passages | milesastray

__________
passages

ANTMAN, SANDMAN

Antman, sandman. How vast your ambition, how tall your expectation, how steep your inclination to match your purpose. You climb whatever you can climb, transcend whatever you can’t. No height shortens your sight, no fall cripples your gall. Your every summit a mere means not an end, a steppingstone to a higher throne of a bigger sandcastle in a wider sky. What bliss that you don’t know of those dimensions beyond your grasp.

Deadvlei / Namibia · 2017

ECHO TRAP

– and following his own echo got him trapped in his jagged ways before he knew it, and after he knew it. But it was a shortcut to himself and his self-determination, his agency, and, ultimately, his well-chosen freedom.

Valle De Las Animas / Bolivia · 2014

BRICK LORD

A summer's work, Mud burned into brick, Soil fruit in his hand. Blocks growing from the ground, layer by layer, His blood in them, his scrapes their scrapes, All colors earthy in this dirt rainbow. A son's son and a father's father, Glass bead cataract eyes with a vision, Youth in his age, warmth in his strength. Always helper, A giver this builder, Building more than just a building, Giving more than just hope, Giving love. To those children in his care, Packed like sardines in the old dorm, School principal, custodian angel. The first step always the right step, A long time coming, a long ways away, Brick kingdom lying dormant underneath the drapes. Large shirt, but he larger, larger than life, Few know his name, Mud hero.

Kitende/ Uganda · 2017

COMMUNAL COMMUTE

Day in, day out, day in, day out, day in, day out... Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Monday. Allies aligned in highway lanes, side by side through dawn and dusk. Calendar days and weeks and months flying by like road signs, years and decades going past, until the exit.

San Diego / USA · 2008

LIVELIHOOD

His skin was leather, testimony to a noble life spent beneath the generous Ethiopian sun. He looked 80 but was probably closer to 60 when deducting the dignified furrows a career of arduous labor had etched into his face. And while his reticent demeanor expressed a polite indifference to my existence, I somehow felt like he would guard that bit of stranger’s existence with all of his if necessary. He exuded an air of loyalty to his responsibility as a scout. All he carried into the mountains was a small rucksack, a quilted jacket, an umbrella, a shawl that inexplicably sufficed him as a blanket throughout the relentless altitude nights, and the AK-47. Ka-lash-ni-kov, rat-tat-tat-tat – what a perfect last name to invent a rifle, I thought. The phonetics and connotation were a match made in Russia. What kind of machine gun would a “Wilson” or “Gonzales” be? But if the rifle made me feel any safer, it made me feel unsafer in at least equal measure. I disliked the tangible proximity of death the gun established, notwithstanding that this one was more livelihood than weapon – a tool of life and death that was foremost a tool. Some written or unwritten rule obliged him to carry it, and me to be babysat by an armed veteran. Wild animals or humans are no real threat here, but a family going hungry is.

Simien Mountains / Ethiopia · 2017

DECISIONS, DECISIONS

Decisions, decisions. They matter. And yet, it's not the decision that defines our happiness, but how we look at it. Riddled with pessimism, every fork has but two negative outcomes. Riding the tailwinds of optimism, any road is the right way.

Namibia · 2017

ORCHESTRATED CHAOS

Twisting your feet and senses and grasp until you’re mad with hues and scents and dichotomies, the medina of Fes is an orchestrated chaos, underneath, if you read chaos. You shouldn’t though.

Fez / Morocco · 2016

TIME SHARDS

Then I slowly turned around, wiped the dust off my shoulders, and started picking up those time shards. The youth yonders and coastal frontiers, where we lost wasted fears in our liquor tears. Disposable second selves we stole from supermarket shelves, honest robberies with indifferent intentions, our knuckles still so shy. Those bright nights of twisted lights and burning turns, when muddy visions made for handsome decisions. The way molten words dripped from our fire lips and galactic hopes boiled in our kettle hearts. Soul runs to the nearest heaven, blind break-ins at the wrong gates, trespassing artists with wings for feet. Just once more I want to climb onto those rolling stones that were our shaky thrones, put on my filthy crown to cover this metallic frown, find golden change in my leaky pockets, drink from rusty faucets, bathe in the flickering dreams of emerald streams where I sing my silent song forever long, walk through those lava marshlands, sinking into the dawn with a most innocent yawn.

Granada / Spain · 2017

COEXISTENCE CONTRAST

As the sun climbed the dune, so did we. And it came to me then, again, that all is contrast and contrast is all. All the arch opposites, born with the bang, were there before me – light and dark, hot and cold, the infinitesimally tiny and the infinitely vast. And so were their earthly cousins: left and right, day and night, up and down, life and death. At the seams, where they met, they lent meaning to one another. Their very existence depended upon it. Because everything, every thing in this space-time cauldron boils down to an essential juxtaposition, a molecular love-hate-bond with the other half. One constant temperature would be no temperature at all; an undetectable attribute can never lend itself to a perceivable concept, so no such thing can be a thing. To live was to balance between these extremes, to tiptoe along that ridge, a crest in this ocean of sand, where the particles always shift while the whole remains the same. But, as much as I understood the necessity of the other and the importance of balance, I wondered if there was always more of one than the other, as to not cancel each other out. And I believed then, that at the end of the day, there was always a little more light than darkness. Of course this can only be true, if something else is false.

Deadvlei / Namibia · 2017

MARKET THEORY’S REALITY

With his famous Five Forces Framework, Harvard academic Michael Porter gave the business world a tool to determine the competitiveness of an industry. How nice, thanks teach! For a business to enter under favorable conditions, the forces should be weak. Let’s look at retailers in Kigali’s Kimironko market for instance: threat of new entrants – strong; threat of substitutes – strong; bargaining power of customers – strong; bargaining power of suppliers – strong; industry rivalry – strong. Well, it looks like this market isn’t the right fit for you Mr. Aspiring Shoe Vendor. Unless, of course, it’s all you got, and life isn’t just a theory.

Kigali / Rwanda · 2017

UNSEEN, UNHEARD

What if you were unseen, unheard? Where would you look for solace, whom would you call upon?

Lake Victoria / Uganda · 2017

Minneriya National Park / Sri Lanka · 2015

THE LAST TUSK

Just one more, we said. One more can’t hurt. Let’s take that one.

Just one more, we said, once more.

Until one day, there was just one more.

Minneriya National Park / Sri Lanka · 2015

topic

__________

lost touch

grasping for roots

How far we are from what's akin. How far we have gone from where we began. How far we've come is how far removed we've become. From our roots. From the matter of what matters. From where we need to be, back, to stay. To co-exist in defiance of odds we're stacking against ourselves. To co-outlive our collective suicidal tendencies. To co-struggle towards survival. To sail this kin-ship home.