about becoming aware

about becoming aware

 

being around infants is amazing… their world is really incomprehensible to us.  imagine though, as they come into the world… they have a direct interface with everything around them, filtered only through the senses.  it’s wide open… but it’s all just raw data.  born into the world, it’s still life, but not like we know it… stimulus and response in the reptilian brain, but no interjecting awareness.

 

but as time goes on, you can literally watch the awareness develop.  the baby realizes: these objects drifting in and out of my vision are part of my world.  then, incredibly, if there is a sound over there, there might be something making that sound, and if i turn my head, i may be able to see it.  then, these things here at the end of my arms part of me, and i am able to control them!  and not only that, but if i handle things in just the right way, these things–let’s call them hands–can let me interact with the other things that are part of my world… and heh! damn! i can use them to put stuff in my mouth too!  and that opens up a whole new way of sensing and knowing the world…

 

the first steps in the process are gripping to watch.  i wish i had so many epiphanies myself these days.  for babies, the paradigm is always flexing and breaking and morphing… but the paradigms, like the rest of the kid, become less malleable as time goes on.  it might be true that the more we learn the easier it becomes to learn more… but it might also be true that the more we learn, the harder it becomes to step outside that learning–even for a second.  it’s harder to shock ourselves.

 

once language develops, we’re pretty much goners.  our minds are locked into a way of thinking, our language–for most of us–becomes the only way we can think.  Confucius said we should rectify the terms… which would help in some cases, but i don’t think it’s enough because no matter how upstanding our terms are, they’re still going to limit us.  language, like all good structures, scaffolds… is allows us to go beyond the original limits, but imposes new limits based on that structure.  there’s probably some greek myth about that.

 

anyways, i think it’s helpful if we can all just be like babies sometimes… i guess people who meditate kind of do that–thoughtless awareness… who knows, but if we set aside the limits of our mental structures–in some way–once in a while, it opens us up to new possibilities.

 

about crafts

about crafts

 

craft is the natural product of creativity… with some basic skill and ingenuity to focus the creative energy, production invariably ensues.  all creation flows from the same process, but as the medium becomes more sophisticated, the creative tendencies lose their organic edge and things get so tied up in figuring out the process that they’re hardly fun anymore…

 

when i was a little kid i used to love making crafts.  it usually mean something like melting crayons, or gluing pretzels to a piece of felt.

 

as i got older i started to think it was more sophisticated to make more complicated things, and things on computers, and things with batteries… but as I soon started to lose interest because the processes were complicated enough that it became about the process rather than the act of creation.  imagine, whole universities set up to teach people how to use a tool to make something!  creating things feels best when the process is stripped down to the minimum, and the number of steps between creativity and creation are the fewest.  there’s something to be said for finger painting… not to say that there’s nothing redeeming in silkscreening and airbrushing… but the raw interface of the crafting process is the invigorating part for me.

http://www.aroundsquare.com/aroundsquare/home.html

 

 

 

 

 

about wood

 

about wood

i read a cool essay once by buckminster fuller, about wood.  the gist of it was something about how wood, actually biomass in general, is the result of thousands of years of sunlight pounding at the earth.  but instead of just bouncing off or getting absorbed and becoming heat, a portion of that light gets grabbed by the little green things in plants.  and those little green things use the energy to make stuff, real stuff we can touch.  and over the years it builds up to the point where we have whole ecosystems with animals and big trees and stuff.  but the point is, that that’s not just some big tree… it actually represents years and years of stored energy from the sun, like a massive spring that’s been wound up tighter, season after season.  all the more with the coal and oil underground.  massive batteries that take eons to charge.  if i remember correctly, his point was something about global warming as we release eons of this stored energy in the space of a few decades.  

 

but the cool part for me is about the coiling up of the spring.  most of the world tends towards chaos, but with nothing more than this persistent source of primal energy, plants are able to weave order from the chaos around them… to intentionally take little bits of this and that from the dirt and air around them, and weave them into something super orderly… seems like almost in direct opposition to entropy.  but i don’t really understand entropy.  but that’s not the point.  the point is that when we hold a hunk of wood in our hands, that wood represents something really cool when we think of it.  the secret lives of ordinary things are always amazing, but there’s something especially cool about the secret lives of things in nature… i think it’s because the plot is never simple… never sterile.  complexity makes things interesting, but the cool thing in nature is that the complex stuff all looks really simple on the surface, so there’s an entry point for everyone.  not like algebra.

 

interfacelift

 

interfacelife

as i work more on this site i have started paying more attention to the other sites on the internets… and some of them are really good.  i bet there are people that make a living with these things… and probably even people who make a living making spaces for people to  make a living with these things.  the whole thing is a bit bizarre, the virtual surrealtors, the unsung heros who spend long hours toiling over gigantic abacuses. 

 

…and the little cyborgs growing up among us.  the little guys who are conceived first as digitized pictures from an ultrasound and circulated over the emails before they even see the light of day.  their whole world is digitized before they even have a chance to know analogue.  there’s nothing inherently wrong with it… it’s just weird.  and it’s weird objectively, because weirdness is defined by its opposite, and the opposite is bigger than this point in time.  it might not seem weird in the here and now, but is freaking weird in the big picture of life on earth!  but here on the internets we all embrace it, and we’ve probably all been called worse than weird at one point in time or another.