Mountains & film

Warm days, cuckoos and woodpeckers, chatty frogs at dusk, garden watering falling into schedule, and dry grasses and seeds sticking to my legs. Yes yes, summer is almost here.

Just before my birthday last month I traveled to spend some days with my friend Becky in the mountains and packed my film camera instead of the digital one. It’s been a few weeks now, and the joy of receiving developed photos back from the lab is real. Each photo etched with physical memory, a play of light and shade intertwined with color. You know photography is my love language, and that makes film the most loving word of said language.

Friends are medicine, and mountains are medicine, and joy is medicine too. Finding plant friends in faraway places is akin to community tending. Swimming in half-frozen lakes after hours-long hikes is pure delirium.

And yet — how do different emotions coexist? How can we still make room for joy in the face of grief, and hold space for grief in the face of joy? I’ve been feeling a multitude of feelings lately, both close and far from home. Politically, socially, and environmentally, and also things as close and familiar as the killing of my favorite sheep by a neighborhood dog attack and the death of a friend. Suffering can take many forms, sometimes palpable, something ethereal-like. Sometimes it’s a hard knot in your stomach, others it’s a dark cloud that freezes you into inaction because it feels so overwhelming and you feel so powerless in the face of it.

adrienne maree brown, who wrote the fantastic Pleasure Activism, says the following in Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds: “If there happens to be a multitude of griefs upon you, individual and collective, or fast and slow, or small and large, add equal parts of these considerations: that the broken heart can cover more territory. that perhaps love can only be as large as grief demands. that grief is the growing up of the heart that bursts boundaries like an old skin or a finished life. that grief is gratitude. that water seeks scale, that even your tears seek the recognition of community. that the heart is a front line and the fight is to feel in a world of distraction. that death might be the only freedom. that your grief is a worthwhile use of your time. that your body will feel only as much as it is able to. that the ones you grieve may be grieving you. that the sacred comes from the limitations. that you are excellent at loving.”

(read that again)

Maybe the answer isn’t in avoiding grief altogether, but in honoring the duality. There is day because there is night, there is sprouting because there is composting. There is laughter because there are tears. None of this is mutually exclusive, only reciprocally affirming.

Speaking of night and day and dualities, and now moving on to the only digital photo of today’s transmission: we caught the aurora borealis in the mountains too, even though we didn’t know it at the time and couldn’t figure out why our sky pictures were turning out pink. It’s the magic of serendipity. Or maybe it’s the magic of the mountains.

Joy will not numb you, it will open and soften you.
Also, take my advice for what it’s worth — pick up that hitchhiker, they might very well become a new friend.

Before I go, here are a couple of stray links for you:

✨ ‘Being There’, a photographic essay by Lee Shulman and Omar Victor Diop. What if there had been a place for Black folkx at the table (literally and metaphorically)? For my fellow portuguese-speaking friends, here’s a good one in portuguese.
✨ A beautiful piece about birdwatchers in Palestine. “These birds, despite the war, they are still coming. And it gives us hope.”