Little Pink House(s)

Yesterday I was back in East London, photographing near the South Woodford tube station -- not far from where I was last weekend, actually. A group of us met and covered pretty much the entire E18 postcode for Bleeding London.

This pink house was one of my finds. When John Mellencamp sang about "little pink houses" with an "interstate running through (the) front yard," he made it sound like a bad thing -- but this little house, within just a few steps of the A406, part of the inner circular freeway that runs around Central London, is pretty great. You gotta love the pink car with the pink hubcaps.

(Then again, John Mellencamp was singing specifically about American little pink houses.)

I photographed my assigned area within E18 and met everyone for lunch ( coffee with a cheese and pickle sandwich -- the British equivalent of a PB&J -- at an economical £4). Then I kept walking northward to where I was last weekend, thus knitting together the two areas -- which for some reason made sense to me. It gave me a sense of neatness, of completion.

I've had several people come out of the woodwork lately to tell me they've read something or other on my blog. It's great to hear people are reading -- and it's a useful reminder that, yeah, all this stuff is going on the Internet for worldwide consumption. Sometimes I forget that I'm not just speaking to my little group of regular readers! (Yikes, what have I said recently?!)

Awake in a Forest

I awoke with a start in the blackness. Something was moving through the trees behind my tent.

Something big.

I lay listening, my heart thumping, as branches snapped and the small mopane trees shook. The sounds seemed to be coming from different directions, which confused me until I realized there was more than one Something out there. There were several.

And then, a powerful trumpeting sound - the unmistakable call of an elephant. It didn’t sound too close - not close enough to be dangerous, anyway. But I sat up, reasoning in my half-asleep state that if a large animal stepped on my tent, I’d be better off if I weren’t lying down, taking up lots of surface area.

I sat rigid, trying not to move or draw attention to myself. The crashing sounds in the mopane trees began to subside. I began to breathe a little easier. Then I heard more movement outside my tent - and this time, it was much closer.

It was a chilly night in August, and I was in Chobe National Park in Botswana, on the country’s northern border with Namibia. I had come to Botswana, a small sparsely populated nation just above South Africa, with two American friends. We were on a camping safari with ten other people. Our goal: to see animals.

Africa was not new to me. I’d traveled in West Africa and Madagascar, and in fact lived in Morocco for 2 1/2 years in the early 1990s. But I’d never been in a place where I could see zebras and giraffes, lions and gazelles.

So there I was, sitting upright in a tent in a pitch-black forest, a place inaccessible by all but the hardiest four-wheel-drive vehicles. Something was moving around outside my tent, and I was thinking, “This may not be the smartest thing I’ve ever done.”

All of my senses were heightened. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt more aware. Now that the elephants had passed, the night had grown quiet again - there was no insect hum in the chill night of the African winter, and my fellow travelers were asleep in other tents scattered nearby. I was alone, separated from a mystery animal by a thin sheet of canvas and a few feet of air, and I was brilliantly alive.

I was aware not only of my own breath, but of its breath. I felt its every footstep. I snuffled the ground with its nose.

Sure, I was scared. I couldn’t look outside the tent flaps without moving, and as I said, I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. Our guide told us the animals wouldn’t bother tents - and indeed, would not step on them - so I probably wasn’t really in danger. But the uncertainty of this presence, this thing I didn’t know, kept me frozen still.

I heard one of my fellow campers suddenly speak to his wife in a tent nearby, and at the sound, the animal moved away. My neighbor opened his tent flap and pointed his flashlight at my tent, lighting up the fabric walls. I released my tightened breath, happy that someone was checking on my safety. I heard the man murmur a few more words to his wife and shut off the light.

When all was quiet again, I lay back down. It took a while, but I fell asleep, and before I knew it, it was morning.

At breakfast we shared stories about the elephant herd, which our guide said moved through the forest about 200 feet from our tents. My neighbor, an Italian man, excitedly told our guide that he’d also seen a black animal in the campsite when he peered out of his tent. I’m sure whatever he saw was what I heard. The guide listened to his description and wasn’t sure what it might have been - he guessed a honey badger.

In retrospect I realized how Buddhist that night was: my hyperawareness, and my feeling of unity with that mystery animal. I heard its presence, breathed its air, felt waves of tension leaving my body and meeting the force of its curiosity somewhere in midair. The fibers of our experience seemed to weave together like cloth.

The fear I felt resulted from my projections of what could happen, what could be true. Was it a lion? A leopard? A rhino?

No, it was a honey badger. It was my own mind.

(Note: I wrote this piece back in 2007, when I was a Zen student, for our Zendo newsletter. I found it a few days ago when I logged into my long-dormant Google Docs account, where I and the other editors of the newsletter used to share articles. The photos are from my Botswana trip, in August 2006.)

Photography Hangover

Yesterday evening I met up with some of the Bleeding London photographers for a wander through Deptford, in Southeast London. It's an area I rarely visit, though I was down there a couple of years ago shooting storefronts. It's an intriguing neighborhood.

On this trip, I initially went to a council estate where I found lots of blocky Stalinist architecture -- albeit in appealing pastel colors -- and the usual suburban fare.

More cats.

I actually resisted photographing the cats -- I am on cat overload -- but this one was posed so perfectly I couldn't pass it up!

After finishing my assigned territory I tried to reunite with the group but got trapped in a maze of construction-blocked streets. Weirdly I ran into another Bleeding London photographer, also trapped in the same vortex of council estate alleyways, and eventually we found our way back to the main group. (I make it sound like there were loads of us -- there were actually five.)

We all walked toward the Thames, and as the sun set I got some night shots like the bar in the top picture. I love that lighting! I wrestled with whether I should color-correct the photos that I took beneath streetlights, which cast a bright yellow light over everything. In the end I left them alone, figuring the odd lighting would help the viewer realize they're night shots. (When you can't see the sky, it's not always easy to tell.)

So, anyway, three of us stopped off at a pub for a pint before catching the train. I belatedly realized that I never ate dinner, so when I got home, I grabbed a peanut butter sandwich, an apple and an ice cream bar. After Dave and I shared stories of our day and he settled in to watch "Star Trek: The Next Generation," I edited and uploaded all my photos, and wound up going to bed around midnight, which is ridiculously late for me.

Hence, the hangover. Which isn't really a hangover -- just a bit of fatigue. Today, I am once again resting my eyes!

Alleys and Mews

This might be my favorite shopfront ever. As I wrote long ago, I love a good accordion. And what about that huge, bent sign? Awesome.

Yesterday was another bonanza day for photography. I went out in the morning, and again at lunch, and again after work. I am trying to hit lots of tiny little streets in many disparate locations that I bypassed on my first walks through our postcode. It's amazing how many little litter-strewn alleys and picturesque mews there are, snaking behind the main avenues. According to the rules of Bleeding London, they all deserve a picture.

I think I've completed about 3/4 of our postcode. One more good outing and I should be done. Tonight, though, I'm going on another meetup with the other photographers, this time in South London -- so NW6 will have to wait until the weekend.

Otherwise, yesterday was very quiet. I sat in the library much of the day and plotted my walking and photography strategy!

Thanks for enduring my preachiness yesterday. I get a bit insane about population issues. It's probably the one topic I feel most passionate about, and one I will continue to study. I'm going to shut up about it now, though.

My Take on the GMO Question

I got back in the saddle yesterday evening and photographed some more streets in our postcode for Bleeding London. And I hit a gold mine, to mix my metaphors. I got several shots I really like.

I also read that GMO article in The New Yorker that we've all been talking about here in blogland. It seems to me that the author of the article took great pains to make GMOs seem benign, and to discredit one particular anti-GMO activist. But he didn't allay my suspicions about them. Common sense tells me that it is hazardous to splice genes from a bacteria or other unrelated organism into a plant, and that allowing corporations to own and control the rights to certain seeds -- the only seeds likely to become widely available -- is bad for farmers, especially in the developing world. I realize GMOs are already commonly grown, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to question them.

Besides, as I wrote recently in a comment on another blog -- to what end are we humans engineering our food supply? So there can be even more of us? It sounds cruel, but a limited food supply is one of the factors that keeps the human population in check (since we are so utterly unable to control it ourselves). I realize I'm not hungry and it's easy for me to say, speaking from a position of privilege, but I have to wonder about our ultimate goal in growing more food more economically. Where do we intend to go with that goal? Do we want to pave the planet? And what happens if variables within the system (climate, or resistance to genetically inbred herbicides or pesticides) shift and our carefully engineered food production collapses?

Seems to me we'd all be better off if we work within the limits of the natural realm. (Admittedly, that cat is out of the bag, given all our chemical fertilizers and pesticides -- but tinkering with genetics beyond simple hybridization takes supernatural farming to another level entirely.)

As they used to say in those margarine commercials, "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature."

(Photo: Yesterday evening, just off Kilburn High Street.)

Gigantic Dogs and Birds

I was walking in a quiet residential area near Golders Green more than a week ago when I passed this guy and his two magnificent French mastiffs. I was initially feeling shy about asking for a picture -- probably intimidated by the dogs! -- but seeing my camera, he said to me, "Don't you want a picture of my dogs?" I said, "Actually, I do!"

So there you have it. I wish I'd asked their names. I'm a bad reporter.

When I mentioned the seasons changing yesterday, I meant to point out that the blackberries are also coming to an end -- another harbinger of fall. We still have some purply-red ones on our backyard vine, but they've been red for weeks, and I suspect they'll never ripen. The berries in Hampstead Heath are looking a bit shriveled and seedy. A coworker told me she went berry picking on the Heath for a couple of hours on Sunday, and I was impressed she could find that many palatable ones. (Apparently the berries in the shady spots are still good.) She took them home and made a pie.

I read a fascinating article yesterday in The New Yorker about radical feminists and their refusal to accept transgender women as women. The feminists say that because transgender women were born as men, they enjoyed the privileges and benefits of being male and thus never suffered through girlhood and young womanhood at the hands of the oppressive patriarchy. (Apparently suffering through gender dysphoria and associated discrimination by the oppressive patriarchy isn't an analogous experience.) This stance has landed them in hot water, with many venues refusing to accommodate them for meetings and conferences.

Needless to say, I come down squarely on the side of the transgender women in this debate, despite my own pro-feminist beliefs. There are always people, in any debate, who take things too far. The "radfems" fall into that camp, I'd say. (They don't want my support anyway, I'm sure.)

People can find so many ways to draw lines and create tribes, can't they?

In trying to power through a small stack of accumulated New Yorkers, I also came across this cartoon, which reminded me so much of our own recent back yard experiences I had to laugh. It's part of the magazine's captioning contest and as such doesn't have a caption yet. How about, "I told you not to buy that birdseed from Monsanto!" (Apparently there's also a huge article about GMO food in one of these New Yorkers, as alluded to recently by fellow blogger Ms. Moon. I haven't tackled that one yet.)

Blessed Respite

Yesterday was fabulous. I did not touch the camera all day. I am on a respite from my photography, a hobby holiday. I am resting my eyes. (As my parents used to say when I was a little kid and I'd catch them falling asleep: "Oh, I'm just resting my eyes.")

I spent the day around the house. I weeded the garden in the morning and relocated a few slugs away from our better plants. Slugs are disgusting, but they're also fascinating. There are leopard-spotted slugs and brown slugs with bright orange fringes, almost like a petticoat. There are roundish slugs and longish slugs. It seems unlikely that what's essentially a snail with no shell could survive at all -- and yet they prosper.

And the earthworms! We have some big ol' earthworms. While I weeded, a robin sat in the bushes just a foot or two away, waiting for vulnerable worms to be unearthed. Dave joked that it was like a scene from Mary Poppins. And then it quickly turned into a horror film -- that tiny little bird could hoover down an entire worm in a flash.

I walked Olga over to Hampstead Heath and we had a good long wander through the woods. She had a great time. I always imagine she looks at me a bit accusingly these days, like, "Why don't you walk me anymore?" It was good to spend time with her and alleviate my guilt.

Dave bought a few more plants at the garden store yesterday afternoon -- speedwell and bergamot and I can't remember what else -- and he planted those. Things are getting a bit tightly packed along the perimeters of the garden. Slug festival!

Finally, last night, we went to the Black Lion, our local pub, for dinner. I had butternut squash wellington, which was good and autumnal. The temperatures are dipping and the air is taking on a cooler edge. We are moving into fall!

(Photos: Some sculptural hedges from Highams Park, on Saturday, and tile art in the seating alcoves at the Black Horse Road tube station.)