Dear friends,

My team and I are heading back to Midway Atoll in December, to witness and film the adult albatrosses doing their mating rituals. We will turn toward the beauty and primacy of this collective call to life as another facet of the rich metaphor that Midway offers. We are privileged on this leg of the journey to have a real live national treasure joining us: the writer Terry Tempest Williams. We’ll be on the island December 2-11, and you can follow us on our website: www.midwayjourney.com.

~cj

Dear friends and followers of the Midway project,

As my team and I prepare to travel back to Midway Atoll, I cannot help but note the macabre juxtaposition of the environmental disaster that is happening in the Pacific Ocean, with the one that is happening in the Gulf of Mexico. The two phenomena are oddly parallel, involving (among other grotesque features) the deaths of untold numbers of sea birds, caused by millions of tons of our petroleum products that have poured into the ocean via our collective negligence. And in each case the birds can be viewed as messengers, serving as one small warming signal of a much larger calamity, with global consequences, in which our individual consumer lifestyles are unavoidably complicit.

My friend the artist Richard Lang says the opposite of beauty is not ugliness, but indifference. For me this means that to live ethical lives, we are called to turn toward the staggering enormity of human-caused catastrophes like the Pacific Garbage Patch and the Gulf Oil Disaster, opening our heart to their horrors, and taking the risk that we might be overwhelmed by the potent feelings this process brings up in us. I can see no other acceptable approach, yet I fear that by dwelling on the awfulness of these tragedies—and the smorgasbord of others we survey in the news every day—we may lose our already tenuous connection with life’s beauty, mystery, humor, and joy. I want to learn to stand in the paradox of these conflicting realities, turning more fully toward each of them despite the anxiety involved, as they generate their respective teachings about what it means to live as an engaged citizen in our times.

These are some thoughts and intentions I carry in mind, as we travel back to Midway to document another chapter in the richly metaphoric intersection of the mythic albatross and the ten million tons of plastic pollution that swirl in the remote waters of the North Pacific. I invite you to follow our expedition as we blog from the island on midwayjourney.com, and as we release our photographs, writings, and the documentary film that will follow.

Happy July to all, with warm regards from Seattle,

~cj

Greetings and happy almost-summer-solstice. Here’s a cute 4-minute video piece on a project I was involved with at a local elementary school. These kids rocked my world:

Hello friends, greetings and welcome to my new website. You can sign up to follow my blog here. I don't plan on writing very often, just the occasional update on new projects, news, etc. And be sure to check the cool SeaDragon zooming feature on the Running the Numbers series, courtesy of my friends at Microsoft’s Live Labs.

Several new projects are in the pipeline, so stay tuned.

Cheers from Seattle,

~cj, May 24, 2010