Steven Gray 5/12/16 Steven Gray 5/12/16

Creative Portraits: Annie in Henna

Depending on the day, the life of my mind is usually best described as resembling either a carnival funhouse or an all-hyena cast performing Shakespeare's "The Tempest." Photography is my tether and my release valve. Creativity keeps me sane. And I am blessed beyond measure to have a spouse who not only helps me hold back the crazy, but loves to create art with me.

Steven Gray 10/31/12 Steven Gray 10/31/12

Travel Blog: India, Day 8 - The Market

You ever watch a travel show on TV and watch the likes of Anthony Bourdain stroll through an obscure street market in Southeast Asia? Sitting at home in Pensacola, Florida, by far one of the most sensible conservative shopping environments one could find in the continental US, I always wondered if the markets in other countries were really that busy and colorful in other places, or if the TV crews purposefully shot them to look as exotic and non-Western as possible. Well, on this last trip to India, I found out. The markets really are that incredible.

After our harrowing race back to town, I accompanied my host through the back streets of the neighborhood to emerge in a brightly lit square, where the town market was in full swing. Again, my presence caused a bit of a splash. Several people followed me around to observe me in the most transparent way possible, eyes narrowed and mirroring my movements. I'm usually okay with the Indian street stare-downs, but I have to confess that it got a little old by this point; I actually started to wish that one unpleasant-looking codger in particular would make a move on me just so I could knock him down. But no harm was done on either side.

In most of India, meals are curried or fried. If the meal is an Indian fry-up, it's a pretty simple affair: chicken and oil, plus whichever vegetables are going to be served with the rice. Curry, however, requires quite a few ingredients, and they are usually bought fresh that day. The staple shopping list for a full curry meal, assuming that you don't have any herbs laying around, includes:

Meat (usually chicken, sometimes goat or mutton)
Onions
Garlic
Ginger
Chiles
Assorted vegetables

The above ingredients are simmered in a particular order in a bit of oil, spiced with turmeric and a few other seasonings, and eventually become a curry whose base ingredients are cooked down so as to be barely recognizable, but still incredibly tasty. My hosts all over the country were desperately hoping that I wouldn't be able to handle the spiciness of their curries--"is it too spicy for you?" seems to be the country's national motto--but I am proud to say that I was always able to eat Indian curry. The cumulative effect was less than optimal after a month, but I definitely enjoyed the the individual meals.

Steven Gray 9/12/12 Steven Gray 9/12/12

India, Day 5 - Eyeglasses for the Adivasi

The Adivasi are one of the original people groups to populate the country of India. Despite their long history of living in India, they now live out an existence somewhere between abject poverty and pure serfdom as underpaid tea pickers. Adivasi all over India eek out a living as laborers for the new, non-tribal owners of the land that was home to their ancestors. I traveled with my host to visit a group of Adivasi, where we performed basic eye exams and fitted as many of them as we could with eyeglasses. If it is possible to be "elegantly destitute" in such wretched environs, the Adivasi manage to conduct themselves accordingly. They viewed us, and especially me, not with fumbling curiosity, but with an air of contemplative interest. Unlike the gawping, ogling stares that greeted me in the towns, where Indian equivalents of country bumpkins gathered en masse to give me the once-over, the Adivasi regarded me with stoic reserve. The women stood dignified in their saris while the men clasped their hands behind their backs and stood with a balletic lightness to observe the proceedings. Even the children were mindfully quiet.

When you are confronted with the less attractive defects that plague humanity, it is hard to watch. This is a fact no matter where you are in the world. But to see a group of people, like the Adivasi, with common problems of cataracts and mental illness, lacking both the education to know what is wrong and the resources to do anything if they did, it is especially hard for a stranger to observe. The faces I saw in that little room stayed with me without the aid of photographs.

Steven Gray 9/11/12 Steven Gray 9/11/12

India, Day 4 - Painting the Church.

When you host a hundred children in one building twice a week, a little paint comes in handy to hide the handprints on the walls. My first job in India was to help my host paint the interior of his building. It took a few hours to apply the first coat; afterward, we enjoyed a lunch of chicken bryani and spent the rest of the day running errands and picking up supplies for upcoming events.

Steven Gray 8/26/12 Steven Gray 8/26/12

Reliving India

Last night, I emerged from a small airplane into a familiar atmosphere of warmth and humidity. After a whirlwind six weeks in India and a few days spent in England to decompress and reacclimatize to Western culture, I was back with my friends and family in Florida. I woke up yesterday morning, and before I even opened my eyes my first thought was "where I am going to day and how am I getting there?" Then I remembered that I was at home and in my own bed. My family was in the next room with a pot of freshly-brewed coffee. It was a wonderful, wonderful feeling. I am honestly still a bit numb, and the knowledge that I am actually home with my family is still sinking in.

For the record, Oxford was a wonderful place to decompress. As a fan of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and the filmed adapations of Harry Potter, several days in a city with such a rich literary history and a dozens of recognizable movie locations provided several days of diversion that I needed to return home to the family as something other than an edgy, coarse-mannered mess. I also had the opportunity to see good friends, new and old, even getting the chance to meet Andy Proper, an Oxford photographer with whom I have corresponded on Facebook for the last two years. The only drawback to my time in England was that something in the water disagreed with my stomach in the strongest possible terms. After six weeks in India with no lasting damage, a glass of UK tap water was enough to give me gold-medal stomach cramps and runs. It's a funny world.

Apart from my long walks through the ancient "city of the dreaming spires," I also had time to reflect.

In the third-floor loft graciously provided for me by friends in Oxford, I spent several mornings staring out the open window, racking my brain in an effort to digest and make sense of everything I saw and experienced in India. My friends whom I stayed with have both participated extensively in missions, and we spoke extensively on the subject of service in other countries. With their counsel I came to the following conclusions:

I don't need to rush to find a resolution at the end of the trip, or expect God to rush in with one as I seek to boil down my experiences to a cohesive, single "lesson."
I shouldn't assume that the experience should be measured by how much change I consciously caused. I should look also at the changes caused in me.
There might not be any single, unified final conclusion at which to arrive.

So, for now, I'm not even going to try. Instead, during this week, I am going to relax, start the photo editing process and relive the journey image by image. You, dear readers, will relive the journey with me as I post my photos as a daily journal, covering the events my journey from days one through forty. I dumped four camera cards and my iPhone yesterday for a grand total of 5,643 image and video files, and I cannot wait to start curating, separating and processing them. I humbly invite you to follow this blog closely, because I guarantee you that it will stay interesting for a long time to come. In addition to the photographs, the written recap will capture my own personal revelations as each photograph triggers a fresh memory. As I articulate them for readers, I will be better able to make sense of the trip myself.

Was the trip a powerful experience?

Yes.

What made it powerful?

Everything.

Can I name individual elements of the trip that made it powerful?

No.

But I can still quote Tom Wilkinson: