Escape Velocity

All images and text ©Bennett Barthelemy

“Every year I pick fruit in California, Oregon, Washington and Montana.” That’s a big migration. “No its not. Not compared to the world.”

I remember hearing that it required speeds of 17,000 miles per hour, or roughly 2.5 miles traveled in a single second, to escape Earth’s gravity and make it into space. There are times when I feel so heavily anchored it feels it would take twice that inertia to make it beyond incorporated space and into wilderness. Staring at the clock, looking through a pane of sun-reflected glass and trying to avoid wishing I was somewhere else. It takes work to enjoy the moment no matter how fractured and disassociated I may feel from the vertical, from the unpaved sources of inspiration, the uncluttered and unspoiled vistas where sweat and sights are savored.

Ultimately, there is the yin and the yang of it all -  the realization that you must have the dark to appreciate the light. The hours of “the bread and butter work” as Carl Sanderg described it, help provide a solid juxtaposition to better appreciate the seemingly ever-truncated flights of fancy back into wonder, the creative, the inspiring, the sustaining… Ultimately one begets the other…

The trick, as the Dalia Lama proposes, is to find completion, contentment, in any task or reality that you inhabit. The $8.80 an hour job that keeps you in poverty and just barely fed, engaging an environment where physicality rules and there is no room for individual expression or creativity… How do we find sustenance, the kind that feeds and inspires the soul, in the day to day with few hours here and there to resurface and breath the air that keeps us dreaming?

Wisdom, inspiration, kindness  - can come from unlikely sources and in the most unlikely of places… Making the everyday, the mundane – magical again. Finding the ever-elusive escape velocity to realize that flight of fancy, whether it is through a serendipitous moment or a roadtrip, a calculated afternoon allocating several hours to the whimsy of adventurous possibility with an open eye and heart - traipsing through the sacred geography of the vertical or the unexplored corners of the extended backyard – This for me is the joie de vivre, the wanderlust of the spirit calling, the call that must always be answered, that expands both internal and external horizons.

It requires a smile, a laugh, an openness to engage a landscape or an individual, let the armor down for a moment and feel, relate, empathize - allow perspective to penetrate the way the light from a forest fire tinged sunset changes the usual textures and colors at dusk. Reality must be challenged, shaken up to be expanded, better appreciated, made special. It requires effort, stamina…

“Every year I pick fruit in California, Oregon, Washington and Montana.” That’s a big migration. “No its not, not compared to the world.”

“Come back and next time I will tell you the story about this hat. Its my grandfather's, he was buried with it.”