she stayed asleep. I was able to work most of the morning at my New Job while she slept into the afternoon. I opened all the doors and windows and let the sun shine inside. Glorious southern California winter. In the late afternoon, I began making dough for cinnamon-raisin bread. It was just about the most perfect dough I've ever made, white and soft and satiny and flecked with golden raisins. I did what's called a business letter fold and put it into a ceramic bowl, brushed some oil over it, covered it with plastic wrap and put it inside the fridge. It can stay there up to 24 hours, so sometime tomorrow I'll pull it out and shape it into loaves with a cinnamon swirl. Working with this dough made me feel whole and full-assed (what I am quite literally, too), and I wonder why it's been so long since I've done any baking. A neighbor came over at the point where the dough was coming together in the mixing bowl, and when I exclaimed over it, she claimed that she just never got into baking. She's an incredibly good cook, but she doesn't like measuring. I think people either like or don't like baking, and they generally have an intuitive feel for doughs and batters or they don't. I have always been a baker -- since I was a very young girl, and pretty much everything I've ever tried (bread, cake, pie dough, French pastry) comes out pretty decent. I'm grateful for that.

I'm grateful, too, for the sun and the orchid and the pink sparkly ornament from my childhood that hangs from the chandelier. I'm grateful for my friend Tanya for joining me in half-assery and for my friend Debra with whom I spent last evening. We watched a beautiful documentary about the photographer Sebastio Salgado called Salt of the Earth.* It made me glad to be alive right now on this planet, today. I urge you to find it and watch it, be transported out of this ugly old world into this beautiful world.





*Here's the link for the trailer.