Don't forget that you are Islanders

This year was like a line dance I never quite mastered.

It's cadence was marked by smiles, unquestioning generosity, and that wonderful middling ground where land meets the sea and sky. There were passes that felt familiar, eyes that sparkled with deja vu. I began to learn how to chop firewood, build fires, make rope, navigate, cook. I learned about relationships, power, hate, love, religion, science, climate and about how they were all connected, each integral to understanding the other. Along the way, I learned how to live my life. As Pablo Neruda memoirs published posthumously: Confieso que he vivido. I confess that I have lived.

Isn't that the most we can do? The best we can do?

For me this year was about dismantling category, about losing, silencing myself to write for and record and understand others. As Bruce Chatwin once wrote, "My interest is people." I wanted to learn about life, and about how people lived it. Abandoning the get-in, get-out policy of journalism to listen without an agenda. To say, I'm here to listen to you listen to yourself, to hear what it is that makes you who you are.

I was blessed to interview and work with people from all walks of life this year: artists, taxi drivers, fishermen, navigators, historians, matriarchs, governors, revolutionaries, chiefs, presidents, 9-year-olds, a cave man, doctors, addicts, murderers, musicians, mothers, stars of telenovelas, gang members, unemployed, environmentalists, refugees, millionaires, missionaries, migrant workers, sons and daughters.

A big mentor of mine, Erica Heilman from Vermont, once told me that when she interviews someone she falls in love with them. And it's true - a good interview is exhilarating, heart-wrenching, you slide down their voice and into their soul.

I did not always agree with the people I met, but I listened, and I felt empathy for every one. Most importantly, I heard them listen to themselves.

It's hard to measure the impact of storytelling.

I imagine it as somehow airy, shimmery maybe - bobbing particles that spark and fizz and then dissipate as they are born on parted lips. There were days when I wondered whether storytelling was too fluffy - and I should turn in my equipment for a degree in medicine, alternative energy, architecture. But then I would interview someone, and it was magical. Studs Terkel once wrote that he loved to watch people listen to themselves back on tape, smiling as they'd say: "I never I knew I felt that way." And that's what I loved. After years of searching for the right medium I'm settling on the old fashioned kitchen-table, fireside, deckside, starside chat. The magic that occurs between two people.

It's woefully and wonderfully abstract. Every culture tells stories; every person has a story to tell. It transcends illiteracy, technology, education, access. Everyone can participate, everyone has something to say.

Here is an adapted version of the presentation I gave at the returner's conference.

My first presentation was a little overwhelming - close to 300 photos in 9 minutes! I regretted it after - what a blur, and how naive, trying to fit it all in!
But in some ways that's exactly what it's felt like - time warps and unravels at a dizzying speed when you're traveling. Days bleed together, memories hover and jostle for attention in the belly of a kaleidoscope. The more you see, the less you know.

To encapsulate that feeling in ten minutes is such a challenge, almost a slap in the face. Yet each of my peers unveiled something wonderfully unique and incredibly inspiring.

This is an audio-visual collage that spans:
1 Me
371 days
800ish audio recordings
1 Volleyball Team
5 rabies shots
73 beds
5 religions
15 words for coconut

1 world cup championship
4 marriage proposals
1 Independence Day
9 colonial powers (not counted twice)
12 languages
12 full moons
23 host families
Too many sunburns
Never enough sunsets
14 journals
40 boat trips (not including daily ferry in Villingili, Maldives)
10 school visits
28 books read
2 First Birth Ceremonies
3 Weddings
1 Funeral
25 Flights
41 Islands
1 Me

One of the questions I asked this year was - what advice would you have for the future generation? Just below the equator, on the island of Fuvumulah in the Maldives, an island councilor said something that will stay with me forever: "Don't forget that you are islanders."

Islands are everywhere - Manhattan, United Kingdom, Nelson Mandela's Robben Island, Bangkok was once an island - they populate literary tradition (Thomas More's Utopia, Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare's the Tempest, Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa), even ourselves (I - land).

I'd like to dedicate this to the hundreds of people who helped me this year. When I first set out on my journey I naively envisioned myself looking back on my year able to say, "Look at what I've done. Me! All by myself." I know now, I've realized that all I have learned, all I have achieved - is the cumulative work of hundreds of people. This is for them. People who continue to teach in their absentia when their voices have evaporate on parted lips and alighted on air, settled in the sand, found lift on the foam.

Don't forget that you are Islanders from Aylie Baker on Vimeo.

Copyright © Aylie Baker (and hundreds of islanders). For educational use only.

Featuring Music by: Zero Degree Atoll, Shiuz, the musical stylings of the one and only Susan-Shifa-Thanzy Trio, Lisa, Sergio, Sergio Colivoro, Jorge Toledo, and Los Campesinos (Gran Canaria).