For the full story, click here to go to my blog post.

Short and chockfull of images for August!

More in September (tomorrow actually!)

Reduced to numbers when trying to communicate, she tried her best to navigate her days dealing with life, people, society. Using facial expressions, gestures, and body language, intermingled with a few numbers worked ok in person. But written communication only went so far with numbers and emojis.

Her brain didn’t forget letters or sentences, but the neurocognitive process that translated words from her brain to her mouth and hands had experienced a sudden, critical, and fatal error. And using a keyboard was no exception. Her fingers simply refused to type letters and truly unbelievable, punctuation as well. Cutting and pasting words didn’t work either. It was if her body cut itself off from this part her brain and she’d been abandoned to think and only think without the relief of expression. Reality may only be in our minds, but not being able to use words made her everyday life an excruciating game of trying not to look inept or insane.

But she had worked out a solution, though unconventional. There are 26 letters in the alphabet, so each letter does have a corresponding number. And the number zero, could represent a space between words. Of course punctuation was still a sticky unsolved issue, but given that she’d been struck dumb only last week, her solution seemed like a good one. She would’ve given herself a thumbs-up if she already wasn’t sick to death of doing this in texts, emails, and of course in person.

“Large vanilla and citrus spice cappuccino.” the barista called the order a second time. She raised her hand, remembering she’d ordered the coffee of the day. Written on the chalkboard next to the counter she could simply point, avoiding a round of charades trying to order her usual. What a joy it would be to order her double espresso with a drop of almond milk, but this for obvious reasons, was an impossibility.

Woken up from her nervous anticipation of using her newly-formed code language, she took a deep breath and said, “20 8 1 14 11 0 25 15 21”

Her first numeric thank you. Her first spoken words in a week.

The barista narrowed her eyes. “What?”

She opened her mouth to repeat her feat of communication, but remembered the ER doctor’s expression on Monday. She had done her best to explain her sudden sickness with gestures, hand signals, and text emojis. The empathetic doctor listened, nodded, and looked perplexed, but when she began to blast out number after number, the doctor looked positively alarmed.

The doctor left the curtained space and spoke to an unseen someone wearing scuffed blue crocks. “…yes, call upstairs…a psyche evaluation I think.”

Not willing to wait around for the white coat patrol, she slipped out from the ER, walked quickly passed hospital security, and ran for her car. Of course the hospital had all her information, but hopefully they’d act like the overworked, underpaid medical staff they were and would forget about her.

So, she hoped. But for the past three days, she’s skulked a little when a police car passed her on the street or cruised through her neighborhood.

She smiled and gave the barista a thumbs up.

Back in her car, she felt too frustrated to be embarrassed by her almost conversation at the coffee shop. For three years, she’s been going there and they never remembered her coffee order, or noticed that she had suddenly gone mute - as if she was a stranger, a passer-by. Why did I keep going back? Not for the charm obviously. And that damn barista needs to stop wearing electric blue eye shadow like it’s 1986 for christsake.

She smelled her coffee temped to toss it out the window. Vanilla and citrus, this better not make me puke.

Unbelievably, the coffee tasted smooth, slightly sweet, actually, delicious.

She leaned her head back and indulged herself in a moment of pity. Aah, back in the day, 8 days ago, when the alphabet, words, phrases, song lyrics, flitted off my tongue without a second guess or thought.

She reached for the pen she kept tucked under the passenger’s side visor and wrote the number 8 - the alphabetical equivalent, h. House, homework, haberdashery all began with h.

She also hadn’t been to work. A relief for once that her boss, Dorothy, HR manager at IT4U hated talking to people and preferred texting over every other form of communication. Each day she sent a sick emoji to Dorothy who sent back a sad emoji.

Friends and her remaining family a theater-addict sister and distracted with his new girlfriend father, were used to her infrequent texts and calls, so the 8 days, had passed without notice or concern.

But she needed a break. Whatever downward spiral she had inadvertently stumbled into, she needed out.

She turned on the ignition switch and drove out of the parking lot. The gas gauge flashed orange. Well, this won’t get me far.

She filled her tank and walked into the over AC’d minimart, gathered chips, a bottle of water, and circled around to pick up three double-chocolate granola bars.

Why bother?

She tossed the granola bars back in the bin and took three Snickers bars off the shelf.

The teenager manning the register was explaining again to the very loud and aggravated customer why his discount card for the Plentymart grocery store didn’t work at Gasmart’s minimart. “Yes, we are owned by the Maxmart corporation like Plentymart. But our discount cards don’t talk to each other. Ya know?” The teenager’s black t-shirt read: OFF LABEL.

She laughed to herself. Curative or killer?

“That doesn’t make sense,” the man in the green Hawaiian shirt and matching golf shorts said. “Talk to each other. I don’t need them to chat it up. Only to give me my hard earned ten percent discount.”

Propped up on the magazine rack next to the lonely newspapers and monthly magazines sat a thick and tempting U.S. road atlas.

“You can all just go to hell,” the pot-bellied Hawaiian shirt said and pushed passed the chip display. The bags quivered but remained on their carboard stand.

She placed her supplies and the road atlas on the counter.

The teenager, with aggressively orange spiked hair but a genuine smile scanned the atlas. “Cool, cool. Buying the relic. Where ya going?”

It’d been a long time, longer than just those eight wordless days that an answer to this question had eluded her. Now, it rolled off her tongue as if it had been there her entire life.

“Infinity.”

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Super late this month but here are my two photos for you all to download.

They are both formatted to print at 3:2 ratio with a reference size of A3. However, with the new printing software at print shops, they can resize for you from 10x8 to poster size.

Click on the intertwined circle photos below to download the images from my private Google…

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I reached the edge - fim da terra - ends of the earth- known world.

This was only the threshold of my bedroom. My town. My state.

Of who I was. Long before two marriages and crossing an ocean.

Last week, a verge of a thought I wrote on paper with a pen that I can’t find the cap for.

Words thoughtfully scribbled. Saved.

Ruined by the days the pages sat next to me. Ignored.

Unapologetically.

Music.

That’s a good story.

Phrases, randomly convincing me that doodles, capital letters are full of sense.

No sense or singing are made from the yesterdays of yesterday’s words today.

Fitting.

Irony has left the show years ago.

No one replaced the witty banter.

I’ve left behind the once upon a times, remember who and when.

Aaron suggested - What if.

I said - What if we.

What if we what.

Wrote a letter - pen to paper - felt the press of fingertips against the cylinder of ink, as a palm smooths out the page.

Words press against words till the edge.

Of the page. Of the known world.

Push ourselves past fim da terra - ends of the earth.

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This month I’ve invested my time in writing and performing a monologue. I’m usually the one behind the camera, but the subject I’m talking about this month - the misogynistic status quo - needed more than words on a screen.

My words needed the power of my voice.

So today, as I celebrate April 25th, the Dia de Liberdade (Freedom Day), here in Portugal. The day when the people took down the dictatorship peacefully in 1974. The day also known as the Carnation Revolution. On this day, I’m publishing a long overdue monologue speaking out against the constructs that want to push me and so many other people out the picture. We will not be shut down from taking out the destructive status quo of misogyny.

Click below to view my Keep On Rocking Your Heart monologue. View FULLSCREEN for English subtitles.

March 8th was International Women’s Day; the night before I celebrated by attending an all women’s art exhibition, Holding and Creating Space, at Bohio Creative. The event held a lot of emotion and promise for me. I have a piece in the show, the Sjean House, a blend of architecture, sculpture, and photography, an extension of my desire to blur inside and outside spaces and blend multiple mediums.

And my House is also a part of a much larger project: A House of One’s Own. My collaboration with riffs and expands off of Virginia Woolf’s essay, A Room of One’s Own. The first seed of this idea came to me three years ago, and since then I’ve been looking for venues and funding for this project. It’s been series of maybes and almosts. For over a year, Katharine (Muse - Spark) and I have been collaborating, thinking, planning. And this year we got our break (thanks to Franchesca at Bohío) to break out and exhibit the first iteration of the project with two model-size houses.

This is only the beginning.

The idea is to grow, bring in other artists, create other (life-size) houses for other venues. These Houses of One’s Own could become a neighborhood, a village, town, city. A country? Don’t laugh - stranger things have happened then a group of women creating a country. The Island of the Amazons from Greek mythology is my rough blueprint.

This is a project of endless possibilities, an example of projecting a world, a perspective beyond the madness of current events. We need to create and give voice to our ideas, perspectives, thoughts, emotions. Create a controlled chaos that is the essence of new life and negates the chaos of willful destruction.

For life to survive and thrive on earth, we need water. For humanity to survive and thrive, for life to be livable, for us to move towards peace, sustainability, and a semblance of justice, we are in desperate need of REAL MEDIA - artists, journalists, documentarians, writers, historians, musicians. We are the truth tellers of the human experience.

And all of us, all people hold emotional accountability when we have free expression and freely use it. If authoritarianism shuts down free media and free expression, we will be in the second Dark Ages of aggression and oppression. Today, we are seeing too many signs of this already beginning, with the United (fascist) States of America government offering to deplete democracy into vaper.

Last year, I attended an online presentation by the VII Foundation speaking about journalism and documentary work during authoritarian times. Andrew Cheatham, a human rights lawyer and founder of Pragmatic Panic, spoke to the power of the free media and free expression. He rightly compared the media’s influence on societies with the earth’s water cycle.

Below I’ve included Andrew’s slides from his presentation, showing how crucial the Arts and Media are to civilization still being civilized:

I do not subscribe to the thinking that we are on a sinking ship. If we want to move from where we are now, then we need to move - literally. And right now I want to move my voice and the voices of others, who need to be heard, from the backstage to the front stage. Push our voices from this stage into the atmosphere and bring a storm of words, images, music for people to hear, see, read.

What the audience, the Universal You, will think or do with our free expression, I can’t say. But the action of putting the media “out there” is imperative.

I’ve spent most of my life in the arts. It’s been the catalysts for me to think for myself, be awake and conscious of my world. My only hope is that others want to be awake, thinking, creating, and raising their voices loud and clear.

The most substantial part of living is our breath, flowing in and out. Finite, brittle. Our natural world inhales time inexhaustibly and has exhaled fires and storms, earthquakes and tsunamis, avalanches and maelstroms for millions, billions of years and will continue for millions and billions of years to come. Infinite, indomitable.

When I think of our climate crisis, I think of our societies buried, our utter distress, wildlife suffering, floral and fauna also dying off. While the earth maintains its robust blue-green facade, and channels a crusty churning fire at its center.

My friend, Veronica Iacomi, is an archeologist, and spent nearly 20 years digging along the coast of Turkey, uncovering stories of the Roman port cities and their fabrication of amphoras. The terracotta vessels used to transport wine and sometimes olive oil.

She’s told me of discovering dwellings created from destroyed warehouses and ateliers that were once Roman villas. Repurposed spaces that survived subsequent disasters, and before their “final abandonment” were inhabited by families. People, who in all probability were trying to keep the amphora business viable or perhaps desperate for shelter, had lugged trash and rubble into one of the rooms, sealed the entry, and called the crumbling remains home.

All of this history, constructed by layers of people’s lives, civilizations, dating back for over a thousand years buried meters deep. Stories raised up delicately from earth with a pick and shovel.

The earth isn’t so easy with us. When I leave my house and walk the beach, the Atlantic looms in front of me, sometimes invitingly blue but other days shutdown in a blank grey line.

I could be easily stripped from shore, carried by a rip current, drifting half alive for one or two days, a week at most.

This doesn’t leave me heartbroken. There’s so much that I hope survives a millennia of years beyond my own life - art, music, novels, ideas, stories of love and friends and family, and our keepsakes of everyday life.

The wars, the bullshit of power and prestige, the suffering of many for the vengeance of a few, and the world leaders who drive manmade catastrophes belong in prisons not government chambers, let their names be buried deep and forgotten.

I often think of how much suffering the Roman Empire caused, and what it remains today seems almost innocuous: art, monuments. Their famed military supremacy that is still held in awe by some, and though we regularly conjure up the names of Rome’s Caesars and Emperors, they were vicious at best vicious and at worst genocidal. But even this Empire had an expiration date and was eventually split, depleted, and buried.

I wish we remembered the names of the people who lived in the Roman port of Elaiussa Sebaste and made amphoras. If only we could open a book and read their personal accounts about their daily lives and dramas, hopes and fears, families and friends. At least Veronica has rescued a sketch of their lives, like graffiti scrawled on a street corner, the uncovered ruins yell to us: we lived!

The earth is going to bury us. Let’s preserve the stories of you and me, of our friends, family, and communities, with the writings, music, and art that make our lives sing.

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After reading ’s moving dedication poem for her dog, Gracie, I reflected on my own unfinished writings. My years spent with dogs in nature, has surpassed every other aspect of my life. Yet, the words I’ve written fall flat on the page, muffled by phrases and figures of speech.

The expression of my love for dogs and nature resides in the being - if writing is to remember so we can forget, then I’ll never write the word dog again, never write forest, ocean, desert, mountain, ever again.

To tell you more than I have will risk the core of my memories.

But I will tell you three secrets.

If you’ve ever dived into the power of a crashing wave, to be jettisoned and deposited on the sandy shore, you know why dogs occupy so many of my thoughts.

If you’ve ever felt the warmth rise from a woodland trail, during a summer hike, when the pine needles sink underneath your sandals, you understand why I spend so many hours in the company of dogs.

The next time you’re in a car, stick your arm out the window. Allow your forearm to drift and undulate against the speedy currents, notice the air pleasantly nipping at your fingertips, your skin. Now, you understand why dogs have so much of my love.

My father was a carpenter. I grew up familiar with the whine and burr of table saws, the banging thud of pounding nails, and knowing he used 2x4s and 2x6s to frame a house. Discovering the cost of a home, well, that took life experience.

The price differences between homes, whether old, new, or renovated could seem visually self-explanatory. A home’s worth - $/€5M, $/€500,000, or $/€50,000 (a low price unheard of these days), is reliant on, square feet/meters, inside and outside amenities, location, and of course the luxuries: Olympic-sized pool, gold-plated faucets, and marble hallways.

But there are hidden luxuries found in the the fundamental basics of housing, like widows for an example. Windows are categorized just like food and clothes - from the generic to luxury name brands. Fancy labeling aside, no one would think ultra-processed American cheese as having the same quality ingredients as the organic artisanal Wisconsin cheddar. Just as no one would count on a thin plastic rain poncho to keep them warmer and drier during a winter storm than a well-insulated parka. And single-pane windows are the basement bargains versus double (better) or triple-pane windows that are lux and “A rated” for keeping heat in and the cold out. But a this shouldn’t be a luxury. There is something amiss when essentials - warm homes, warm clothes, healthy food are luxuries.

And windows are such a basic element in any home that I am surprised it took me so long to understand a window’s potential as a luxury in our current (capitalist) economies.

I once was pet sitting at a mansion-like home in eastern Massachusetts, during the bitter cold days of January. I had never been in such a house, and was immediately taken back at the number of large windows and glass doors in the living room, facing the wide open expanse of billowy-white snow covered fields. The heating system was set to 68 degrees Fahrenheit but the high-ceiling room seemed toasty. I touched a window pane. Unbelievable, I thought, almost warm.

I immediately went on an internet search for the brand and models of the windows and doors. All these windows were made from premium materials with triple-pane glass.

Every house in a cold climate should have these windows. But just like organic cheese and warm jackets, those windows that offered the most protection were expensive and completely out of reach for the average person.

The windows in that one room cost more than my annual income. The people who also need to save money on heating bills in order to buy food and clothes, could never afford these windows.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Not only can 85% of the world not afford these windows, they couldn’t afford to buy a home! And most people are being priced-out of renting.

Luxury is now defined by the ability to have a decent, safe, roof over your head. And don’t think of creating a self-built home and in self-built neighborhood; it’s illegal. You’d be treated as a squatter. As if trying to build a home, because you are priced out of mainstream housing yet still need a place to sleep, is a crime.

What a shame and sham that governments and politicians call to build affordable housing units. I’m neither an economist nor a mathematician, but I can tell you that in regards to the basics of living, which includes housing, the formula is completing wrong.

We do not need to build more AFFORDABLE HOUSING options.

HOUSING should be AFFORDABLE for everyone.

How to accomplish this: We would to need to begin by limiting if not almost completely abolishing profits from residential dwellings. You buy a house or an apartment, you can only resell it for a 5% profit, this would definitely deter the developers and venture capitalists. And maybe finally, there would be home ownership for the rest of us. And if you have a residential property for rent then the rental price needs to be aligned with the minimum to average wage of the working people.

We need to put aside the old formula of:

Whatever the market will bear - we will charge.

To embrace:

The cost of living is affordable - for all.

And this would of course have to be a trickle-down effect. Triple-pane glass would be the standard not set at a luxury price. And from housing, food, and clothing, to healthcare and education, we need to create and maintain sustainable affordable living.

We need a worldwide treaty for this initiative: The Affordable Life. We already have the United Nations, the G7, 20, 30, ASEAN, and other intergovernmental blocs; let’s repurpose these institutions for the people not the profits.

If we don’t want to evolve further into a dystopian society, then we must push ourselves to evolve another way. What we have deemed as fated and human nature is false. We have histories and tendencies, but we also make choices.

This is not a dreamy initiative, but this idea can be a viable, workable, practical action plan.

Housing for all. Food for all. Clothes for all. Healthcare for all. Education for all.

This is not only doable but it is necessary.

I wanted to express my heartfelt thanks to you for being a paid subscriber. Your subscription helps me sustain my writing and my visual arts, and is a great moral support for me. To know that people value my ideas, my art, and my dedication to expression, the human spirit, and my humanitarian ideals, means so much.

This month, you can download my two high resolution, composite photos. These images were originally three photos of spring wildflowers that I duplicated hundreds of times. The vibrance of these photos always makes my soul sing with how much the natural world gives us everyday.

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But the idea of being a revolutionary by raising a gun in the air and declaring freedom with a spray of bullets is barbaric, has been performed countless times throughout history, and only produces mass graves, destruction of societies and our natural resources.

We need to survive, be alive, awake, aware of the trouble we’re in globally. As friend of mine said to me, we need to be lucid (clear in understanding : intelligible; having full use of one’s faculties). In part, this means putting aside the warlike rhetoric that repeatedly blares on social media channels, political platforms, and pulpits.

This means thinking for yourself, making decisions not knee-jerk reactions. The concept of making choices that are good for you and your family, and the welfare of your neighbors. An example would be if you had a stream that ran through your land, you wouldn’t build a dam that would stop the flow of water into your neighbor’s land. Your neighbors also need water to live. This type of action, denying access to natural resources is referred to as eco-fascism, yet almost every country, no matter their mode of government, engages in these extreme acts. Practicing conservation has little to do with restricting access; rather, we need to share resources and avoid waste and mismanagement. This and we also need to stop blowing each other up and destroying our lands and water resources.

If I put a name to what I’m referring to, people would call me a Socialist, or worse a Communist, or even more unthinkable an Anarchist. To think that people, communities could take care of each other without a gun (literally or figuratively) pointed at their heads and obey laws, is a scary proposition for governments.

I am none of these political labels; maybe if you put them all together you could call me a person practicing sanity, socialism and anarchy. A Sanarchist maybe? I don’t know. Labels are not a friend to progress, since they create boxes that people either want to defend or destroy.

But I do understand that we desperately need a new way of thinking about being a revolutionary. I grew up in Massachusetts, only a few miles away from the infamous battle of Concord and Lexington, where the colony militias fought against the British Army, and so began the American Revolution. In school, we learned about the militias’ guerilla tactics against the most powerful army in the world. The men were instructed by their commanders: don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes. In other words: Don’t waste bullets, and stand your ground.

Push this idea forward 249 years, and a housecleaner is murdered by a homeowner. Shot in the head through the front door, because she had gone to the wrong address. This is not being a patriot, this is paranoia, hysteria, and criminal. Did the homeowner think to ask, Hello? Who is it? What are you doing? before shooting through a closed door? No, and the house cleaner was armed with nothing but keys to the wrong house. The state of Indiana’s D.A. admitted a decision on whether to file charges won’t be easy because of the “stand your ground” or “castle doctrine” laws in the state.

A home as a castle - kings and queens live in castles. The American Revolution rejected the idea of rule by royalty. But history and facts haven’t squashed the ideal of living like a king or queen in a castle. This tired concept of wearing the crown goes round and round in the U.S. from the media and entertainment sectors, to big business and big tech, run by CEOs and bros anointed by the moneyed elite. We the people can’t seem put aside the idea of getting rich and powerful. Dial back the clock to John F. Kennedy’s presidency (1961-1963) that was quaintly referred to as Camelot. The idealized kingdom of the U.S.A was solidified by comparing his presidency with Britain’s most famous and fictional ruler, King Arthur.

Old ideals, even ones that no longer are agreeable, reasonable, or beneficial are hard to put aside.

But this is the work.

There we have our evolution and being a revolutionary.

But not the dystopian evolution of destruction and mayhem. We can’t allow the pushers of this human-induced crisis evolution let humanity crash. These pushers of war and greed are the same horde who are desperately looking for scapegoats to pin all the world’s troubles onto - you know, the immigrants, the aliens.

Whether the aliens are from another state, country, or continent, the stranger seems to be an easy target.

All my great-great grandparents were all aliens to the U.S., and everyone in the U.S. has this same legacy unless they are indigenous. And now I’m an alien in Portugal. Forget the suspect and targeted laws that want to make people legal and illegal, because they cross one imaginary border into another. An allegiance that people swear to, this abstract idea, holds no relevance to us taking care of each other. These are rules made up by governments to separate the people, to create an Us and a Them. Patriotism is the easy sell. Give people a flag and tell them it represents all their wants and desires. Too bad we can’t trade our flags for food and healthcare.

Since the beginning of the beginning. There has always been someone standing on a soapbox, declaring their People are the Chosen Ones. With paper in hand, they dictate who belongs and who doesn’t.

In truth, we are all aliens, drifters, immigrants, and migratory. Even if a person stays in their town or city their entire life, they become alien, because the people, the landscape, are in constant flux. The band Pearl Jam, sang about this in, Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town

All these changes taking place

wish I’d seen the place

But no one’s ever taken me

…

It’s hard when you’re stuck upon the shelf

I changed by not changing at all

Small town predicts my fate

Perhaps that’s what no one wants to see

I just want to scream hello

The woman just wanted to scream

HELLO.

Isn’t this the truth. How many of us sense the same despair as governments become more fascist (here’s looking at you U.S.A.), bully each other with nuclear testing, creating mega-deals that reward the billionaires, while starving the people of food, clean water, healthcare, and education.

We are social animals in need of connection. Person to person, no government needed.

We need a revolution of hellos. At least they are far less lethal than machine guns.

This is not a wild thought, not even a drastic shift of perspective. We say hello everyday to someone even if this someone is your dog or pet fish. Greeting someone other than your own reflection in the mirror, is an act of acknowledgment, the existence of the other.

It’s such a small gesture, greeting a stranger; the act may seem insignificant.

But one small act stands out from a sea of inaction.

A small turn of the color wheel is a revolution in color.

Saying hello is like this a small turn of the wheel, a slight movement to look at someone in the eyes, a transformation.

However, this is not a solution, for the complexities of our world. And I don’t think the world is more complicated than it was 200 or 2000 years ago, other than needing a password, with a 2-step ID process, and a reoccurring one-time code to view my electric bill.

The world has always been a mix of cultures, identities, challenges, and tragedies. People have always needed to communicate, compromise, and work together within and between communities.

If anything, the tech that has made viewing my electric bill more work, has also challenged our abilities to communicate. There are more digital channels for communication, yet less understanding. Forget the media channels, we need in person, face-to-face, feel the other’s presence meetings.

How do we get there? No sound bite and snark remarks.

How do we evolve and put aside ideals, teachings, lifestyles, belief systems that are so old they have already turned to dust?

Knowing we cannot go back to Paradise. Understanding we can’t blow everything up and start over. How can we rebuild and painstakingly restore what we’ve destroyed and polluted?

Everyday I pickup discarded plastic that the tide has dragged onto the shoreline. I bend down for a bottle cap and discover a tiny straw and a next to that are tinier Styrofoam balls broken off from a fishing buoy. In the half meter of sand I’m looking at, the amount of plastic is overwhelming. When I think about all the plastic floating, buried, being used worldwide, my brain cramps.

There are no easy answers. Plastic is everywhere, used for everything, because it’s easy, affordable, light, good for storage, and making toys, cars, toothbrushes, and whatever else you need. Plastic never rusts or breaks down like other materials. Our world is drowning in plastic, so much so that we now have plastic in our brains.

Maybe the plastic is to blame for our inability to talk to each other. But whether it is or not doesn’t matter. We need to engage in a new way of being.

To solve the plastic crisis and all the other human-made crises, we need to talk and try to understand each other first.

We must be revolutionary and think beyond our thinking and not with AI. We must use our own powers of thought to create humanistic solutions based on nature/nurture, intelligence/instinct, that encompass the communities and connections that serve the emotional animals we are.

Saying hello to a stranger may be the twitch of a beginning to do this.

“...We are without question the most intellectual creatures to ever walk the planet…We may have brilliant brains, but we are not intelligent. Because intelligent creatures don’t destroy their only home.” from Jane Goodall’s last interview

Apathy is an easy road to follow as we scroll, listen, watch, experience our world’s environmental, economic, and political catastrophes. The wars, manmade famines, genocides, fascists from the White House to Russia, the pollution and climate crisis, I’m already tired typing these words. There’s a lot to be alarmed by, protest against, so many justified reasons to be angry and downright sad, but apathy never did anyone any good. As Jane Goodall reminded us, we need act - intelligently.

We’ve all know about Jane Goodall and her famous work with chimpanzees, climate justice, and programs to alleviate poverty. She was an inspiration. She introduced and reinforced the discoveries of animal intelligence. She understood like so many of us do animals are far more savvy about living and community than we give them credit for.

Not only are they not hell-bent on destroying the earth, which raises their intelligence to genius levels, as opposed to humanity’s seemingly disregard for life. But they also in my experience forgo wallowing in the doldrums when plans go awry and unforeseen consequences wallop their intentions.

For many years I worked with dogs; they’re my first love. I knew this little Jack Russell name Rennie. She came on my dog hikes (a controlled chaos of 8-10 dogs off-leash in the backcountry of Massachusetts). But even for our forest-roving pack she was a relentless hunter. For many years, her owner Debra and on a few occasions me, chased Rennie down roadways, mountain paths, forests, parks, and beaches. Rennie, blissfully heedless of everything except chasing down the scent of her prey. And to her credit, she was never contrite when finally caught up-to and leashed.

One day, I received a call from an unknown Maine number.

“Are you missing a little dog named, Rennie?” the woman on the phone asked me.

“I take of a Rennie. Her owner is Debra, the other number on her caller.” Debra had both our cell phone numbers on the collar. Just in case. “Is she ok?” They were up in Acadia National Park for the summer.

“Oh yes,” she laughed. “But I’m not sure where she came from. I’m calling from the Jordan Pond Restaurant. We don’t open for another two hours. No one is here except the staff.”

“She must’ve struck out hunting on her own, while on a hike with her owner.” I said.

“Do you think so? The nearest trailhead is at least a mile from here.”

Turns out, Debra and Rennie had been hiking up a mountain nearly miles away. They were reunited as soon as Debra had reached the parking lot and had cell service again. For Rennie, the numbers on her collar worked like a taxi service.

This was also the summer Rennie chased a porcupine into a burrow and came out with a muzzle full of quills.

A month later, she had to return to the vet to have her left eye removed. A puncture wound from a migrated quill had severed her optic nerve. She spent a mandatory two weeks house bound to recover. Three weeks later, they had returned to Massachusetts and she was on her usual hikes with me in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts.

This photo was taken on a hike after Rennie’s surgery. Her behavior didn’t change nor did her adventurous character. She adjusted to living with one eye and moved on. Her pack acknowledged her missing eye, sniffing at the healed up socket, but they moved on as well. They were a pack, working, sniffing together.

You’ll notice the bell visible just below her collar. This is a bear bell, just so she wouldn’t sneak up one during our hikes.

This is a feel good anecdote, right? The classic: we are resilient! we can overcome adversity together! don’t give up!

But it’s really much more. My story highlights a blunt fact.

We can not give up. We need to be more intelligent and less indulgent. This is the only way to save our humanity and the nature that supports all Life.

But Jane Goodall, with her gentle strength of words explains this better, “...on the one hand you get over consumption, you get unsustainable lifestyles like probably everyone in this room including me…and on the other hand you get poverty where people, if they’re rural, destroy the environment to get some money from timber or destroying the landscape for growing some crop just to survive. And if they’re in a city, then they buy the cheapest junk food, which has clearly been made in the cheapest way possible and harm the environment. [we need to] alleviate poverty and reduce our unsustainable lifestyle[s] and have a different way of thinking about things…we need to protect this planet and think about the future.”

We can’t think of hope as wishful thinking but as an action. Goodall always held on to hers: “…if enough people who care come together and use the intellect surely we can find a way…”

Yes. We can find a path to create a sense of safety in a world that has lost all certainty. We can rebuild, sustain, care for life on this planet.

Or, as Goodall stated plainly enough, “…because if we don’t, that’s the end of our species.”

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The idea of progress has been with us for centuries. The forward motion of the road, of a life, an idea, the progressive movements to advance humankind, machinery, technology.

The time of forward thinking has now ended. To continue forward at this haphazard breakneck speed only brings us closer to devastation. And there’s no going backwards, since that would entail destroying everything that we built throughout millennia.

Put aside the biblical ideology of blowing it all up to start again. The notion of a fresh start, clean slate, a second paradise, has brought us to twisted ends. Blow up one culture to built another. Blow up one city for the ideals of another. Blow up one political system to contrive another. There is no paradise after an armageddon, only the dead and the rubble.

However, let’s think of the evolutionary process, which is much more aligned with Life. Changes according to the rhythms of life. Life as in the actually living, breathing, reproducing beyond humankind. The necessity of Life overrides everything else. Our societies, big or small, can only survive if there is Life. However, Life can survive just fine without a society.

Yet, even with this knowledge of Life, here we are on the brink of AI fashioning everything we see, hear, read, and think, the rise of authoritarianism in too many nations, the end-stages of Capitalism whose only goal is destruction for the sake of money, the building of more nuclear weapons, fear mongering political rhetoric. Here we are, daring each other to stand closer on the verge of the next armageddon, a bigger manmade disaster.

There is no such thing as a natural disasters, the world, the very earth we dig our hands into is going through it’s process, the sky we see and beyond, evolving at the speed of Life. If a storm, wave, or meteor destroys something manmade, this equals disaster, but yet a bomb exploding on a suburban neighborhood is a tragedy. As if the bombs are in defense of some great biblical principle of good and evil.

Am I being too harsh on religious ideologies and beliefs held dear to humanity for as long as anyone can remember? Maybe, but it is only because there is no time left for the minute discussions of who said, well, the book says, the prophet said.

There is only the time left for us to evolve.

The evolution is not a revolution of now, it’s a revolution of to become. The Grand Canyon, the big ditch that spans over 200 miles through Arizona, USA, is an evolution spanning billions of years. The collision of tectonic plates, merged water ways, volcanos, a land in continual slow-motion, bringing us to witness (experience) today, the natural wonder of deep land and water against swift blue skies.

When I boated down the Colorado River through the Canyon, I felt as though I was in a waking dream. Floating down the river over a mile deep from the rim, boulders seemingly glued to the walls or hanging by the crust of clay. Crevices, and caves that will never be explored. A canyon, with its history on display, is slowly becoming its future form.

This becoming is only way we can survive and to begin to thrive. We can’t dig through the stone wall; we can’t hack our way back through the forest of our beginnings. We must evolve.

We must learn to wait and live with our limitations; create from the humongous glut of stuff we’ve already made and casted away; learn how to communicate beyond the concrete spectrum of right and wrong. Allow ourselves to naturally evolve without the pressure of be all you can be. This idea of non-stop action defining who we must be.

Who would be if we actively waited? Since this is what evolving is, adjusting, creating, aligning with the realities of Life. This is not something to forecast, or predict, or study, this is to actively live Life.

Benefits for us and future generations? To be determined. Later, much later.

So far what I’ve written is the easy part, suggestions and theories of my personal philosophy and the world’s follies and ills.

The work is harder than my notions. It’s the day in and day out of questioning my conveniences, creating space away from the force-fed media upon us 24/7, and the small actions that take me further into Life and inevitably society.

Recently, I attended a conference, that discussed documenting during our authoritarian times. Sara Kontar, a photo/videographer spoke about the necessity of small actions. She is a Syrian refugee, living and creating in France. For her latest project, she needed photographs of her childhood home, but she can’t go back due to her refugee status. She knew a photographer still living in her hometown, but this person didn’t have a working camera. With the help of donations and ingenuity, a camera was smuggled into Syria for the photographer. Sara received her hometown photos for her project, and the photographer has a camera to continue her work within Syria. Sara stressed how important practical help is no matter how small the act may seem compared to the wider world.

We can only live in one world at a time. Ours.

On this same panel discussion, was a former U.N. official Andrew Cheatham, a human rights lawyer teaching and working in the U.K. and the U.S. We had a chance to speak after the conference about his own project. Last year he started, Pragmatic Panic, a think tank bringing ideas and people together to initiate creatives ways to evolve and not dissolve ourselves in a worldwide meltdown. He’s actively looking for creative thinkers to connect with and collaborate.

And for myself, I am beginning two projects:

• Creating a series of photo essays, Life on the Farm: Day & Night. Working with images that focus on sustainability and the land. How much we take versus how much we give back and the impact this continually creates on Life.

• Also, gathering material and notes for a book about sustainability and reverse migration: weaving together a history of my ancestry (six of my great-grandparents came through Ellis Island, New York City) and my own immigration to Portugal, against the wider backdrop of agroforestry, the climate crisis, and how this effects migration and immigration worldwide.
  

There are no words of wisdom only the work of creating communities in this place called Life.