Seeking the World’s Soul

I like to know as much as pos­si­ble about places before I visit or move to them, and as I’ve been doing a lot of travel over the last few years I’ve worked some basic online research meth­ods. Of course books are great and I love a good travel guide — Rough Guides (http://www NULL.roughguides NULL.com/) are my favorite, gen­er­ally — but most of the time I don’t have easy access to Eng­lish lan­guage books.  Hence, most of my research is done online.

When I’m look­ing for work to sup­port my travel habit, I gen­er­ally look for Eng­lish teach­ing jobs or nanny jobs for fam­i­lies that want their child to begin learn­ing a for­eign lan­guage early. The main sites I start look­ing on are TEFL.com (http://tefl NULL.com), Dave’s ESL Cafe (http://eslcafe NULL.com), and Craigslist (http://craigslist NULL.com). These are all very gen­er­al­ist sites, and com­pe­ti­tion for jobs in West­ern coun­tries is quite fierce, while in devel­op­ing coun­tries less so. I gen­er­ally keep Google Maps (http://maps NULL.google NULL.com) open while I’m search­ing, as many jobs are in places I’ve never heard of. I’ll also search on “Forums” or “Expat” plus the name of the coun­try or city I’m inter­ested in; those are often the best places to find local nanny agen­cies who are recruit­ing, as well as non-EFL jobs.

Next I’ll look up Wikipedia (http://wikipedia NULL.com) and Wik­i­travel (http://wikitravel NULL.org) for a gen­eral overview of the place and some his­tory. While I’ll travel just about any­where, I’ll only live places with lively cof­feeshops (bane of my exis­tence right now; the only mod­ern cafe in Sam­sun just went out of busi­ness and I don’t think I’ll see a mocha until my con­tract expires), legal alco­hol, an arts scene, and high speed inter­net. Between the wiki sites and Vir­tual Tourist (http://virtualtourist NULL.com), I can usu­ally get an idea if those are pos­si­ble. I’ve also had a lot of fun over the years with peo­ple from the Couch Surf­ing (http://couchsurfing NULL.com) club, so I try to see if there’s an active group with reg­u­lar meetings.

Then I’ll try and eval­u­ate the pho­to­graphic poten­tial of a place. My favorite travel pho­tog­ra­phy site is TrekEarth (http://trekearth NULL.com), which has gor­geous pho­tos arranged by geo­graphic loca­tion. Google maps also lets you turn on geo­t­agged pho­tos, which can give a nice idea of local attrac­tions; sim­ply doing an image search on Google for the place name can be a good start as well. I’ll also take a look at stock agen­cies like Travel-Photos.com (http://travel-photos NULL.com) to see how other stock shoot­ers have inter­preted the place, and look for what sort of images seem to be missing.

Finally, I’ll take a look at local tal­ent on Model May­hem (http://modelmayhem NULL.com). Local mod­els will­ing to do a loca­tion shoot can give life and fire to a site, and inci­den­tally also know where to go get a good pint once the shoot is over. I’ve made long term friends with a lot of the mod­els I’ve worked with on trade shoots (mean­ing they give me a model release to sell the images, and I give them good pic­tures for their port­fo­lio).  If I can’t get any local mod­els, I’ll usu­ally either make my hus­band pose or see if I can find some other locals — Couch­surf­ing mem­bers are some­times willing.

Any­way, that’s my research process and I hope oth­ers find it use­ful! Please do post any sug­ges­tions for other sites you’ve found use­ful, or other research ideas, in the com­ments section.

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The last trip got to me. Just a bit, noth­ing too bad, only trav­el­ing two weeks around Turkey, where I’ve now lived for 5 months. It left me exhausted, though, and I’ve spent the last three days since get­ting back to Sam­sun in the house, all burned out and anti-social.

I always try to go… fur­ther. Deeper into a place, to grab its pain and love and his­tory, to wrap it up around me and get it under my skin. How can you under­stand some­thing with­out get­ting too close to it? Too close means the bar­ri­ers fall, you get past the polite masks, the illu­sion embraced by the unin­ter­ested — ignorance’s safe haven. Too close means you get touched. You get muddy, soaked, exhausted, afraid. It’s when it’s try­ing you, though, that you see the real face of a place, begin to touch its soul, to have your own soul exposed by it. Not safe. Not comfortable.

I named my blog “Seek­ing the World’s Soul” because that title describes what I’m doing, in this long wan­der­ing path around the globe. I’m try­ing to under­stand these places, the peo­ple, the rever­ber­a­tions of his­tory on the present, to under­stand this crazy lovely heart­break­ing world of ours. I’m try­ing to catch glimpses of its soul in my viewfinder, to share its darks and lights, its wild­ness, its sacred­ness, its des­e­cra­tion, and some­times the glimpses of that shud­der­ing beauty that shines through its pain.

Of course I do more nor­mal photo projects — var­i­ous shoots with fan­tas­ti­cally cos­tumed mod­els, wed­dings, the odd prod­uct shoot. But I rarely try and shoot ugli­ness, because the world has enough of that already.

The artist’s role is to burn with Promethean fire, and its fuel is Promethean pain — to have your guts pulled out for all to see, picked over by the vul­tures of the world, and still to keep breath­ing, keep being reborn. To keep dream­ing, and to keep the fires alight. “Art” that is only a com­men­tary on ennui, on bore­dom, on apa­thy… fails.

Good art alchem­izes real­ity into truth. It takes the world and shows its deeper heart, the eter­nal bal­anc­ing the transient.

But the process itself can be exhausting.

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Hav­ing some prob­lems with my site at the moment — my apolo­gies! I upgraded word­press and the tem­plate I’ve been using for the last few years broke. So, try­ing to find a new one that dis­plays both images and text well — so far, a lot harder than I expected. I do know some of the menu items are hav­ing dif­fi­cul­ties and am try­ing to fig­ure it out; hope­fully I can can that sorted in the next day or so.

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I just stopped using Zenfolio’s photo host­ing and now some of my older image links are bro­ken. I’ve switched to self-hosted Gallery2 soft­ware and am in the process of upload­ing pho­tos and updat­ing bro­ken links, but it might take a cou­ple days. Hope­fully I’ll be able to get it all cleaned up over the weekend.

Also, I’m con­sid­er­ing a major site redesign — maybe work­ing on cre­at­ing a cus­tom word­press tem­plate for this site. I’m not very happy with Gallery2’s look, either, so may be div­ing into its css and rip­ping it apart. Any suggestions?

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I’ve just been read­ing up on mycore­me­di­a­tion, or clean­ing soil with ben­e­fi­cial fungi, at Fungi Per­fecti (http://www NULL.fungi NULL.com/mycotech/mycova NULL.html).

Here’s an exerpt:

What can you do? Delin­eate your garbage into cat­e­gories. Not only com­post all organic debris, but seg­re­gate the refuse into piles appro­pri­ate for a vari­ety of desired mush­room species. Inoc­u­late card­board and paper prod­ucts, cof­fee grounds, and wood debris with mush­room spawn. Teach chil­dren about the role of fungi, espe­cially mush­rooms, in the forests and their crit­i­cal role in build­ing soils. Encour­age mush­rooms to grow in your yards by mulching around plants. Take advan­tage of cat­a­strophia — nat­ural dis­as­ters are per­fect oppor­tu­ni­ties for community-action recy­cling projects. We should learn from our elders. Native peo­ples world­wide have viewed fungi as spir­i­tual allies. They are not only the guardians of the for­est. They are the guardians of our future.

Inter­est­ing stuff. Being able to fil­ter agri­cul­tural runoff and get edi­ble mush­rooms at the same time sounds like a great idea. They’ve also been using oys­ter mush­rooms (http://en NULL.wikipedia NULL.org/wiki/Oyster_mushroom) to clean up oil spills; read the whole arti­cle to learn more.

(http://reblog NULL.zemanta NULL.com/zemified/97c259e5-ba65-488e-80a5-1a0401ebd733/)

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“Terra Preta (http://en NULL.wikipedia NULL.org/wiki/Terra_preta)”, or “dark earth”, is an Ama­zon­ian Indian tech­nol­ogy which can vastly improve soil fer­til­ity (http://en NULL.wikipedia NULL.org/wiki/Fertility_%28soil%29) and pull car­bon diox­ide out of the atmos­phere, poten­tially keep­ing it out for thou­sands of years. Bio­mass — plant and ani­mal waste such as manure, waste wood, and crop left­overs — can be turned into char­coal (or “biochar”) and then buried in agri­cul­tural soil, mak­ing rich black earth that plants grow very, very well in. Char­coal is extremely porous, and pro­vides a per­fect envi­ron­ment for ben­e­fi­cial soil microor­gan­isms that help plants grow. It also holds water, and can greatly help crops to sur­vive drought conditions.

Biochar can be used to pull car­bon diox­ide out of the atmos­phere and poten­tially reverse global warm­ing (if it were used on a wide enough scale). As we know from archae­o­log­i­cal carbon-14 dat­ing (http://en NULL.wikipedia NULL.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating) processes, char­coal lasts a long time; (terra preta was actu­ally “dis­cov­ered” by archae­ol­o­gists try­ing to fig­ure out how the Ama­zon, with its depleted trop­i­cal soil, could have sup­ported the large urban pop­u­la­tion for which they were find­ing evi­dence). Plants pull CO2, car­bon diox­ide, out of the air to grow — this is where the vast major­ity of their mass comes from. If that mass is bro­ken down nat­u­rally by the com­post­ing process, the car­bon stays out of the atmos­phere for 6 – 12 years on aver­age. Char it, though, and it’ll be in the ground for hun­dreds, if not thou­sands, of years. (Some patches of Terra Preta soil in the Ama­zon are around 2000 years old.) What’s more, you can weigh exactly how much you’re seques­ter­ing — just put it on a scale. The­o­ret­i­cally, this could even­tu­ally work into car­bon trad­ing schemes.

Pho­to­syn­the­sis, at its most basic, is the process where plants use sun­light to take in car­bon diox­ide, use the car­bon for cell build­ing blocks, and give off oxy­gen. When it is charred, or burned with­out access to oxy­gen, the water vapor and var­i­ous flam­ma­ble gases, pri­mar­ily methane and hydro­gen, are dri­ven off. The gases can be col­lected for cook­ing gas or elec­tric­ity gen­er­a­tion, or in lower tech pro­duc­tion directed below the char­coal con­tainer to feed the burn. A com­pany called Epidra is mak­ing char, hydro­gen, and biodiesel simul­ta­ne­ously — see this arti­cle (http://www NULL.eprida NULL.com/news/nature_viewpoint_on_charcoal NULL.pdf) for a good overview on biochar and mod­ern usage.

Char­coal appears to pro­vide a medium which facil­i­tates the trans­fer of min­er­als from soils to plants; there­fore it is bet­ter used in con­junc­tion with min­eral fer­til­iz­ers and com­post. Essen­tially, it pro­vides habi­tat for sym­bi­otic organ­isms that help plant roots to grow, and acts as a buffer for soil mois­ture; it is not a fer­til­izer but a facil­i­ta­tor. Liq­uid fer­til­iz­ers can be applied to the char before it is mixed into soil; an Indian researcher, Dr. Sai Bhaskar Reddy Nakka, has been exper­i­ment­ing (http://e-terrapretarooftopexp NULL.blogspot NULL.com/2008/04/tp-urine-experiment-photos NULL.html) with using clay pots full of char­coal as uri­nals in a boys’ school in India; when the pots start to smell, after 10 days or so, the sat­u­rated char­coal is removed and then mixed into pot­ting, bring­ing a strong dose of eas­ily acces­si­ble nitro­gen to plants. Pho­tos from the trial showed a much darker, health­ier green leaves on the treated plants than on the con­trol sample.

Com­pletely untested per­sonal the­ory, but I sus­pect that apply­ing a liq­uid myc­or­rhizal root­ing enhancer (like Mycogrow (http://www NULL.fungi NULL.com/mycogrow/index NULL.html), for exam­ple) to char­coal would give very nice results as well.

For a home gar­dener, you could make your own char­coal or buy bar­be­cue char­coal made from tree trim­mings — i.e., the nat­ural stuff, not the bri­quets. The eas­i­est way to make char­coal, though it won’t be burned entirely through, is to place a metal garbage bin full of yard waste upside down on bon­fire coals and leave it 24 hours, then pore water over it to make sure no coals sur­vive. Crush the char­coal down to a pow­der and add it to your gar­den beds, pot­ting soil, or com­post bin.

Any­way, some links:

Watch this first (3 minutes):

Click on the image for a film sec­tion in English

(http://www NULL.biochar NULL.org/joomla/images/stories/BBCmyPart NULL.WMV)

Full movie (45 min) on youtube — very inter­est­ing film about ancient civ­i­liza­tions in the Ama­zon and track­ing them down with archae­ol­ogy (http://nz NULL.youtube NULL.com/watch?v=76gAB5x0sjQ)

Treehugger.com’s overview. (http://www NULL.tree­hug­ger NULL.com/files/2008/03/biochar_an_answer NULL.php) Lots of links in the com­ments sec­tion, too.

Biochar.org (http://www NULL.biochar NULL.org/joomla/index NULL.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=6&Itemid=7) has a bit on sim­ple char­coal mak­ing (http://www NULL.biochar NULL.org/joomla/index NULL.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=3).

Terra Preta on Bioen­er­gylists (http://terrapreta NULL.bioen­er­gylists NULL.org/) — big clear­ing house of infor­ma­tion, lots of links on how to make char­coal. There’s also a dif­fer­ent sec­tion on gasi­fi­ca­tion (http://gasifiers NULL.bioen­er­gylists NULL.org/), which aims at pro­duc­ing burn­able gases from bio­mass pri­mar­ily but gets char as a side product.

Biochar Inter­na­tional (http://www NULL.biochar-international NULL.org/) — very good sum­mary of what Terra Preta does on this page

Wikipedia’s Terra Preta page (http://en NULL.wikipedia NULL.org/wiki/Terra_preta)

Terra Preta — Sci­ence forums (http://hypography NULL.com/forums/terra-preta/) — nice active forums talk­ing about terra preta

Note: Terra Preta has become a big inter­est of mine and some­thing that peo­ple really need to know more about (espe­cially my Dad, who’s the main per­son I’m writ­ing this sum­mary for since he works on envi­ron­men­tal projects around Africa). Feel free to link to this post!

Update, Feb 12 2009: There’s now a book on biochar, “Biochar for Envi­ron­men­tal Management”, available at http://www.earthscan.co.uk/?tabid=49381 (http://www NULL.earth­scan NULL.co NULL.uk/?tabid=49381) .

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I’ve been play­ing with a big site redesign — I’m think­ing about switch­ing to the “Options” theme and using Gallery2 for my pho­tos, since google can index it and I can still set up print order­ing. Any­way, just test­ing some things out. I feel like I’m star­ing up a very steep learn­ing curve, again.

Orig­i­nal here for pinged sites.

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It’s the short­est night of the year. I’d much rather be out at a bon­fire than here at the dig­i­tal hearth, but at least Tony and I went out to the Friedric­shain Folk­park and climbed the big hill out there. We had some good bread with local goat cheese on top, and split a bot­tle of “Odin’s Drink” honey ale. Very lovely. Get­ting up and down the hill is a bit like walk­ing a labyrinth on a cone; lots of cir­cling around and get­ting very dis­ori­ented. It’s all forested and you can’t get much of a view. I like it.

On a side note, I’m try­ing out a new ser­vice, Ping (http://ping NULL.fm/), which lets me cross post from my blog to a vari­ety of other sites — LJ, MySpace, etc. So here’s hop­ing it works.

Also, Tony took some pic­tures of me for pro­file pics and what­not — take a look and tell me which you think I should be using, please! They’re linked off the photo below.

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So I couldn’t fig­ure out how to get that backup to work, but luck­ily I’d been cross­post­ing just about every­thing from this blog to LJ and was able to man­u­ally copy and paste most of my posts back in. I skipped some that were just links to gal­leries with­out text; I fig­ure it would be bet­ter to do some writ­ing about the pho­tos and then put some­thing like them back up later.

In the mean­time, I’m think­ing to use this as an oppor­tu­nity to redo my site a bit. Now I just have to fig­ure out how!

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Well, some bit of mal­ware just ate my site. I’m extremely annoyed — as if I wasn’t in the mid­dle of mov­ing to a new city and try­ing to get the apart­ment ready and all that!

I do have a backup file from two weeks ago when I last upgraded word­press, and I may even be able to fig­ure out how to use it. But, not tonight.

Any­way, if you’re here for my pho­tos, please view the gallery here. Be sure to check out the new work with Tamta in the “Mod­els” folder espe­cially — she looks like a Renais­sance beauty and I’ve really been enjoy­ing work­ing with her.

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