Long Way

photograph by Sebastiao Salgado

The distance between the Bosnian cities of Zepa and Kladanj is roughly 40 kilometers. Kladanj to Zenica is close to 60.

That's a long way to run from a killer.

A moment, undoubtedly brief, of hard-fought repose falls like a chilly November on this young refugee family in Kladanj in central Bosnia in 1995.

They are on their way to Zepa, a city that offers better shelter amidst the ethnic cleansing that boiled them out of their homes in eastern Bosnia. In 2007 the British Broadcasting Corporation released that the death toll in the war in Bosnia during the 1990s was 97,207; 65% of whom were Bosniak Muslims.

I have never slept the way they are. Look at them. That mother is so strong. The two girls - how do they help their mother run with the baby? How do two girls their age cope with responsibilities of supporting their mother and caring for the little one? Are they coping with losing their youth to being on the run? Or has it gone already? And the little one- what does she feel?

I wish I didn't have any more questions.


Salgado, Sebastião. Migrations: Humanity In Transition. New York: Aperture, 2000. 127. Print.
"Bosnia war dead figure announced." BBC NEWS Europe 21 June 2007: n. pag. Web. 18 Feb 2010.

On writing

My wife and I retain on our bookshelf an invaluable volume of history. We have very little in our tiny little house. And that's a newlywed normality, I know. But we do feel a certain brand of pride when we browse the bookshelf that Kaylie's old roommates bought for us for our wedding. It's not only crammed with thousands of pages that, despite all the money forked out by my parents for all kinds of schooling, I daresay constitutes a formidable part of our education; it also is home to valuable reading's twin sister, meaningful writing. Our own meaningful writing. While I served a mission in China, Kaylie wrote me a letter every week. And I wrote back, well, almost every week. The gist and feel of the letters define the relationship between the two of us for those one-hundred-plus weeks, obviously unlike any other period of our relationship. They are supportive, full of love, some frustration, loaded with excitement, often times downright sorrowful, but mostly they are deeply, deeply spiritual. We keep them all on our bookshelf now, every single letter. As well as every photo, every envelope I fashioned out of other bits of paper when I couldn't buy more envelopes, every little piece of Chinese art I sent to her. Those letters were a great strength to me in my responsibilities then, and it was those letters that, upon seeing her at the airport when I came home, inspired me to buy her a ring on my third day home, and surprise her with it on the seventh. In brief, I owe my marriage, in part, to writing. 

    Joseph Smith once said, "The art of writing is one of the greatest blessings we enjoy. To cultivate it is our duty, and to use it is our privilege."

   Kaylie and I also both keep journals. She recently convinced me to get a blog. And she's quite a poet. We just love to write. There is something liberating about putting ink on paper and calling it your feelings, or the story of what happened today. It's like creating names for the colors inside a seashell. And to put a life -especially one's own- with all of its blunders and victories and occasional spells of boredom, on paper, is nothing short of, as the Prophet said, an art.

Try

photograph by Sebastiao Salgado

"The eyes are the windows to the soul."

I think that's how the adage goes.

How much truth is there to it?

Look at this picture. Look into their windows.

Can you see their souls?

There is a strain of sorrow that's a stranger to me. It sleeps with them.

There is fear. Like they walk with ghosts.

There is pain and distrust.

There is unspoken perseverance and a tinge of majesty.

There are scars and wounds and death and disease and hunger.

They are tired. They are tired. They are so tired.

There is anger and confusion. The kind that makes people blind. 

It makes them see.

Most of all there is memory.

It is thick and saturated like a hovering storm.

I don't know what they remember. But it's there.

There is memory.

These are the souls of refugees. Where are they going? Do we know?

Do they?

This is one of a series of photos taken by Sebastiao Salgado of refugees from all over the world that he published in his book Migrations: Humanity in Transition.

I want to try to look into their souls. I want to try to understand who they are. And I want you to try with me.

Salgado, Sebastiao. Photograph. Migrations: Humanity in Transition. New York: Aperture, 2000. 198.

Absolutely Not

Life, to me, is all about honesty.

There are plenty of do's and don'ts in everything we ever wanna do. Things we're supposed to do. Things we ought to do. Things we should try to quit doing. Things we know we should avoid altogether.

But it seems like it never matters how many times you've done what you've done.

First time, second time, third time, a thousand.

SOMEONE is always RIGHT there to correct SOMETHING about the way YOU do what you WANNA do.

And that's why I try to stay honest.

I respect pretty much everyone. I try to maintain good manners and I salute culture and honor etiquette.

But sometimes the weather is just too perfect.

So I gotta be honest. And I ask myself, and I ask you,

"Is there really anything unclassy about golfing barefoot?"