After nearly a month of interviewing, researching, and many careful considerations, I am overjoyed to announce the arrival of the newest asset to the Elephant Heart team: Welcome, Jamie!
It’s been a long road to getting her here, but worth every step.
I’m shocked to admit that after only a day working together I can whole-heartedly say, “I can’t imagine this business without you!”
As much as I love the city, every so often I need to get away, go outside. I crave the fresh air, quiet, and long vistas free of houses and cars. As congested as Los Angeles is, it happens to be surrounded by rugged mountains, golden desert, and the glistening blue Pacific.
This weekend I decided to get out and enjoy the beautiful lingering Los Angeles summer with a hike in the Angeles Crest Forest. My friend, photographer Peter Bohler, and I headed out in the late morning with aspirations for an eight mile hike.
After a gorgeous hour long drive over windy ridges rife with cyclists and bikers, we reached our turn-out and already felt the quietude of the forest settling in–all until I reached back to exchange my flip-flops for my hiking boots and found they had somehow not escaped the grasp of the city.
It would be impossible for me to hike in flip-flops and impossible for us to turn around, retrieve my shoes and still have enough daylight to make our hike. I was beyond disappointed.
I have a friend who instead of asking me how I am, asks me what I know. It’s funny. With a question like that you can’t really get away with saying “fine” or “ok” or firing right back with “great and how are you?” So, what do you know. It’s a tricky question, really puts you on the spot, forces you to actually think.
Under that kind of pressure and certainly not wanting to be caught “knowing” nothing, I would usually try to come up with something witty or funny or at the very least strange–like, “well…I know I’ve got all my teeth today and my shoes seem to be on the right feet, for now, at least.”
And now here I am, some time has passed since I’ve been asked what I know and I still seem to be thinking about it–must be the mark of a great question!
For the past few weeks I’ve been so focused on what I don’t know (in terms of shopping for insurance and hiring an assistant and switching from using just one computer to a whole network) that I seem to have lost sight of any and all certainty in my life.
So for my own sanity and perhaps your amusement…here is what I know:
1. No matter how exciting learning can be, it’s rarely easy or painless.
2. When things get tough it’s very hard to have confidence that they won’t always be tough, even though all prior experience and rationale tells you it’ll be ok.
3. There is some real truth to Murphy’s Law. Just when you seem to be at capacity for stress in your life…bugs invade your pantry…and your car mysteriously and suddenly won’t start–i mean…just for instance.
4. It does all work out. Not always for the best and not always as quickly as one might hope, but eventually time marches on and new challenges and successes gradually force out the old ones.
5. No matter how tricky or overwhelming it is to learn something new, there is always a way to make it a little more fun and a little more interesting.
Here’s the product of my first official Photoshop lesson!
After more than five years at war in Afghanistan and Iraq, I was ashamed to admit that I didn’t know anyone personally who had served in the military. Mentally, I knew we were at war. I read the newspapers, saw the lists of casualties, but I had no emotional connection or understanding of what was going on so far away from my daily American life…until this past weekend when I had the honor of being invited to spend three days with the Army as they trained at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, CA.
I, along with close friend and photographer Maria Schriber, volunteered through the Public Affairs Office to pose as journalists to help train the troops for the media attention they will encounter in Iraq. No one, aside from the civilians in the Public Affairs Office, knew that we weren’t actual members of the press. Upon arriving we were posed with the challenge of choosing a magazine or news outlet to represent and coming up with a story to interview for and then report back on–with the goal of getting an interview with the highest ranking commander. With Maria as the photographer, the reporting and interviewing was left up to me. I quickly discovered I had a lot of ground to cover since my lack of prior contact with the military left me without a clue as to how everything was organized. I didn’t know the difference between a battalion (300 to 1,000 Soldiers–or troops) and a brigade (up to 5,000 troops comprised of three to five battalions), a platoon (about 40 Soldiers) and a company (62 to 190 Soldiers and three to five platoons). Thankfully I had plenty of organizational questions to ask while I scrambled to invent the real story I was after.
After seeing one of the constructed Iraqi villages on the training grounds and witnessing an exercise in what is called the “trauma lane,” I chose to do a story for Good Magazine, reporting on the differences between the tactical training and the cultural training, or as the army refers to it–kinesthetic versus non-kinesthetic training–the troops were receiving.
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