Work, Knowledge and the Spiritual Path: A Complex & Simple Answer

A new zaadz friend asked me in a recent email about how I connect the facets of my life and experience, taking into consideration that in this society, in the United States of America, the parts of a person's life can largely be separate, defined by a split between some of the most important parts of the human being. She asked a simple question that had a more complex or, at least, a decidedly more lengthy answer, though that answer ends with a simple, singular perspective, hopefully comprehensible to anyone that might dare read it. I appreciated her question and realized that as I wrote my answer, it was to be a process that would serve me deeply, to recapitulate the important steps that helped define a path, a journey that I feel very strongly about and have learned to value more deeply every day, every minute that I am given the gift of life to experience it. My friend asked, ""Perhaps you can tell me more about your statement “have worked in media for over 20 years as photographer, videographer, producer, director, creator/writer and learning now to connect all of that work and knowledge with the spiritual path”. How are you connecting them all? What are you working on?" My answer became (and somehow I still feel it incomplete!): I started out tinkering with old/new cameras laying around the house in my early high school years and got caught/captivated by the chemical process and control of the Polaroid Land Camera (complete with noxious chemical packs to be processed and then put into the environment!!! YAY!!!.....?)....but I loved the ability to see a thing and depict a thing. It was another way of seeing, a way of bringing the simplicity or complexity of my world to a medium that could express it simply or with complexity to the eyes and minds of others. One x-mas, I was given a Yashica 35m camera....not an SLR, but it was my first "real" camera with which I could control exposure, do high-quality photos and get easy reprints and enlargments made...more control (the control is a recent observation about what also was going through my psyche)....I remember carrying that camera EVERYwhere....especially to high school football games where I realized cheerleaders would bounce over and ask me to take their picture....and since they were ultimately interested in the instantaneous attention and not actually seeing physical prints later on, I could agree to their requests and never have to let on that I had run out of film long ago....naive tech-head-wannabe that I was, it never dawned on my that there could have been BENEFITS to approaching them later with sparkling prints of themselves......ouch....youth is sometimes wasted on the young, I tell you....at least, it seemed to be wasted on me! But that humble little rangefinder camera got me on the road to a career more illustrious for the process of it than the professional output of it all....(con)text trumps tech every time. I later was headed to the Rochester Institute of Technology with my first self-purchased Pentax 35mm SLR (K1000, I think....great camera....classic, reliable workhorse). I entered RIT, one of the premier photo schools in the country, thinking I'd be some sort of slick, glamorous New York big city advertising photographer....so I bumbled through soft images, low contrast and poorly rendered subjects until a really cool older student named Hal showed me what the difference between black and white really was - on film. What a revelation! : ) My grades and photos were nothing to scream about unless you were my parents paying for that education. After almost 2 years of lack-luster grades attempting to be somebody else's photographer and almost 2 years of top-notch drinking, I took a leave of absence due to an abiding feeling that I was isolated from real things happening in the real world that didn't seem to penetrate my rural Henrietta, New York existence except through my constant companion, the television. I had been seeing events unfolding in the 1980's Middle East and Africa, heard news of nuclear proliferation and the odd and sundry liberal and left lamentations about racism, sexism and some four-letter words I would soon learn about - classism and capitalism. I spent my almost one-year absence from college working as a yearbook candid photographer shooting sports and school environments and activities and clubs and organizations and campus life, making lame mistakes and shooting some increasingly good photos, having cut my teeth on shooting just about everything that dared cross my path from the time I found the first family camera laying around the house. While shooting in high schools all over New Jersey (another education in itself....my decreasingly naive mind was becoming more adept at answering the question of why alot of the schools inhabited by people that looked like me happened to be run down and in impoverished areas while the schools in high property tax zones had marble bathroom-tile-shiny halls and high-tech rubber running tracks and faculty and staff that would more likely ask (and assume positively) whether I was good at basketball rather than ask me a technical question about photography, which I could have answered with glowing dexterity. Instead of bumbling around the direct answer of "I didn't make the cut for the high school basketball team because my game went to pot any time the other guy put his hands up any higher than his shoulders", I learned to say, "No, I play golf and tennis", which I did, and exceedingly better I might add, which seemed to shut them up quite successfully until they got me to my photographic destination. While on my leave of absence, I studied about the world, this country, organized a walk for hunger in my town and conceived of and advocated for an organization that would be a clearinghouse for social service and political organizations that I called S.C.A.N. (Social Concerns Action Network). Thinking back to it, it was a pretty solid idea, based on providing a central database that would allow people looking for how to connect with organizations doing socially-responsible work and political activism, a sort of liberal-cum-left-wing one-stop-shopping-center for getting important things done in the world. One of my forays to create this organization led me to Columbia University to talk to members of a steering committee for a consortium of political and social organizations dealing with subjects from gay rights to political prisoners to colonialism to the military-industrial complex. I was a cool-green wide-eyed budding pinko growing into my own suit of basic Black....and I was making sense....to these seasoned political activists....they were getting the picture and I wasn't using my camera. The idea became the king of my developmental domain. I returned to college with a renewed perspective. Instead of shooting fashion models and expensive toys of materialism, began shooting a more valuable asset - people. My work developed from photography to photo-journalism and I discovered the power of story and time and depth and pathos and ethos and emotion....and how they all connected to the silver halides that began to really come to life on my celluloid film and print paper. I did do well at shooting things and was proud of that, but my real passion became people and what they were about and what they could do and what they had to show me. I became a better student because I became a better student of the world. Alot of my work in college revolved around artists, as I was a musician, a pianist, self-taught and budding, growing also in that way in very important ways. I shot local bands mostly and had the opportunity to run film through my camera as I perused the likes of Pat Metheny (mind-blowing), James Van Der Zee and Gordon Parks (mind-expanding) and Steve Smiith (international rock group Journey's drummer, then playing with his jazz fusion band) and Cabo Frio (me-validating), an uber-popular jazz-fusion band from Rochester for which I shot their first press package which showed up in the hands of the first radio station DJ in Boston I called to request a song by them off their first nationally-released album. Nice. While in that second thrust through college I took an intro film class taught by Martin Rennalls, the father of Jamaican film. This film-guru taught me things that I would never forget and would consistently teach to my video and television students 20 years later. Dr. Rennalls was a passionate teacher that knew one well if he knew his own name and culture - he knew how to use that speedy succession of still frames (24 per second to be exact) to communicate deep meaning in things and people and how to manipulate those meanings through basic, functional, creative shooting and editing. He taught me to use vectors and motion and framing to make things that were static in the frame come alive when the film gate began its clattering aria, taking the viewer on a trip that they could not have taken without me. And the moving image bug had bitten - and hard. So I left school with a virtual major in still photo, a minor in film and video and degree in understanding that there were more important things in the world to communicate about than objectified women, expensive classist crystal and blood diamonds, but those objects would figure deeply into my later work and personal development. I went to work in Boston as a photo-assistant freezing the photographer's grapes and mopping up liquified-horse-manure-insulation that rained down into the studio in spots when the weather turned precipitatively moist enough outside. Continuing to learn much on my path, I began to put the foundations on the video and photography company that I had created in my mind (and often bragged about to one of my now oldest friends) during college, Blue Falcon Productions. Blue Falcon Productions, finally staffed by me and 3 other image-makers and business people, created images for people in the arts and social-service organizations. As the arts funding got sucked dry from the federal to the local level, we focused more and more on corporate work and writing and creating for television, all the while vowing to keep our ethics and never to sell out our values to a system that would always ask the highest technical quality, but allow the human element to be compromised at every turn. Our work included environmental organizations, groups providing services for adults with developmental disabilities, organizations that gave starts to young entrepreneurs and....well....Exxon. We did the first promotional video for a company that may have produced the first commercially available lap-top computer. Wow....I couldn't believe a printer could be that small! Financial ups and downs left the company flapping about from client to client. I then followed that pattern going from job to job from time to time as I began a process that soon became known to me as teaching. As a business-person, it was standard practice to, at least, think of giving back to the community. In the process that desire to do so I met a man who was busying himself with organizing a youth group called Simba Wachanga (young lions in Kiswahili). I came on as a co-coordinator and took on the task of leading activities, teaching African culture, civil rights and African (continent of and in America) history along with concepts of self-esteem, responsibility, community and politics. Much of my learning curve was arcing just ahead of they boys’. I was steeped in library books and a growing collection of my own. The name of the organization plunged me into study of the Kiswahili language and ultimately Swahili culture. The interplay of parents, children and locale (Northeastern University) gave rise to a growing political and cultural awareness that would never go back to its earlier state of dormancy. An African political party conceived by Kwame Nkrumah had a chapter organizing on the campus and its leaflets planted seed and found fertile ground in my mind from which a staunch Pan-Africanist/socialist grew with a quiet ferocity that made my friends often bristle and throw up their mostly silent defenses. My clothing changed from denim blues and cotton reds and sneaker tans to liberation flag greens, Garvey shipping line star blacks, Kwanzaa vibunzi (corn) yellows and army boot blacks and blood of my people’s struggle reds and military-issue BDU pants blacks (notice the trend). I continued to shoot stills and video for private clients and social organizations doing community work and political organizing throughout the 90’s, even after moving back to New Jersey where I worked as an assistant teacher in special education schools for 8 years, working often as audio/visual coordinator, shooting stills and video for the schools, setting up TVs and computers, but learning more and more about the stigma put upon these teenagers that I worked with for so many of those years, all of which were very much normal teenagers and truly great human beings in their hearts, but they couldn’t make change, or tie their own shoes or hold a cogent enough conversation about the weather to make those around them think that they were as human as all the other “normal” people around them in business suits, professional uniforms or those riding the longer busses to and from school. These young people changed my life and taught me what was necessary, not only for special education, but for ALL education. My life was many lives squeezed into almost one - a political life, a professional work/educational life, a social life (not my most robust), an independent work life (tutoring private students, some of my most rewarding work to date), an artistic life creating music, a communicative life doing video and photography - and all these lives seemed separate, disparate and disjointed, all seemingly having different goals and philosophies and methods, but seeming also to have an undercurrent that defined a thread of unity within and through them all. In one way, I was going crazy...doing a million things and having no way to keep them all intellectually or emotionally under control (there’s that “C” word again, remember that?) enough to be able to call it MY life. I was living a number of lives for a number of reasons and oddly, ironically and/or perfectly enough, it was those runny-nosed, professionally-underskilled, socially-underprepared and spiritually advanced teenagers in those “slow” schools that gave me the perspective and the awareness of the undercurrent, the life flow, the spiritual base that would make all the seemingly disparate parts of my life and lives come together like never before. Those developmentally disabled young men and women (and most of them deserved that advanced human degree of womanhood and manhood) reminded me gently, loudly, consistently and completely that every human develops with something very basic and fundamental, without which, we grow up incomplete and truly, deeply disabled in our ability to conduct ourselves and humans becoming better humans becoming deeper spirits - other people. They reminded me that culture, the understanding of which was borne out of my work with Simba Wachanga and my African political party work, was vital to human learning and growth, like soil to a sapling that gets fed through its agri-cultural environment and also contributes to it with its falling leaves and vibrant fruition. They reminded me that education was fundamental and intrinsically simple - for everyone - AND that it had unbelievably complex, powerful and undeniable consequences and gifts for the world. They reminded me that communications, along with mass communications, were important enough to be a focus of attention as they carried the heart and soul, the text and context, the intellect and genius, the essence of the people that used, consume and understood what meanings were given life by the process of communication, the life blood of any people, or humankind. The journey I had taken from the time of my leave of absence from my own initial higher education to my golden years in special education had fused my separate lives into one. I knew I had to use my skills in education and communication to bring people forward to their old, yet renewed understanding of the importance of community, culture and humanity and the repercussions that that enlightenment would set in motion, a liberating, spiritual force that is yet transforming the hearts and minds of people in this country in beyond. I was able to envision one life for myself that supported my social life and growth, my personal political and spiritual awakening and allowed for a rich and rewarding professional life that would ultimately bring into focus all of the other parts of my life, creating a unified concept that I could express in multiform manner, a perfect example of unity in diversity in unity with the world that is, with the Spirit that is, with humans as they are and can be. TV is not my constant companion as much as my tool for engendering conversation about the intricacies of human relational dynamics and environmental awareness (and as a Cultural Media Literacy educator, my favorite whipping post). Photographs, many of which these days are of water (which I am connected to as a physical human and as a member of the Water Clan as given life by the Dagara of Burkina Faso), serve as a technical platform for spiritual images, meaning and work (volunteering as a water quality monitor for the Mystic River Watershed Association) that I do in the world, for the greater good of all. My music, expressed as a sound healer or a member of the improvisationnal band, Improvelocity, is a form for healing and rejuvenation. My teaching (in higher education and in other less formal ways) is a means to share the composite of all the learnings that have been created for me by a universe, by Spirit that loves me and wishes to let every other human that doesn’t yet know it that it loves them, too and that that love is to be communicated in every way possible, at every moment possible and that there is no room for words, actions, processes, ideas and structures that hurt and damage people, that strip cultures of their interdependence or that separate us from our essential humanity, our human nature and that nature that gave rise to and constantly supports our life and growth and enlightenment, that inspires us, enlivening the breath that animates us, inspiring, in spirit, in the constant flow of love that was set forth by the first ripple in the river of life that flows deep and strong through us all.