University of British Columbia
It only took me two full days to get to the Atlanta airport. I left Anderson on Thursday and finally made it to the airport Saturday morning where I then did eight hours of turbine time getting here to the University of British Columbia day before yesterday. I love doing my work in universities with all these young energetic people around me
Thursday I had an uneventful drive to Atlanta where I met with our Childspring staff in the afternoon. I was shown an inspiring presentation of our expanding open heart program in Colombia, South America. The work there is really wondrous and gaining much traction. Five more children were identified as candidates for open heart surgery.
After this inspiring presentation, I walked the fifty feet across the road to the High Museum and saw $500 million of wondrous Dutch Old Masters. The work assembled is staggering in its creativity and wonder. There are so many ways creativity manifests in our lives when we live grounded lives of service to others. Some do this with their paint brushes; some do it with scalpels. I try to do so with cameras and pen.
A ten minute encounter with a museum security guard provided an amazing opportunity. It would have been so easy to have gotten cross-wise with the Atlanta attitude. As it turned out I was able to get him to understand he worked in one of the best possible places in the world and had a profoundly important job. I reminded him he was sitting at his desk twenty feet away from one of the most admired paintings in the world, worth perhaps $100 million. He was keeping it safe and in good order and was enabling me to see it at leisure. He was transfixed I would think he or his job mattered. He got up and nearly bowed down to me, shaking my hand, telling me how honored he was to meet me, and was so happy I found the exhibition most satisfying. We really do have a choice about what we put into the lives of those around us. Affirmation is something that always goes down well.
Friday I went to the Atlanta Botanical Gardens and made more than three hundred images of some very distinctive things, especially nineteen installations of mosaiculture – a surreal French thing with thousands of tiny plants installed to yield something looking a bit like complex topiary. This form of creativity was completely new to me.
If you want to do something really cool, get with a precocious ten year old boy on his first airplane ride and show him a huge volcano (Mt Rainier) covered with snow. His eighty year old grandmother one seat away was on her first plane ride as well. I had to make it good. For four hours I got to show this boy what the world looked like from the top side. He couldn't get enough of it and his three-generation family was most grateful for my sitting services. It sure made one of my long rides seem short.
Saturday night I was setting out to photograph the Strait of Georgia at sunset; it must be a whole quarter mile away from me. As I did so an elegant woman (a visiting professor) saw me going out with tripods and camera pack and asked if I was going to the beach and if she could accompany me! I thought about this for at least a nano-second. I ended up with a really splendid three-hour wandering with a visiting professor from Ontario and then fixings for dinner. It was a magnificent beginning to this journey.
I wandered about Stanley Park most of yesterday; a thousand acres of paradise set in the middle of an amazingly dense vertical city. What a magical place of people enjoying God’s creation. There is a world class Japanese Garden immediately next to my university residence. I plan to 'collect' it in a couple hours when it opens up. The university proves the perfect place to stay in the middle of paradise. A million buses run from here into the city centre. There is a lounge and kitchen closer than the ones in my house.
My phone does not work here … wahhhh!! I’m guessing I have a vast backlog of texts somewhere in cyberspace. Later in the day my nice fast hard-wired Ethernet Internet access will be gone and then I will have intermittent phone access going up the coast … perhaps chances to clip onto Wi-Fi at assorted small towns. The weather forecast as far as Anchorage is really very good for ten days. At home surreal torrential rainfall continues unabated from what I am told.
Gotta go!!! A wave of photons is careening across paradise at a 1000 mph and it needs to be collected … sunrise.
Blessings,
Craig C. Johnson
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