Broken Dreams In The Hut

We really love having the opportunity to live in a time when capturing video has become so easy.  Ever since we got our first very basic digital camera back in 2004 we have begun shoot video.  When I grew up this just didn't exist.  Making movies never happened for me until fairly recently and now it seems to happen all the time.  It is as if we are developing a new vocabulary.  

One of the intersting things about working to create your own movies is the way it makes you a more appreciative movie watcher.  It is as if working to make your own, however humble they may be, puts you into the great tribe of film makers that before would have never been the case.  Last night I watched Strangers on a Train by Alfred Hitchcock and couldn't help but notice his creative use of camera angles and pacing to create his tightly wound suspense.

 

This little clip was shot in the nearby woods and is Brenda's first published attempt with her new camera.

Wild At Heart

The other day we found this temporary structure that was built in the woods beside one of our favorite local parks.  We came back to take a few pictures.  It is a large construction and well built with out the use of nails or any visible lashings.  The whole thing seems to just be stacked and woven out of fallen trees and branches that had been lying about the woods.

I really love that we can have these undeveloped chunks of land with in the city where things can feel a little wild and uncultivated.  I find myself renewed by visiting these kind of wild patches when I go for walks in the neighborhood.  It is as if some wild aspect of my self is affirmed by these places, a place that wants to just remain untamed and natural.

Into The Wild

In our neighborhood there are a few small pieces of land that feel wild.  The place where Pearl is playing here is at the edge of a city park. It is a small patch of woods on a very steep  hill that has never been developed.  This property used to be an old unofficial city dump and you can still find shoe soles and sometimes unbroken milk bottles from local creameries that have long since disappeared.

I love these little patches of wilderness right here in the city. I like them for the way they mirror my own internal wildness and unsolved mystery.  I think it is important in life that we leave some territory for poison-ivy and tangled  undergrowth. We need places that don't make sense and just are. We need cats that still have their claws.  We need this more than money in the bank, more than we need our shirts ironed and our shoes polished.

I have several stain spots on my pants today and I will not be shaving.  I have not taken a bath for five days (but I did clean the house this morning and the kitchen is spotless).  I want to listen to the call of the wild today.  I want to move in the unforced rhythms of grace.  I plan to "be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction" (Wendell Berry) but don't follow me,--- get lost in your own chunk of the woods.