“The White Man’s Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands.”

Take up the White Man’s burden—

Send forth the best ye breed—

Go send your sons to exile

To serve your captives' need

To wait in heavy harness

On fluttered folk and wild—

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half devil and half child

Take up the White Man’s burden

In patience to abide

To veil the threat of terror

And check the show of pride;

By open speech and simple

An hundred times made plain

To seek another’s profit

And work another’s gain

Take up the White Man’s burden—

And reap his old reward:

The blame of those ye better

The hate of those ye guard—

The cry of hosts ye humour

(Ah slowly) to the light:

"Why brought ye us from bondage,

“Our loved Egyptian night?”

Take up the White Man’s burden-

Have done with childish days-

The lightly proffered laurel,

The easy, ungrudged praise.

Comes now, to search your manhood

Through all the thankless years,

Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,

The judgment of your peers!

Source: Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden: The United States & The Philippine Islands, 1899.” Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1929).

the naturalist

February 16^th 2008

This morning…
As I gaze at the hairs protruding form his chest, a nest reminding me of the nature of our existence. A beauty often denied the owner, forgetting of our savage nature. Reordered and institutionalized by the technology and construct that surrounds our everyday existence; this the reason for which we are great and ‘far superior’ to any of the other ways of life. Be it the humble Buddhist or the simple bushman, Native American or aboriginal. Our ego is what has driven us to erect the highest tower, to make the greatest discovery and to be the best that we can strive to be. But are we not forgetting what we came form. Who our natural selves have now become? The man in the cave, the woman picking and gathering goods for the survival of their own. Since we have proven the fittest…for but now that is. When one day the forces of our world will once again remind us of our roots. It will be too late once we’ve remembered and we’ll be moaning and grinding in our haste, a crude and naive suffering. Denial has always been at comfort with the masses as we know how ignorance is bliss and we crave comfort in front of a warm fire.

But the buildings and the massive highways and the erect shuttles, trains and fast cars. Have none of them been the reminder of what we deserted. This desire for more money and bigger spaces is for what? How did it feel to be the Homo sapiens? What existence did he leave behind and to where have we taken it? Homo Sapiens Sapiens the later of which has caused such destruction. Overpopulation, disparity, too much food but not enough full bellies, religious disdain, political might, now the environmental plight.

It’s a pity. We have in the mean time lost so much. Innate sprit, bond with the earth, the naked body, the beautiful space, animals alongside us, and now? We compete with our surrounding nature trying to revert the harm our ancestors handed us, but not on a silver platter. Greater is the man who has sat in his place while minding others and preserved life than any man who has climbed the greatest mountain or achieved …

Technological destruction, hospitals=survival, chemicals & weaponry=death…where else are we heading

spider

Have you ever watched a spider get around…on a tiled surface? It’s especially beautiful.

Watching the legs move so fast…eight of them just scrimmaging….for something but you don’t know where or why and what there is that’s so interesting to its sight and other senses that it seems SO excited to make it … somewhere.

Brown and small not so big and bulky but stout and simple. Those daddy longlegs never did it for me, these just look odd. cool to look at while there, standing not doing anything. Still. i mean come on…imagine that, running around with those long appendages, trying to get by everywhere…you’d be so fragile and imagine trying to runaway from your prey…say a cheetah or a bear or crocodile for that matter. Oouuh!

Running like mad is what Madelaine, my little four year old cousin was doing tonight before going to bed. I especially enjoy hearing her make night noises before she falls asleep. Sometimes I think she’s in there for hours playing on her own before she actually tries to rest her head. It’s cute. Definitely a place for her imagination to soar… just before dreaming, how perfect!

September 14, 2006

who?

It spreads like wildfire. As though someone just came and started the biggest rumor in the 8^th grade class about a boy that was discovered in the girl’s bathroom. They did it again everyone says, ‘can you believe it’. Here we go! I’m so sick of this ‘daily routine” as it is described by the CNN correspondent who knows herself is spreading false accusations about our country on international television, making a mockery of us. Now even more than before all these ignorant fools listening will believe that this country is falling apart and then we will have even less tourists next summer. And then the economy will go through yet another one of it’s infamous Lebanese style crises. Thank God it has not become a daily routine…the assassination of these people…the politicians that no one seems to find the place in their heart to be proud of these days.

Spring 2006

January 1^st, 2006

Ana bide shee…

Bas shou hal shee ba ma3rif.

So this is it…my 30 second update…

From Beirut Lebanon. I’ll start off by telling you that the situation here could be better. We could have been eating our own shit which we’re not at least bas the political situation only seems to be diminished a little each day. I would like to make a note of Israel’s bombing that hit south of Beirut on Wednesday. This attack was in response to 3 rockets that were launched from Lebanon into an Israeli town…Not hezbollah this time but some mysterious force some dared to call al-quaeda. it ended up being the Palestinians admitting. on the same day a judge was attacked in the full brightness of daylight while jogging after already being treated more than once. Then on friday night a Syrian official, former minister of exterior current parliament MP fleed to France to tell the story of what he knows in regards to Syrian involvement in R Hariri’s assassination last valentines day. This was a very inconvenient time for his confession as my friends and I were planning a trip to Damascus the next day which inevitably was canceled. This all comes less than a month after popular and powerful parliament MP and editor in chief of the main newspaper here Al-nahar was assassinated when a car bomb detonated as his car was passing it by on the early morning of December 12^th. Instability I say…but compared to the rest of the world how much more unstable are we? might be a difficult one to answer. The world is balancing on the tip of a needle. And the US, I mean how unstable can we get!?!

from before

My decision to come to my native country was one that i took soon after the events of March 14^th which are now proudly referred to as the day the Lebanese claimed their Independence against Syria and Freedom. I was very much moved last Valentine’s Day on February 14 2005 when I received a phone call from my friend Charlotte. She was calling out of concern for the safety of my family. There had been a massive bomb that exploded and killed a honorable man. Rafik Hariri was had been the Prime Minister of Lebanon for the ___previous years and he was taking a year of down time to reconsider his stance and political agenda for the region. HE was coming from the downtown region that we was responsible for rebuilding, called Solidere on his way back to his palace. This philanthropist had invested billions of dollars into rebuilding the country and was known for his charitable contributions to the poor of the country, be they scholarly, financial, medical or otherwise. His money did buy him his power, tough, unfortunately. He was in fact never able to see the completion of the biggest mosque in Lebanon where he is now buried, near to which stands a memorial to him and 6 others, his body guards and the former minister of economy (akh ya Baba), also killed during the attack. As I walk home from a long day at work and a diner meet I pass by the blaring Koran being sung in the tune so melancholic it brings tear to my non-Muslim eyes. I am touched by the way in which there is never a moment that I pass this site without seeing but a person standing, paying homage to a man so loved for the good he tried doing for his country. A place torn by 15 years of war and a sectarian government that only continue to separate its people. Christian (Maronite, Orthodox), Muslim (Sunni, Shia), Druz, Armenian, Progressive etc. Here it often feels like you must choose one or the other in order to truly feel like you fit in. One must identify with a sect in order to belong somewhere, so that they can be placed and categories. So that maybe no intentional offense is found in a conversation and also so that one knows where you stand in certain parts of the country’s framework and makeup.

February 26, 2006

hello welcome...here we go
enjoy
www.photoshelter.com/user/xposephotography

OLD blog POST from early 2006