I began this blog as a travel journal and to share my adventures with friends and family. It is good fortune to travel out of the familiar, the continent of my birth, out of my comfort zone, affording me a wide-angle view of myself and the world. But there are many journeys we take in our lifetime(s) and until I venture to a far-off land again, I'll concentrate on the inner-journeys and those closer to home, the social and political boundaries and borders that define, restrict and free us as human beings.
In 2007, I participated in a Sierra College Study Abroad course, War Era Literature, spending a few weeks in Vietnam, traveling from Hanoi in the North, making our way down to the Mekong Delta and then Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) in the South. The images above are from my collection of photographs of Children of Vietnam, (and an exhibit, "Vietnam Today: Carrying On"), which tells a story of life in another country. The photos leave out the poetry, the people's inner-most thoughts, their relationships, how basic needs are met, the possibilities in their world. Through our interaction with the picture, we write the details of those stories, using our own experiences, information we learn from news, reading, travel, and our imagination and points of view. We can only know the true details by living the life, so our imagination and empathy really come into play. I have to ask myself how accurate are we, when we are looking through our own lens, no matter that I was really there, in person?
And how do we write the stories and poetry of our own lives? In the next entries I'll continue posting photographs and stories that illustrate how we travel beyond borders without a passport, but always with the poetry of life.
No comments:
Post a Comment