remember to breathe in. and then to breathe out.

missing

i miss everyone and everything

the now thoughts

 

 

i think i'm gonna tutor kids

be a teacher

and then maybe get my masters in multimedia journalism

and make multimedia pieces using audio, stills, and video

i think that is my jam

and also become an amateur kick boxer

or do none of those things and all of those things

and have a good time of it

everyday awakenings

sometimes i paint a grim picture when the picture is not so grim. yes i am suffering from chronic headaches, migraines, and pressure in my brain. yes i get an aura that takes over the entire left side of my vision when i do push-ups. but i will see the dr. tomorrow. the things you don't hear about is how i sparred naked with my man until 1.30 in the morning until i knocked the bulb out of his light and the room fell fully dark aside from the blue glow of the mac screen. what you do not hear about is manning the telephones at the radio station or getting stoned in the parking lot with the most exquisite human being i know. you don't hear about the late-night banter about life, the backyard bonfires, kick-boxing, and biking everywhere. yes sometimes the world closes in on me. i never made it to the river this summer, it was a tragedy. i never audited arabic. i never got the job at Berkeley or MECA or Global Exchange. i lost my waitressing job, the farmers market turned me over twice, and the heavy lifting job hasn't come through. but i'm reading the autobiography of Malcolm X and dreaming of the day when my head stops hurting so I can pick up and go back to Africa. So I can take that temp job in Sudan photographing for the UN. So I can go back to that invincible person I once was before I gave my heart away. To men.

We are all responsible for our own happiness, don't get me wrong. I take full responsibility for the last couple weeks of panic and depression. I will run now everytime the fear hits me. The fear of life. The fear of shooting that wedding next year or shooting the guys at the kick-boxing gym. The fear of the fact that I've been on unemployment for a year, that I don't own a car, and I haven't fully come into my own.

Yes I crave the life-partner, the stability, the home, the job, the car. But moreso more than anything I crave self-contentedness, self-assurity. Confidence. Pride. Self-respect.

Hear me out all friends who have known great desperation and most difficult times. WE ARE ALL IN THE GUTTER at moments. Sometimes we cannot always see the stars. But they are burning up there to remind us that the impossible is only possible when you can convince yourself thus. That is, we can have it all, all we need to do is hold onto hope. Pretend the world is a nicer place than it is. Put all our chips down on the optimists, on the people who take the time to say thank you and please and ask you how you are doing and call to check in on you. There is so much to learn from those people. 

let the good times roll

happy 1 year anniversary

start over

i would like to start all over again
from this hardest year of my life
with all of its heartbreak and alienation
illness and pain
i am ready to bury this person i am calling myself
this person who is calling friends and friends are
finding excuses not to visit or see or call
this person no one wants to know

the hard truth

so you can go ahead and tell your sons and daughters that the hardest thing that they will ever know in life is this: you will love one person fully. you will pour all of your love into that one person. they will be the secret behind your smile, your laughter, your confident stride, the whistled tune you carry with you as you walk the streets. it will not be the center of your attention all the time, but it will be the raison d'etre, albeit quietly. 

and this person that you pour your love into will someday throw it all away at a moment's notice. it will take you aback. months and sometimes years of love. it will be hard to swallow at first. impossible to accept. why? what for? but they will throw it all away and close the door on you. they will not want your words, they will not want to know the details of how they have hurt you. they will simply walk away in silence.

then you will have to find some way to continue being in the world without your smile, your laughter and your confident stride. you will feel ugly. tired. you will have to perform meaningless tasks like going to the grocery store and looking for jobs. this pain in you will not go away for many months. your appetite will sometimes be shifty, sleep will be mediocre. days will get longer. the sun will shine and the world will continue to be beautiful but you will only participate it with great hesitation, sometimes it will be dreadful.

loss is, by far, the hardest thing to accept. mike said it right - relationships are like dreams; when you are in them you cannot see out of them, and then once you are out of them, much later, you cannot believe the state you were once in. well, right now i'm kicking around on the edge of one, but he's pushing me out. trying to hang onto a dream that he says is dead. fumbling.

people always mediate these situations by saying there are many fish in the sea. but when you are hanging onto the one you loved, you cannot have eyes for anyone else. there is no medicine to help ease the pain. there is no 12-step program. no 5 year plan. loss is loss. i have lost someone i love. he says he cannot bring himself to love me. i have about a million words to tell him but somewhere i feel like i'm not supposed to share them. that i'm supposed to keep them to myself. i will probably write a letter, with paper and ink, the old fashioned way.

how this week or this month will transgress, i don't know. i think it will be many months of this feeling of being lost in the world. 2010-2011 has been a strange transition for me. from archeological photographer to unpaid intern. jobless american collecting unemployment. a lady full of love for a man who cannot love her. things can only get better i hope.

DJ Lafleur

On the death of Bin Laden

And how it signifies that we have a long way to go before we come to grips with who we are as a nation. 

This mass patriotism always makes me extremely uneasy and deeply worries me. Especially this, now. these events make America even more blind, make regular citizens once again overlook all the horrible acts that we are responsible for in the name of finding one man in a far and distant land that we somehow feel will bring resolution to what happened on 9/11. Anyone who knows anything about world conflict or any kind of conflict at all knows that the cat and mouse chase will just go back and forth. We have declared some kind of victory for killing Osama bin Laden and have taken this opportunity to act like a bunch of rednecks. Soon, I'm sure, some horrible act of "revenge" for the death of Osama will fall on us, and the cat and mouse game will pick up again where it left off. As my friend Dan Denvir rightly pointed out in his piece

Bin Laden Killing Does Not Vindicate Afghanistan and Iraq Wars

we need to take responsibility for the deaths that have taken place in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. we need to collectively as a country realize that we are all guilty of these unforgivable crimes, and we all need to put down our weapons, and find peace in a way that doesn't involve murders. Islamaphobia will go on, probably fueled more by this event. Our military will continue to kill innocent bystanders. Middle Eastern people who have nothing to do with the conflict will die by "drones".

We need to step back and look at ourselves, and this so-called cause for celebration and rejoice of "justice" just takes people even further away. A great deal of Americans are sadly immature, and have equivocated this to some kind of sport, or cowboys and Indians-type game. It is deadly, complicated, tragic, and the longest foreign war in our nation's history has resulted from this "war on terrorism". As one bumper sticker in my Berkeley neighborhood joked "Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam". Often times, it just feels like we have no understanding, as a country, of what we are doing. In any case, Dan, thanks for your honest, home-hitting words. We need more journalists like you. In this day of journalism being called dead, we need you more than ever.

you can find it

 

remember what is important and sacred to you

and you can find it here

because you can find it anywhere

there are so many places

full moon

i made a video with old friends. they wanted to make it for 6 years.



Full Moon from gabby miller on Vimeo.

the longest silence

the month we stopped speaking
the birds stopped chirping
their beaks scrape sadness into the
trees in my backyard
the month of march on the wall calendar
is a parade of empty squares
and meaningless appointments
our kisses could have cured
a hundred vacant hours
do you remember how effortlessly
my body curled into yours
and kisses came like exhales
or do you remember it all
as a poorly-rehearsed play
with bad actors and sets

Quiet

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let's not speak in any language;
let's stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about...

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with
death.

Now I'll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

- pablo neruda

away

A lot of people have been writing to me saying they haven't really been following the protests in Egypt all the way through and are overwhelmed by the amount of coverage now and want an insider's view on what's going down over there - just trying to get a grasp of what this all means.

I've been busy writing and re-writing a short radio commentary that I find myself having to constantly update each day, being unsatisfied when it isn't fully present. I will publish the piece to this blog when it is finished, or maybe a longer version of it. I recorded it tonight at KPFA, but it still needs to be edited. It does not include anything from my interviews with Owen - that will probably turn into something different.

But getting off the phone with Owen in Luxor for the 3rd time now I do miss it. California is sunny and easy for the most part. I know I'm ready for this year or two in America, but I suppose I realized today that I will always be drawn out of my shell during such dynamic times, I will always want to be over there, where the world is still very much in an embryonic, mercural state. America will never keep me here for the long run, I suppose. I suppose I'll always be running off and coming back. Settling, and re-settling. For now I am happy where I am, I love the chicken coop we are building in the backyard, the garden beds ready with soil and compost to be planted with flowers, I love this bike that takes me to the radio station where I am learning to be a radio producer. I love my friends, as we beat on empty buckets and strum guitars and make up songs in my kitchen as the night comes to an end. But I know it will not hold me forever. That I will crave the foreign worlds again.

Today I worked out in the park and told my friend about how slow I've been this week. Usually I get up in the morning with nervous energy - I go for a run just to sit still. These days I am crawling to the park, I am moving slowly about the house. It is a kind of reverse PTSD, I was telling her - a post-quotidian bored disorder. In any case, it will not last forever, but this week, as I watch the events unfold in Egypt, I can't help but feel like my time in America is not permanent. That I will make it my home for a few years, but find myself abroad again in the near future. 

Good days bad days

Good days and bad days. Today was both. Bladder infection I thought was gone came back; unsure about what is going to happen to my unemployment when I tell them I forgot to file for a week of work in November, and then there's this waitressing gig that I seem to have landed that I'm not sure if I want or whether it will mess things up for me more than better them. So it is with life - forever a challenge on many levels. I'm too tired now from the bike journey I took and the antibiotics to get into it. I've just spent the last two hours trying to recount the story of Luxor being destroyed to make way for tourists. An exercise in radio - finally an assignment from KPFA, to get the wheels moving and my mind off of my own life.

I biked out there to his folks house today with the same motive - to put the unemployment, the restaurant, and my problems behind me - out of the desire to have my legs be the things to take me there. wanting the sun on my back and him within reach. I learned that I barely take pictures anymore and he barely paints. But things are moving around in us. I learned it will be okay. I learned things will only get better.

looking up

After a mild freakout things are feeling better. Woke early today, 7am, and went to the cafe where Matt is finishing a plumbing job. I've taken notes and watched the process step-by-step and have a pretty good idea of how to fix a leaking ceiling, that is one that is caused by a leaking upstairs shower pipe. After reading for a few hours at the cafe and watching Matt finish up, I volunteered for the first time at a local garden run by a nonprofit called the People's Grocery, that supplies CSAs. Feels good to get back outside and my hands in the dirt, has a very cathartic effect on me, just chatting and asking questions and taking notes for my own garden which is soon to come to life in the backyard. Weeded a bed, airated the soil, and put down a cover crop to put Nitrogen back into the soil and prepare it for veggies in the spring. Today we'll be picking up some rich soil/compost mix for our own garden, and the chicken coop production should begin this weekend so things are finally beginning to take flight.

Feeling a lot more comfortable with unemployment as I have this opportunity to gain gardening, youth leading, wilderness, radio and video skills. Before the time was terrifying, the free time seemed to choke me everyday when I woke up without a defined task. Now I have a better idea of how I can make this time work for me and organize a schedule where I get my photography up in galleries in SF, learn to shoot and edit video, learn gardening skills, start writing radio shows for KPFA, and read. I have an interview next week for a waitressing job at a local cafe, which I wanted way back in September when I had no income and was desperate for any and all work. Since then I've interned at San Francisco Magazine, worked weekends at the farmer's market, gotten a DJ gig, a computer coding gig, and an Apprenticeship at KPFA radio, so you can't say I'm not keeping busy. Given this, I no longer feel so uncomfortable with being on unemployment. I admit, it's taken some time for me to get comfortable with it and come to terms with it, I would prefer a full-time job that pays my salary and is fullfilling but I haven't gotten there yet. I've applied to dozens of positions, but I don't always have the precise skill-set.

In other news, the photo editor at the Wall Street Journal responded to my email within minutes saying: "Hey sara - your work is really dope.. Thanks for reaching out.. We'll be in touch for sure. What's your favorite thing to shoot? What are you interested in shooting in SF? I see you're on bryan's site. They broke the mold when he popped out - love that dude. Talk soon." So I'm pretty happy about that. I hope they give me an assignment soon, although there are a lot of great shooters in the Bay Area right now, I'm sure they'll get to me eventually. It's just nice to have someone at a major publication be so human and warm, I've never really even gotten any kind of response from an editor at a major publication, the standard response is dead silence. So I'm very grateful for that.

every ten years

a celebration of life