Shon

I can’t think where to start, except by reminding myself that beginnings are always continuances, and that soon, somehow, Shane and Josh will be reading this, along with all of the other outpourings of so many who love them or would if they had the chance. My friendship with Shane has been continuing, with a hiatus here and there, in presence but never in love, since 2005. I can’t imagine life without Shane, how my life would be or would have been, even after a year and a half of thinking of almost nothing besides his (and Josh’s, and until recently Sarah’s) overwhelming, omnipresent, suffocating absence.

The way Shane has lived his life has allowed me to live mine, has allowed me to imagine and sometimes even follow through with my imagining, only because Shane lives (lived, has lived, is living, will live) his life like no one else I’ve ever met: pursued with a surgeon’s seriousness and care; driven by a mighty conviction that suffering is never necessary; steadied with a compassionate insistence incapable of turning away from the hard-to-take; salted with an unforgivably goofy sense of humor; and somehow all of it pulled together so casually, so humbly, so sweetly, like a neighbor across the hall who remembers your birthday with cookies. Shane is ten years younger than me, and we’ve always had a beery, all-night torrents-of-the-heart friendship that says more than everything, but I have to admit to him now – now that he will be reading this before long – a little secret, that he’s always been a sort of hero to me.

One can, and should, feel sorry for Shane the Hiker, but an almost awed admiration, joined perhaps with outrage, steps forward instead for Shane the Journalist (author of more than 50 articles from “on the ground” in the Middle East, east Africa, and the U.S., for outlets as diverse as Al Jazeera, Christian Science Monitor, Slate, the LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nation,) Shane the filmmaker (“Songs to Enemies and Deserts,” 2009), Shane the multiple-award-winning photojournalist (shanebauer.net), Shane the linguist (whose fluency in Arabic, which has enabled the most amazing of his work, was won only with long years of largely independent struggle which I was lucky enough to witness and share in part.)I despair of trying to convey Shane the Philosopher, Shane the Goof, Shane the Cook, Shane the Friend. I can only testify to the wrenching irony that Shane of all people, and Josh just as much, the most free and most just people I have ever met in my life, have so long been kept unfree and prevented from living out their lives, as they always have, for love and for justice.