About Things Receding and Not Receding, September 1, from Jane

Hi Friends, Ten years ago this autumn, Jenna and I were preparing to travel to India and Nepal together. It was an exciting time. Just before we left, Jenna won The McGlothlin Award for Teaching Excellence. We gave a presentation at Price's Fork Elementary School about the camels and fortress cities of Rajasthan, India, and about the remote Himalayas of western Nepal--places Jenna was going to experience for the first time. We promised to send post cards, write blogs when we found working computers, and take photographs. We both kept more personal journals, too, which we collaged and illustrated. I wanted to have a record for my own two children to describe what drew their Mom to such far-flung places--and not just to ANY far-flung places. South Asia had a strong pull, a calling. And although it was a relatively new tool for her, just before we left, Jenna also packed a videocamera.

I have titled my blog entry here to allude to my friend Suzi Gablik's most recent blog entry on her site, www.virgilspeaks.blogspot.com, which she has titled, About Things Standing and Not Standing. Take a look: all in the same collaged stew, Suzi collects the grand old chestnut tree out Anne Frank's window (which recently fell to fungal disease), an eerie-spooky broom that likes to stand upright on its own in the middle of a haunted boiler room (you'll see), Sarah Palin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Glenn Beck, President Obama, and the American (or human?) assumption that better times are ahead.

Autumn (or April, the cruelest month, or When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd--writers face Suzi's question about what stands and what does not stand in every season) is certainly one natural time to see the evergreen and the deciduous, the perennial and the annual, the possible and the lost, the hibernating and the dead.

Along with my friend Jenna, in this decade, I saw Amchi Tsampa, the extraordinary man whose lineage painting I was to make, come to
America for the first time. I saw him see September 11th happen on American television. I have seen the only existing photographs of the Dalai Lama's entire family--when he was just a little guy, before he was officially revealed as the reincarnation of his predecessor, the 13th Dalai Lama, more than seventy years ago--published for the first time--from a long-lost roll of film I found in Sedona, Arizona. I have walked incredibly difficult miles at extreme altitudes to have a conversation with an old King. I have seen many of the best treasures of what remains of old Tibet. I have been as rich as a human can be with love and friendship. My daughter Iris is in her third year of medical school at UVa. Five years ago this week she spent one semester at Virginia Tech, here with me, as her Tulane University spluttered and gasped to reopen after Hurricane Katrina drowned and broke people, pets, and property. My son Emerson is in his first semester of UVa's law school. He spent July with our film team and with me, in Nepal, revisiting the shrines, rickshaws, gardens, and mountains of his childhood. My children have supported A Gift for the Village at every stage of our work. And like everyone who reads this paragraph, I have also suffered. I have been afraid. I have seen some beautiful things recede.

But this month, let the red fireflies of the Annapurna Himalayan night skies, and the purple, gold, and green of Mardi Gras, and the chartreuse and magenta and mango of the carved flowers and candles on Suzi Gablik's dining room table, and the pink of my Strawberry Buddha painting, and the curries-burgundies-bluegreys & shell whites of the rock-silt pigment we collected this summer in Upper Mustang--let ALL the colors in this world know that our film is completed; Jenna Swann and Tom Landon and I have not missed ONE of them in A Gift for the Village. Every color stands.

My film team is so incredible. Thank you, Jenna. Thank you, Tom. Thank you, Lisa Mullins, for letting your absolutely gorgeous voice bring our script to life. Thank you, Ambassador and Mrs. DeLisi for celebrating our work in Nepal. Thank you, Gil and Dan Harrington, for allowing me to carry Morgan's ashes to sacred places.

Thanks to all of you who continue to express interest in our work, and who will be joining us on the evening of September 16th at The Taubman Museum in Roanoke, for the American Premiere of our documentary, A Gift for the Village. Ten years fit into one hour! So please, no blinking allowed.

I look forward to speaking about our work six days before the Premiere, at noon, on Friday, September 10th, in the Taubman Museum, as part of their Box Lunch series. Please join me there.

So much will never recede. So much does stand. Jane