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Taken Aback by Iwase Yoshiyuki

I first saw Iwase Yoshiyuki’s photographs of ama, female free divers, or “sea women,” who swim to depths of 80 feet for abalone with basically no equipment, via the NYT’s 6th Floor blog. The photo story was related to/inspired by this week’s Sunday Magazine cover story on a potentially immortal jellyfish.

I didn’t have to read the cover story though to know that if jellyfish can tell us something about living forever, sea women must know the secret, too.

More of Iwase Yoshiyuki’s photos here.

Also related: Ian Baguskas’s photos of haenyo.

My dad taught me how to ski and most of my snow-loving friends growing up were guys. When I wanted to run the Bolder Boulder, my first 10K, my uncle gave me a training plan and went on the longer runs with me. He also took me on my first mountain biking trip to Moab. Female role models were absent in my early athletic days. (I want to note this is not to say I didn’t learn a lot of badass stuff from my mom: horsemanship, how to dig a ditch and throw a bale of hay, and most importantly, how to keep shit together when things fall apart. But that is another story entirely.)

It wasn’t until college that I met other girls who loved running as much as I did and we all trained for our first half-marathon together. I was eventually introduced to ultra-running by a boyfriend when I paced for him as he completed his first 50 mile race. But, I didn’t sign up for an ultra myself until prodded by a friend, Morley, who was herself encouraged by another friend, Christy. Though Christy competes on a level I don’t, and won’t ever—she finished the Tahoe Rim Trail 50 mile race more than 4 hours before we did, placing 3rd for women overall—in training, and before, during and after the race, she was a phenonmenal source of information and support for both Morley and me. Christy was also the first woman to climb and ski all 54 of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks. In describing her accomplishments, the word “inspiring” sounds trite.

Unfortunately, the feats of Christy and women like her don’t often get a lot of attention. Thankfully, some good people are trying to change that by bringing the story of another insanely awesome athlete into the limelight with the film Finding Traction. Finding Traction follows ultra-runner Nikki Kimball as she attempts to become the fastest person in history to run Vermont’s 273-mile Long Trail by breaking the 4 day, 12 hour record. And she just might be the person to do it. In addition to being a three-time winner of the Western States 100, Nikki is a tireless advocate for women in professional sports and actively promotes physical activity to combat the obseity epidemic. Hers is a story that needs to be shared. A team of Emmy Award-winning filmmakers is working to do just that—pitch in here to help them complete the film and get the show on the road.

One foot in front of the other

I was one of few who wanted the NYC marathon to run this last weekend.

I was also one of few who had power, heat, and water throughout the storm. The worst I suffered was intermittent internet outages. But, I believed that as a decent human being, the mayor wouldn’t have made the decision to keep the event had he known that life-saving resources were being diverted. The revenue the race generates, of course, would have been good for the city but more so, I needed to see people celebrating and supporting other people covering 26.2 miles, putting one foot in front of the other.

After a week of obsessively ingesting an insane amount of Sandy-related news (often regurgitated versions of the same information with increasingly distorted headlines) from a warm, dry perch, I felt anxious and stuck. Every site I looked to for volunteer information offered me a cheery thank-for-your-interest-but-we’re-not-currently-accepting-volunteers/food/supplies. So, to get out of the house, away from the internet, I went out for brunch, for a run, for a drink, as I would have any other day, knowing this was not any other time in New York. A friend wrote about this weirdly normal place we found ourselves in—safe, feeling singularly helpless, and guilty, doing nothing really, at all.

Finally, on Friday evening, another friend who had been checking in on a friend who stayed in the Rockaways, received info via text that the Rockaway Beach Surf Club was organizing a help center to organize and distribute food, supplies, and able-bodied volunteers. We went out and bought shovels, gloves and rubber boots, and drove down to 87th Street on Saturday morning.

We unloaded my car with the water, toiletries, clothing, and blanket donations we brought and were immediately put to work, organizing donations and preparing to assist the line of people forming outside. Because I was able to find pen and paper, I became a list-taker, writing down the name of the next person in line and what they needed, and for how many adults and how many children. I then circled through the club’s lot and shelter, filling a bag with supplies and returning it to my person in the line. For my small efforts, I was embarrassed to receive hugs and thank yous.

I’m not sure that coordinating relief efforts was something the RBSC ever intended or imagined they would be doing but they were quick and efficient and by the end of the day a few dozen of us had organized and distributed truckloads of donations and teams were dispatched to clean up the homes of a few elderly women who came seeking help. The remaining goods were repackaged and dropped off at a distribution center around the corner that the National Guard appeared to be just setting up and the surf club was readied to receive the next day’s donations and volunteers. Most of us, myself included, wanted/needed to get out of the Rockaways before dark and we departed to the warmth of our homes in other parts of the city.

From our safe places, it seems unfair and possibly unkind to resume “normal” life—emailing, doing laundry, and well, working—knowing others are fighting for the basics. At the same time, the news has shifted and election coverage is as inescapable as Sandy and her aftermath had been. And so, most of NYC is looking ahead, over the next few days, the next few months, to the next four years, and getting back to work. It’s better than where we were a week ago, waiting on a hurricane, watching the aftermath, some near, and some of us far. Now, we are moving forward, putting one foot in front of the other. And hopefully, because we know, by virture of geography (but not geography alone), we are starting leaps and bounds ahead of people around us, we’ll be working towards new, re-defined, refined goals. We can do more, do better than we think we can and now is the time to realize it.

When training for a marathon, if you are lucky, early on, you learn this trick: when you are tired and you think you will never run that far, if you can keep moving your arms, your legs, too, will keep moving, and your feet will cover the distance. Eventually, your efforts will add up to something that you once thought was impossible.

In getting back to work, to life, keeping an eye on opportunities to help, (having voted by mail), I am repeating this to myself: Keep moving your arms.

Rockaway Beach Surf Club is still, and will be for some time, working for recovery in the Rockaways.

Occupy Sandy is providing real-time updates on volunteer opportunities and donation needs on their site and over Twitter and Facebook. They are also accepting donations.

I can’t get Ben Rivers’ Two Years at Sea, a glorious 88 minutes of grainy, gorgeous black and white footage of Jake Williams—a hermit in the Scottish Highlands—out of my head. I was entirely transported, seduced, by the film to somewhere far, far away from here, where the day’s primary concerns are eating, bathing and staying warm. (The only other things that happen: Jake wakes up one day to find his trailer high up in the treetops and spends another day building a raft to float around on a lake). The best, lasting effect of the film (so far): sleeping more soundly than I have in weeks.

But today, on the eve of a storm that threatens to flood the streets and suspend power, I am happy, so happy, to be with people I love.

"The towers were so tall that for someone on the observation deck, the horizon was forty-five miles away. This distance was far enough along Earth’s curved surface for the Sun to set two minutes later for the person on the observation deck than it did for someone on the ground floor. If you could have run up the stairs at one flight per second, you would literally have stopped the sunset. Alas, you’d eventually have run out of breath or run out of floors. In either case, at that moment you’d lose the Sun for the night, as it set gently below your horizon."

Neil Degrasse Tyson

(via @nicoleslaw)

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Comet, 10”x11”, Acrylic and oil on paper, 2011, by Ky Anderson

I just bought this small work on paper by Ky Anderson. It’s made up of shapes that often appear in her work—half moons and slightly curved lines that together start to look like eyes and the light that goes through them when we see. Sometimes, she stacks these abstracted objects till they are towering. But here the forms tilted, fell, and became something else entirely. Something that flys: Comet.

One story ends and another begins:

From the last page in Wild by Cheryl Strayed:

To believe that I didn’t need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything.

From the first page in Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton:

Water is elemental, it’s what we’re made of, what we can’t live within or without. Trying to define what swimming means to me is like looking at a shell sitting in a few feet of clear, still water. There it is, in sharp focus, but once I reach for it, breaking the surface, the ripples refract the shell. It becomes five shells, twenty-five shells, some smaller, some larger, and I blindly feel for what I saw perfectly before trying to grasp it.

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Kevin Tadge on Flickr via Innisfree.

Writing + Remembering on the Internet

A couple weeks ago, NYT tech reporter Jenna Wortham did something really brave.

Writing about recently losing her father, she also lamented not having an appropriate space to turn to on the internet to share this particular news: “As someone who lives out most of her life online and revels in the Web, I can tell you it feels very weird not to have an outlet for one of the biggest events of my life to date… And not only does it feel weird: it gives the impression, at times mistaken, that all is well behind your screen.”

When I lost my dad it was 1996. I didn’t have to contend with the internet, didn’t try to pretend that all was well, but also couldn’t hide what had happened. The news traveled. My close friends and some high school peers offered their support and condolences, most awkwardly avoided eye contact.

The internet, I think, is a bit like my then adolescent friends—earnest, but (fairly, reasonably) ill-prepared to talk about death. While the loss of someone close is an experience we will all eventually share, many don’t experience it until a little later in life. Even then though, for most, it’s a pretty private matter. Why this is, I’m not sure—we fear pity, we think that feeling alone with this kind of loss makes us, and the person we lost, more special.

When I did talk about my dad and his passing somewhat publicly, it was over email, about two years ago. I was training for a marathon and raising money in his memory for a non-profit I thought he, too, would have wanted to support. The responses I got from people sharing their own experiences and losses were enormously kind, generous and open. These two-way conversations brought me closer to both people who were already friends and those who had been acquaintances.

The intimacy of email, it seems, made it a comfortable place to talk about cancer, about loss and death. While you can easily share news with a lot of people over a bcced list, any resulting dialog will only be between two people, or at most, a smaller, self-selected group. For the same reason, old-fashioned email lists, like The Listserve, feel like a small, well-lit room when there is glaring light everywhere else.

These spaces function differently than other (and newer) means we have to broadcast news—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram—enabling something not the same as but closer to the conversation you might have sitting next to someone in a car*. But the internet and its tools and platforms mostly follow our lead as we use them, and for now at least, culturally, we don’t deal well with death.

But this doesn’t mean that there won’t eventually exist the right places online for grieving or sharing unbearably bad news. The best condolence offered to me 16 years ago came from the mom of a good friend who had also lost her dad when she was young. She told me to write down everything that I wanted to remember, because, even though I couldn’t imagine ever forgetting any important detail about my dad, I would. And she was right. I mostly failed to take her advice, save a few short things jotted down in different notebooks over the years between now and then.

But thankfully, the internet is only going to get better for that, for writing—for remembering.

*A friend who is a mother told me that IM is like this for her and her daughter, too.

Kind of obsessed with Tom Friedman’s Seascape via Sublime Spy and Jenni Holder.

(It’s a crumpled piece of paper!)

(Source: )