Putting Our Hands Together

Mornings have turned cool. In direct sunshine though the heat unequivocally says it is summer still!

I took a break yesterday from working on images. I finished reading Albert von Le Coq's 1928 book, Buried Treasures of Chinese Turkestan. This was his account of finding Buddhist, Manichaeian and Nestorian Christian artifacts in the abandoned cities of what used to be Chinese or Eastern Turkestan. He posited that what is now Xinchiang in China was once inhabited by Indo-European peoples. East and West met here.

Growing up in the Philippines and migrating to America halfway through with my life I straddle the East-West divide. I am intrigued by culture and how culture shapes the way we see and live life. Dividing the world into East and West is a convenient way to study cultures. The land mass we call Europe on the West and Asia on the East intrigues me as the boundary between East and West shifted through the centuries.

Last night, my interest in the Central Asia shifted to the Himalayas that bounded it on the south and watched Eric Valli's movie, Himalaya. Half documentary, half fiction, the movie kept my attention for all 104 minutes. It documents the culture of the Dolpopa, a small village in the Nepalese Himalayas, the struggle between the old and young generations, and between the influx of Western technology and old-time religion.

My interest in history and culture is more influential, certainly more established than my interest in art and photography. When I started visiting the Philippines again in the 1980s I hatched plans for documenting the changing culture there. I wanted to unearth what I knew of life in the islands when I was growing up and tracing its connections to the history of the rest of the world. 

In connecting Philippine culture and history to the rest of the world maybe I am attempting to find my own place in the world. Here is passion that I have not really put at the center of my search for what to do with the rest of my life. I doubt I have the boldness and vision of Valli who made his movie after encountering Tibetan culture in his travels to Central Asia. But how do I marry my interests with what I do? How do I put my hands together and connect the forces of the left with that of the right? Where do I find where the forces in my life can come together to make a significant contribution to our knowledge of ourselves and how best to live our lives?