Creative director, writer, coffee and conversation lover, mother to the Awesome One, proud member of the UGA Bulldog Nation. Celebrating 22 years as a small business owner. On the web: www.ashworth-lee.com. On Twitter: @Shelleyalee. On Facebook: Ashworth-Lee Communications.
Amazing photos telling incredible stories.
"In the age of digital photography, the traditional contact sheet is no longer the inextricable standard in terms of working process."
I subscribe to a daily email - "everyday. meaning." - from lifebyme.com, in which guest writers offer thoughts on the question: What is most meaningful to you? As lifebyme puts it, you get original answers, from all sorts of people, every day. The email from November 2 carried this subject line: "Set love as your default setting, your homepage." Judy Clement Wall - author, lover, cheesecake enthusiast - writes about how, in January, she made the public declaration that 2011 would be her year of loving fearlessly. So she started her Love Project. Writes Wall: "I want love to be my default setting. Not just the sweet, let's-all-try-to-get-along kind of love, but the fierce, messy, searching kind, the kind that breaks you open, empties you out, and then fills you up in perfect and utterly unexpected ways." It's a powerful piece of writing about who she is. And there are plenty more like it on lifebyme.com. http://lifebyme.com/
Last year, I had the privilege of hearing Susan Enan sing here in Atlanta, at a “house concert” hosted by my friends Elizabeth Jetton and Michael Smith. (Michael is also my financial advisor, but a friend first.) Susan is a New York-based English singer-songwriter whose novel approach to touring is to perform in intimate settings in fans’ houses. Her album “Plainsong” was described by Paste Magazine as one of “eight criminally underrated albums from 2009.” Go listen – beautiful music. (Personal favorite: “Bring On the Wonder.”) But here’s what you really should read about Susan – she gave a house concert at Folsom Prison in California, sharing both music and stories with the prison’s inmates. On the first day, she was able to listen to some of the men’s stories. One began his poem: “I was in prison before I was in prison.” Another said, after playing the flute, “Everyone always told me I was nothing. Then I came in here and discovered I’m an artist.” Provocative, powerful, meaningful. Story is everywhere. Read Susan’s blog about her two days at Folsom Prison here: http://www.susanenan.com/Index.aspx
We are born with what some psychologists call an “explanatory drive.” You give a baby a strange object or something that doesn’t make sense and she will become instantly absorbed; using all her abilities — taste, smell, force — to figure out how it fits in with the world.
I recently met someone who, though in his seventh decade, still seems to be gripped by this sort of compulsive curiosity. His name is Philip Leakey.
He is the third son of the famed paleoanthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey and the brother of the equally renowned scholar, Richard Leakey. Philip was raised by people whose lives were driven by questions. Parts of his childhood were organized around expeditions to places like Olduvai Gorge where Louis and most especially Mary searched for bones, footprints and artifacts of early man. The Leakeys also tend to have large personalities. Strains of adventurousness, contentiousness, impulsivity and romance run through the family, producing spellbinding people who are sometimes hard to deal with.
Philip was also reared in the Kenyan bush. There are certain people whose lives are permanently shaped by their frontier childhoods. They grew up out in nature, adventuring alone for long stretches, befriending strange animals and snakes, studying bugs and rock formations, learning to fend for themselves. (The Leakeys are the sort of people who, when their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, manage to fix the engine with the innards of a cow.)
This sort of childhood seems to have imprinted Philip with a certain definition of happiness — out there in the bush, lost in some experiment. Naturally, he wasn’t going to fit in at boarding school.
At 16, he decided to drop out and made a deal with his parents. He would fend for himself if they would hire a tutor to teach him Swahili. Kenya has 42 native tribes, and over the next years Phillip moved in with several. He started a series of small businesses — mining, safari, fertilizer manufacturing and so on. As one Kenyan told me, it’s quicker to list the jobs he didn’t hold than the ones he did.
The Leakey family has been prolifically chronicled, and in some of the memoirs Philip comes off as something of a black sheep, who could never focus on one thing. But he became the first white Kenyan to win election to Parliament after independence, serving there for 15 years.
I met him at the remote mountain camp where he now lives, a bumpy 4-hour ride south of Nairobi near the Rift Valley. Leakey and his wife Katy — an artist who baby-sat for Jane Goodall and led a cultural expedition up the Amazon — have created an enterprise called the Leakey Collection, which employs up to 1,200 of the local Maasai, and sells designer jewelry and household items around the world.
The Leakeys live in a mountaintop tent. Their kitchen and dining room is a lean-to with endless views across the valley. The workers sit out under the trees gossiping and making jewelry. Getting a tour of the facilities is like walking through “Swiss Family Robinson” or “Dr. Dolittle.”
Philip has experiments running up and down the mountainside. He’s trying to build an irrigation system that doubles as a tilapia farm. He’s trying to graft fruit trees onto native trees so they can survive in rocky soil. He’s completing a pit to turn cow manure into electricity and plans to build a micro-hyrdroelectric generator in a local stream.
Leakey and his workers devise and build their own lathes and saws, tough enough to carve into the hard acacia wood. They’re inventing their own dyes for the Leakey Collection’s Zulugrass jewelry, planning to use Marula trees to make body lotion, designing cement beehives to foil the honey badgers. They have also started a midwife training program and a women’s health initiative.
Philip guides you like an eager kid at his own personal science fair, pausing to scratch into the earth where Iron Age settlers once built a forge. He says that about one in seven of his experiments pans out, noting there is no such thing as a free education.
Some people center their lives around money or status or community or service to God, but this seems to be a learning-centered life, where little bits of practical knowledge are the daily currency, where the main vocation is to be preoccupied with some exciting little project or maybe a dozen.
Some people specialize, and certainly the modern economy encourages that. But there are still people, even if only out in the African wilderness, with a wandering curiosity, alighting on every interesting part of their environment.
The late Richard Holbrooke used to give the essential piece of advice for a question-driven life: Know something about something. Don’t just present your wonderful self to the world. Constantly amass knowledge and offer it around.
Paul Krugman is off today.
Great piece from NYT's David Brooks.
When we think of stories, the ones that often come to mind are the most grandiose, recounted in bestselling novels or by famous figures, or the most simple, told to children at bedtime to teach a lesson or convey some larger truth. What we may overlook are the stories of our own, mixed-up ordinary lives, which according to Christina Baldwin, author of Storycatcher, may be the most important. This ‘self-story,’ after all, defines the way we think of ourselves and interpret the sum of our experiences, and, consequently, determines the ways in which we live. She defines the self-story as the “narrative voice in the stream of consciousness that runs babbling along the edge of our awareness. Minute by minute [it] defines who we are and what we are capable, or not capable, of doing.”
For Baldwin, then, the self-story is constantly being written, but because of its complexity, the sum of its parts often goes unknown, even to the individual.
Yet what if this internal dialogue could become external? What if the story’s threads made themselves known not just to the self-story teller, but to everyone, from complete strangers to their most intimate friends, all of whom might contribute to the story not only by filling in the gaps, but also by offering new interpretations, and could use this output to make sense of their own self-stories?
As it turns out, Baldwin says that story telling (and listening) is encouraged—and, perhaps, even required—for understanding one’s own self-story.
“We understand the power of the self-story by listening to each other’s stories. Other people’s stories send us scrambling through our own story looking for correlations, similarities, or different possibilities. Sometimes we can hardly wait for a person to finish saying his or her piece because we want to share a piece of our own that’s suddenly come to mind. The stories that rise in us while listening to and reading other people’s narratives contain information and insight we can apply to our own choices.”
Here, Baldwin seems to be saying that we need each other to unlock the meaning behind our own self-stories, and that to be most effective this feedback ought to immediately follow, or even occur simultaneously with, the storyteller’s own voice.
If this concept of instantaneous updates, information and collaboration that Baldwin is proposing (back in 2005) sounds familiar, it’s because it’s already become a huge part of our daily lives. While Baldwin’s concept of storytelling may conjure images of campers gathered around a fire to receive a speaker’s wisdom, it also brings to mind a rapidly growing message thread in an online forum, a blog post by an aspiring writer, or a flood of tweets in response to a national disaster.
Like it or not, online media have come to dominate our social interactions, offering tremendous opportunity for the sharing of stories. We construct our virtual selves through online profiles, modifying them as our interests—and our lives—change over time. Major life events that were once celebrated in private are now announced (and applauded) in public. Events such as securing a new job, becoming engaged, or having a baby (and the outpouring of enthusiasm that typically follows) come to mind. We become active participants in each other’s stories, and thanks to improvements in technology these interactions are more than just fleeting memories: they are instantly documented, quantifiable and available at a moment’s notice.
Despite these advantages, it’s clear to any savvy user of social media that a lot of the noise generated online, even from our closest friends, is just that—noise. So how do we make sense of it all, filter out the junk and discover which elements are the most important to our own (and other’s) self-stories.
As social media manage to delve deeper and deeper into our private lives, new technologies aim to help us decode the myriad stories we’re telling. Storify.com allows users to compile information from multiple social networks (think tweets, Facebook status updates, and YouTube videos) to form a cohesive digital story. Check out this story on a bookstore’s live tweets of a customer’s proposal to his fiancée, or this rundown of last week’s riots in London. The power of social media to tell stories may change the face of not just our personal stories, but also our approach to journalism.
Yet the permanent record created by online media raises philosophical questions regarding the use of that information, particularly after a user has passed away. What is to be done once the story ends? According to new media entrepreneur Adam Ostrow, it doesn’t have to. What if our online content took the form of a living archive, with which our friends and families could interact even after our death? It may sound like science fiction, but some websites are making this a reality. IfIDie.net allows users to create a post or video to be uploaded to Facebook in the event of their own death, while 1000 Memories provides for an interactive online forum where people can add stories, photos, quotes, and even songs to remember a loved one. The memorial remains active forever, and so the story goes on.
The shift is happening—while we will hopefully never give up face-to-face communication entirely, we should embrace the opportunities that advances in technology present to help us construct—and give others access to—our self-stories. Says Baldwin, “This mutual inspiration—how the story that gets one person through lays out a map to get another person through—remains essential. We need the mirror of each other’s courage.”
The stories are out there. We just have to be willing to look for them.
I've never liked roller coasters. Or roller coaster days. (Who does?) But I do love good photos that capture a moment....and these certainly do.
