June Recap

The past couple of weeks have been crazy! Per the last update, I was in Chicago for the Streets Festival - which was amazing and will have photographs from there up soon. It was this summer festival, with 4 stages of mostly every single Muslim artist in America and from outside of America as well, as well as artists of other faiths. (minus Kareem Salama, I think he's still on his tour...thats the excuse I'm going to give because otherwise it would be "he's country" and I believe everyone really likes country secretly, but they also just like to hate on it it was great to meet so many different people who make such different types of art.  I also got to meet El Seed from Montreal, which you can see his work here on dA, and watched him paint a mural..as well as Mohammed "AerosalArabic" Ali. They both made great murals in the span of one day, very awe-inspiring to see the work in real life, mashaAllah. Mos Def was also the headliner and I got some great shots of him as well alhamdulillah. He started off with an "asalamu alaykum" piece which I hope he records because it was really something different yet familiar mashaAllah.

The weekend after, I went to YMFA Camp up in Camp Taha in Michigan. It was Muslim run camp, which is very rare to find in America, and it was great to be surrounded by rules and an environment that encourages your identity and makes you proud of it. The camp isn't done being built yet - theres an entire sisters compound with our own pool, basketball and tennis courts, cabins of course, fields and more. It was a wonderful experience meeting all the girls at that camp, and I let a couple of the younger girls use my camera - which at first I wasn't so sure about, because its not a very cheap camera ha - but after I saw the photos they took, I was glad I was able to give someone the chance to use some equipment they don't normally have access to. That's how I learned to use cameras too, by borrowing the ones from the school photo lab and taking a bajillion photos, so it always helps.

Plus it helps to keep in mind that creativity, in my opinion, is not a selfish venture. I believe that sharing is caring - and most of the designers and photographers I look up to practice this as well. If you're going to make really cool art for yourself in a cave...no one cares. Thats how I started this blog anyway - I took the advice of abduzeedo (www.abduzeedo.com ) who started his blog after he was robbed of his equipment and work. He began to put up all his work online, and started offering tips and tutorials as well. Now its a whole team of designers with a popular daily inspiration features, tutorials for photoshop, illustrator, and more, advice, articles, freebies and more. I could go on and on but thats for another post.

Back to Chicago for the 47th Annual ISNA convention in Rosemont, it was another amazing event of the summer. I hadn't been to ISNA in a while since it wasn't in Chicago for the past couple of years, so it was a nice experience to go back to Rosemont. I've been to so many ISNA's there, its a comforting place in an odd sort of way. I volunteered for the SeekersGuidance booth ( www.Seekersguidance.org ) which was fun alhamdulillah, because I used to man the MuslimTees booth, many moons ago. I met a couple of the SG-Team people and got to see many of the scholars who would stop by the booth, which is a blessed experience alhamdulillah. Our booth was part of a bigger booth, of a bookstore and they had the most adorable kids in the world mashaAllah. They were all homeschooled so we hit it off right away. As a homeschooled kid, I know there's something different about kids that are homeschooled. They don't have that particular rigidity of a consumer life, which these days, is not surprising to find in young kids. They don't sit there and talk about their favorite cartoon characters or their favorite store or their favorite toys and candy (although they were obsessed with candy , but they were just hilarious to be around and kept playing around and telling us stories and asking funny questions - one of them sang us a nasheed, and it was just such a heart warming experience!  It really concerns me to know that statistics predict more generations of princess-claiming girls, only to grow up to realize its not true, and boys who expect and demand the world serve them, while knowing nothing about chivalry. So to see that there is still hope for our Ummah is a good feeling alhamdulillah.. inshaAllah.

Oh yea I went to a couple of lectures, they were good too.

The places I went and the people I met are all experiences that help shape me and let me find yet another hidden layer of positivity and life. You never really stop growing or learning so make the most of it! Alhamdulillah.