maurag.com

March 12, 1996 – February 23, 2011

I love this ad. And Willem  Dafoe.

Loving this photographers work. Check out more of her stuff here – Irina Werning. Her Muse series is awesome.

But who wouldn’t?

This summer my niece turned 13. She also entered womanhood. You know, she was “visited by Aunt Flo”. My niece is 1/4 Navajo and they have this amazing tradition. Instead of quietly disappearing to the bathroom with a box of maxipads and a quick lesson about birds and bees from mom, or your sister, or the neighbor who got boobs earlier than you did,..the Navajo celebrate this moment with a week long series of ceremonies. Hair braiding, running in the desert, all night chanting, blessings and sharing of meals…one of those ceremonies involved making a corn cake and baking it overnight in the earth under a pile of burning juniper. This corn cake was then distributed to family and friends. If you choose not to eat the cake, you were obligated to return it to the earth. I returned my piece to a corn field outside of Erie, Colorado. It was a rainy day and harvest was near. I stood in the middle of the field, muddy shoes, rain on my head, breaking the cake into bits and throwing it as far as I could in every direction. As I finished the last bit, the sun made it’s final showing for the day between the cloud cover and the Rocky Mountain front range. In that moment, with the sun shining through the corn stalks shimmering in rain drops, with  the smell of the earth and the rain, I felt right smack in the middle of the circle of life. A loved one had passed weeks earlier, my niece had just become a woman, the corn was ending its growing season, and I, I felt somewhere right in the middle of all that. And it felt good.