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A few weeks ago my dear friend Tracey Clark from Shutter Sisters called to ask me to consider submitting an idea to this contest. $50,000 from Microsoft/Lenovo to travel anywhere you want in the world to photograph your dream assignment, the winner determined by judges, after the internet selects the top twenty favorite ideas. “I don’t care what you come up with,” she told me. “It just has to have something to do with your work in Rwanda, it has to be something that involves the larger community and it has to support your ideas for hopefulworld.org.”

Hopefulworld.org is a little nest egg of an idea I’ve been holding for a long time now, ever since I met Maggie Doyne in New York City and she told me I needed to follow my heart and start a non-profit and start doing the work I’ve been put on this earth to do. Of course, anyone who knows Maggie knows she said it much more sweetly than that, but I got the point.

So many strange things happened in Rwanda–seismic shifts in my world view, a real cracking open of my soul, weird dreams and odd coincidences that made it feel like I was being set up by the Universe for a life very unlike the one I’d been living. The whole experience really shook me up, and I’ve been in a state of serious reflection ever since trying to put all the pieces together in one whole.

As a result, I’ve developed this uncomfortable relationship with my blog. I feel like that friend who always calls to tell you about the same problem over and over again or the one who you wonder might be a little off her rocker because she keeps reporting things are so, so hard and you can’t for the life of you figure out what is wrong with her. Get over it all ready! Move on! It’s almost impossible for me to write on this blog these days without invoking one of those demons.

It’s almost even more impossible to explain that things are not stuck at all and that I’m actually in a state of disbelief at how good things are and at all the ways the missing pieces are coming to me, without me having to do much of anything at all.

I wish I could say during this process that I’ve been a responsible community member or a faithful friend or an organized Etsy shop owner, but I have not. (Read: heaping mounds of shame on my head) So many things are changing so fast, I’m having trouble keeping up. The only thing that helps is when I step a little more firmly into my new life and into my power. Then things slow down to the just right speed where I know everything I could ever need to know in one moment. But it’s a practice. I don’t have the rhythm down yet. At all.

So when Tracey asked me to enter this contest and then ever so kindly called me everyday to confess her total confidence in me and my process, I thought this is really, really too much for me. She must have made a mistake. I called her back every day for a week to suggest someone else enter, someone else go, but she insisted it was meant for me. Shit. I’ve never felt more unworthy or more un-together to take on something in my life.

But then I started working on ideas. And I realized very quickly that if I was going to take on a project as big as this one, that I didn’t want the idea to come from my own creativity. I wanted to receive an idea, if that makes any sense. I wanted it to be about something more than what my limited mind could cook up. So I wrote a little note to the Universe which said something like this: If you had it in your collective consciousness (or whatever that thing is called) to send someone on a dream assignment, what would you want it to be? Because whatever that thing is, I really want to sign up. And then I twisted up the piece of paper, put it on my little altar, lit a candle and laid on the couch to wait for the answer.

Waiting for the answer turns out to be way more complicated than I first imagined. There are no lightning bolts, for example, which I could accept. But there weren’t any clear nudges either. So I went for a walk. Came home. Tried to sort out my Etsy disaster. Ate an apple. Drank a cup of tea. Sat down. Tried to write. At first, nothing happened, but then one day I sat down to write and I cried hard for an hour over everything I had written which I figured had to be a good sign. And then someone came over and said one little thing which turned out to be an important piece, and then the next day someone called who offered another. And it happened the same the next day. And the day after that.

Every couple days I’d have a total and complete freak out, feeling the full limitation of my brain power and my total ineptitude when it comes to knowing how to listen for the deeper story, and after awhile the only way I could describe it to my friends was to say it felt like balancing a refrigerator on your head. Which sounds silly to me now, since I set it up to not have to have any of the answers in the first place, but still, knowing how to listen carefully to every stray thread that wanted to be gathered up and included in this project was truly one of the most challenging experiences of my life.

It’s funny to me, too, how ashamed I am to admit how much I wanted to get it right and how hard I struggled over an idea which you’ll see isn’t really so complicated after all. But that’s the part where I need the love to get in. I still don’t know there’s a special kind of kindness for not knowing.

Anyway, in the end, I didn’t need to finish it by myself after all because the Universe sent Stephanie Roberts and Tracey to really weave and knit everything together with me into a seamless whole. There’s no bonding like the kind that happens when you’re literally on the phone all night long with two amazing women in two different states, pouring your love into something much much bigger than you could have imagined in the beginning.

We decided at the very last minute that the best way to introduce this project is to create a video. I have hesitated to even post it on this blog (ridiculous, I know) because I’m suffering from a strange kind of hasn’t-the-blogworld-given-you-so-much-already guilt, but Tracey (again) like a true soulsister busted out of her usual zen total-chill space and offered these sage words of advice: “Do I have to come through the phone and strangle you???!! This is not about you, Jen, it’s so much bigger than that. It’s for all of us and you and I are just one small part. So please let the ego out of it, get out of the way and let it happen. Please?” Isn’t it magic when you have friends who will talk to you like that? I was right as rain in two minutes.

Here it is. Picture Hope. You can register here. And vote here. I present it to you with so much love and all the hope I have in my heart. The refrigerator is off of my head. Now all I have to do is to get out these packages.

Shutter Sisters Dream Assignment: Picture Hope from LittlePurpleCow Productions on Vimeo.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 12:13 am and is filed under Journal, art, artist, neighbors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.