Chris Jordan is a photographer I admire greatly. His skill and dedication to his craft is stunning, not to mention the fact that his photographs contribute to the world around us.
I was surfing some of my photography sites when I noticed a link to a new set of his photographs...
I didn't want to look at them once I knew what the subject matter was... but it must be the power of his photographs that drew me to look closely at every one...
I look around me in my room full of stuff and... realize that there is a price to be paid.
I don't believe in the divine. I don't believe in prophecy. But who can look at this world and not feel that something is deeply and horribly wrong? This world is damaged - and it's much worse than just global warming and the buzzwords we hear on television.
And yet it's my fault... mine for believing that the dollar I paid for the soda I bought today was really what it cost. Chris Jordan opened my eyes.
This is the story of a football team, of a coach and his staff, and of a student body and community all coming together for one night to win a football game.
Last Tuesday night, a football player passed away - a young man who brought smiles to everyone around him, and was by all accounts one of the most popular and loving students at the school.
I can't describe the pain I saw in the students, teachers, and coaches. I won't even try.
What I can do, is tell a small part of a much larger story of what I consider one of the most important events in school history.
My wife and I had a wedding to shoot, so I arrived late - the last few minutes of the game with Benson trailing Westside 15-19. Even when they were down, this team believed.
Because their football coach believed.
This is the play where we scored the go-ahead touchdown, pre-snap.
And this is the score - a fumble in the end zone, recovered for a touchdown.
The crowd roared like I've never heard before, the student body crowded together shoulder-to-shoulder, realizing they were a part of something special.
Yet with time remaining, and the point-after blocked, all Westside needed was a field goal to win. The next few chaotic minutes were agonizing as Westside returned the kickoff to mid-field and actually looked like they might have a chance to kick.
But on fourth down Westside couldn't convert. Benson wins.
After the game, the emotionally and physically drained players and coaches came together, tearfully sharing a moment none of them will ever forget.
"If I coach one more year, or five years, or ten years, or fifty years," coach Heuertz said, "There will never be a win that means as much to me as this one."
This is the story of a football team, and a community, and a school that came together on one night to win a football game - and to heal. It speaks to the power of football in this country - the undeniable spirit and strength in young people - and of the power of a coach and his staff to be role models for the entire community. They took an incredibly painful hit, but got back up and won a game. They took the loss of a player and helped to heal an entire school.
This blog is named "This moment is all we have" and there has never been a moment when I realized it more than after the game, when the coach hugged his little girl.
Every moment is a chance to do something great. Every moment is ours to live to the fullest. Every moment is a chance to grow and be a better person. Every moment is precious because we don't know how many more we might have.
Today I took my father to see GI Joe on the big screen, more than 20 years after I spent a good amount of my childhood playing with the toys and reading the comics, savoring the wild imagination those toys brought to my life.
When I was young, my dad and I would always go to the comic book shops and look for the back issues of the GI Joe comics I had missed. He did it because he thought they'd be worth a fortune (they're not), and I did it because it was fun, and because collecting comics was something I could do with my dad. And the toys? Endless hours were lost with those toy Joes battling the legion of Cobra.
Some day I will miss my father, but I'll always have this morning, when I picked him up and just told him we were going to the comic store. He laughed when we arrived at the theater to see GI Joe, but he hugged me close when I told him we were seeing the movie with closed captioning (he's deaf, so usually going to the movies sucks).
It was just so much fun. At at least a dozen points in the movie he laughed out loud, and asked me, "how do they think up these things?
For just a little bit, I felt like I was 12 years old with my dad, and the love I felt for him in the theater was that innocent love of a son's. My dad has always had flaws, and although I knew that when I was younger, I loved him fiercely, and unlike so many people out there - that fierce love was returned.
Today my dad and I both smiled as Snake Eyes came to life to battle Storm Shadow - in all its glorious ridiculousness, both ninjas battling with lightning speed, using swords, shurikens, guns, and fists. It reminded me of a much simpler time, where the good guys were good because they always did the right thing, and the bad guys were bad because they were just plain evil.
I felt like a kid in a comic shop, sharing a timeless moment with his father.
It's so surreal to think that soon I will be a father, and maybe someday in the far future, after we're both a lot older, he'll look back at his life and love me like he did when he was a kid.
