hold fast hope

I discovered the work of Esao Andrews on the album covers of the band Circa Survive. I don't really follow visual art but his paintings have always grasped me. Below are some of my favourites.  Here's a link to his website:  http://esao.net/index.php The Stray  Nowhere Ship Battle  Separate Lives Letting Go  Untitled (Thinker) 

My step dad is from South Africa and moved to British Columbia as a child when his parents fled apartheid. My mother took me overseas as a child to work with the poor. Because of this I grew up with an interest in human rights and in South Africa's situation particularly. I remember writing a paper in junior high school about apartheid and beginning to understand the atrocities more clearly.  In 2009 my family went on a holiday to South Africa. It was an incredible trip. What a beautiful country. We spent most of our time in Cape Town, an incredibly stunning port city at the bottom of the continent, and then took a two week 6200km trip across of the country. We traversed through Kimberly, Johannesburg, Kruger National Park, Pretoria, Durban, Port Elizabeth and many other places along the east coast. What an amazing landscape. I was in heaven going on safaris, playing with baby tigers, lions, cheetahs, petting a full grown cheetah. Cage diving with crocodiles and s...

I love discovering pieces of writing that articulate so clearly my exact questions and ponderings. This is a piece from St. Augustine about how we love to witness grief and misery in the theatre. I've often wondered why my favorite stories and performances are those that reveal tremendous suffering. I think it has something to do with empathy and mercy and the acknowledgement that this stuff happens. Paul Thomas Anderson, one of my favorite filmmakers puts it quite clearly in his film Magnolia:   " This happens. This is something that happens."  - Stanley Spector Confessions of St. Augustine. Book III, Part II "Stage-plays also carried me away, full of images of my miseries, and of fuel to my fire. Why is it, that man desires to be made sad, beholding doleful and tragical things, which yet himself would no means suffer? yet he desires as a spectator to feel sorrow at them, this very sorrow is his pleasure. What is this but a miserable madness? for a ma...