// Dirt!//

One day a terrible fire broke out in a forest - a huge woodlands was suddenly engulfed by a raging

wild fire. Frightened, all the animals fled their homes and ran out of the forest. As they came to the

edge  of  a  stream they  stopped to  watch the fire  and they  were feeling  very  discouraged  and

powerless. They were all bemoaning the destruction of their homes. Every one of them thought

there was nothing they could do about the fire, except for one little hummingbird.

This particular hummingbird decided it would do something. It swooped into the stream and picked

up a few drops of water and went into the forest and put them on the fire. Then it went back to the

stream and did it again, and it kept going back, again and again and again. All the other animals

watched in disbelief; some tried to discourage the hummingbird with comments like, “Don’t bother,

it is too much, you are too little, your wings will burn, your beak is too tiny, it’s only a drop, you

can’t put out this fire.”

And as the animals stood around disparaging the little bird’s efforts, the bird noticed how hopeless

and forlorn they looked. Then one of the animals shouted out and challenged the hummingbird in a

mocking voice, “What do you think you are doing?” And the hummingbird, without wasting time or

losing a beat, looked back and said, “I am doing what I can.”

At times a little campy (what with the old 90s looking cartoon renderings), Dirt! is moreover a story of the most important source of life that we have forgotten. It tells the tale of a subject old as time but that we see as inconsequential. The life of all the land around us is being looked at as a dead entity, yet we step upon it, look to it to support our species, and highly depend upon its resources every day, even if we don’t know it yet. Dirt is our land. It is our species. And at first if you doubt this, as I had, that’s completely understanding. Our society hasn’t entirely given us a very major outlook on dirt. Instead, the word itself has become a…dirty word. Even as I have gardened and helped to compost, I still haven’t looked at dirt as something all that important. Yet, after just half an hour into this documentary dirt becomes something of a matter of importance. And by the end point it becomes a life force you are inevitably drawn to protect and to build back up. 

The story above is illustrated (once again, in kind of a silly way) by the film. Yet, it prizes diference and those people that fight against the sum of society. A society that feels at quite a loss when viewed at the individual level. What can anyone really do by themselves when society holistically is at a loss and can’t look anywhere else but in the same direction? When all you, as the individual, want to do is look the opposite way and shout to the rest of the world that this will help? It can be hard being alone amongst a mass of people all sitting comfortably in their outlooks. It can be hard to tell a mass society no and to turn them about-face in a much different, and much better, direction. But just because you are starting off alone does not mean it will continue that way. Feeling strongly about something will cause you to become a magnet toward your cause. You will draw in one individual after another until you yourself have formed a community of beings all looking in a new direction. 

I really want to start something. Not just because of this film or the many others I’ve seen recently, but because for the first time, I feel like this is what I’m here to do. I want to help the world around me and impact the people within it. I not only want to use my skills as a cinematographer to uncover their stories, I want to live in those stories and make a story of my own. I think I really want to start something big…