Freedom, Privacy, and Leadership

 Freedom, Privacy, and Leadership

Don’t get me wrong. I do worry about my privacy online. But I still have not yet retreated into a tightly sealed personal space, even though I sometimes do, I must admit, hesitate to fully speak my mind. 

Why, why not, and why?

Fundamentally we are social creatures. We are one people. We are all teachers and we all are students, of each other. I do not wish to live in a world that is not safe to be myself and speak my mind in. So I try to create this kind of world by not being walled off, to the extent that I can. 

Today I google the question, why do wrens scold me, even in the winter? Turns out, others have also mused about this. I find their shared thoughts at the tip of my fingers, a true miracle to me, and a joy. It is like they are my friends, these musers I have never met, communicating with me from another time and place.

Yesterday, I visited with a brilliant and creative newly minted young adult, who laments how they are “exhausted!” by capitalism. This young one has no idea how rich we all are now, in choice, and communication, compared to not long ago at all, thanks to the great proliferation of free sharing of our thoughts and knowledge, facilitated in part at least, by free enterprise. Not that over control by mega corporations is any better than over control by government entities. Just that freedom to launch an economically profitable enterprise is not inherently a drain on one’s energy. 

I think they are actually exhausted by freedom. It is the dazzling freedom of choice humans from Earth are beholding for the first time today. It is a freedom to share with and to share in the great mindstream we all are cocreating on the interweb. Culture used to belong to those who were part of the class of people who knew how break in to the conversation of culture, to shape the conversation, by virtue of birth or status. 

We are so rich, so wealthy in an unprecedented scale, in this freedom, the ability to share and to know and to communicate. Those who were born recently have utterly no idea. Now, we all have a voice. Most use it, pathetically enough, to share selfies, or pictures of our plate of lunch, or worse. The impulses, the instincts, the compulsive drive to fit in, did not correspondingly shift suddenly, so we are left with old cultural habits but new riches.

But now we all can share. So we are all leaders! And teachers, and students of one another. Whatever we in the free world are currently cocreating, it is at least, truly ours. Perhaps it still mostly reflects what we think each other wants to see and hear. But as time goes on, we will either relinquish our freedom by trying to conform to our perception of what we think we need to do and be and think, so as to fit in with each other, or…maybe, just maybe, something new and beautiful will be born! Just behold the diversity of life forms in the natural world! Perhaps we too will become a blooming cultural meadow of beautiful harmonious diversity!

Anymore nowadays, I am as frequently astonished by what I see some people creating, as I may be dismayed by what some others are doing. No wonder some do find it all exhausting. But I find it exhilarating!

If I lived in China or some other zones of repression and oppression today, I would not find the same delight in the transparency of today’s cultural landscape. I would find the stifling atmosphere of yesterdays small town culture, only instead, on an overwhelming and daunting scale! I see a little of that here with cancel culture; young people policing one another’s political imperfections as if judging them for life threatening crimes. To the young ones a clumsy statement or casual comment that is not well considered seems to define them. The very medium for this, the ability to say rude things to each other at a distance, things we would never say in person, amplifies this problem. If everyone were judged so harshly there would none left standing, that is for sure. 

It is not safe. The world is not safe. I always come back to the tribal headspace, the psychology of the orientation we evolved from, the tribe of three hundred or so people you can really know and relate to personally. How would this situation compare to that headspace? Fill in the blank. This is my test. In the tribe, everyone knows your business. In the tribe, everyone needs to find a way to get along, because we are all related and our survival depends on cooperation. Sometimes there are intense conflicts. But in the small group of the tribe, everyone is watching, and there are usually leaders to help mediate and settle arguments.

Indeed there have always been beautiful and loving tribes, as well as violent disfunctional tribes. We can see both types on a massive nation sized scale today, from Costa Rica to North Korea.

When the interstate highway system came through the small town culture in this country, suddenly it was possible for outsiders to swoop in, disrupt and take advantage of the natural trust of a tribe, do something bad, and quickly disappear. On a larger scale this has now happened with our global sharing of trade and communication culture amplified exponentially by the interweb. It is dangerous now. But to even try to exist in a physical body is fraught with risk. With greater freedom, as they say, comes greater responsibility. 

I wonder how can we develop analogous ways of protecting each other from exploitation in this new and more intense global tribe space?

Phubbing Etiquette

 Phubbing Etiquette

Phubbing (phone snubbing) is the word invented recently for the act of ignoring the people you are with, to stare at your handheld glowing device. We have all done it at this point, and we all know how rude it feels when someone does it to us. And then there is public phone use etiquette. People complain long and loud about the rudeness of being out in public being subjected to the half conversations of others who are talking on their cell phone. Who has not responded to a bystander, thinking they were talking to you, but they were on the phone?

Various ways of coping with these problems are being developed in our culture. A group sits around a table, and everyone puts out their device, face down on the table in front of them. Rules, like no devices at the family dinner table. Or everyone consensually sits around together, each in their own separate cyberworld.

At our communal house we have developed our own new traditions. When two or more are hanging out in a room together, and someone is on the phone, we bring them into the room with us by turning on the speakerphone. Then everyone can hear both ends of the conversation. If the people on the phone wish to have a more private conversation, they simply leave the room. This way everyone feels included.

This also works quite well out in public. Sometimes people standing nearby will even chime in on the matter being discussed, usually with helpful information or humorous comments. They feel included, and sociable instincts are activated instead of alienating ones.

At home, we also do this with texting. There is nothing more annoying than being with a friend who suddenly begins typing on a little display screen instead of being present with you, right? So what we do at our house, is say out loud what we are typing. People are curious. This is quite natural, and so if you let them in on the matter at hand, the flow of togetherness is not breached. We mutter what we are typing, out loud, and even read some messages we receive out loud. Not the irrelevant ones like  “your payment was received”, but the social ones, like “so and so wants to know what we are up to today”.

We are social creatures. It is stressful to tolerate rudeness. Our new toys should bring us greater comfort and flow, not the reverse. My frame of reference when confronting any new technological social situation is to compare it to the small tribe mindset. In the small tribe, everyone knows your business. We are adapted to this from thousands of years of living this way. People step away together for intimate moments, but generally we all know what everyone is up to, and conversely, we have continuous access to each other’s basic resources and know how.

The other thing I reference when confronting a new social phenomenon, is to ask, what kind of world would I want live in? It is kind of a turn off to find oneself sitting around a room in a social event, only to hear nothing at all but the occasional click and ding, as everyone stares at their individual communication device, with their heads elsewhere, in “social media!” What is next, one might wonder, implants, so seamless, that people are perpetually suspended in this hypnotic state?

No, this is not the future, or for that matter the present I would like to see. I ask, if I could have everything I want, then what? If I did not have to strive for any outcome, achieve any goal, attain any social status, what then would I choose to do, have, and be? I would be in love. I would be in beauty. I would express love and create beauty for the simple joy of doing so and sharing it. That is really not so different from how our ancient tribal ancestors lived.

A Weaving of a Painting of a Rug

A Weaving of a Painting of a Rug

Long ago, I see some cup coasters on the coffee table of a relative. There are photos of Navaho rugs printed on the coasters. Being a weaver myself, something about these little thumbnail coasters bothers me.

The little designs depict thumbnail condensations of a process that originally took many weeks or months for the weaver of the rugs to complete: First there is a sheep. Take loving care of the sheep, every day, and once a year or so, shear them. Carefully wash the raw fleece. Comb out the dirty bits. Spin the pre-spin fiber; next the second spin…Dye the yarn, often with hand gathered herbs from around the land. Construct or set up the loom. Warp the loom; warping is a long process. Then actual weaving of the rug; takes weeks or more. 

Finally, the rug is ready to photograph for the coaster. 

Wait! Is this its purpose in life, to be a tiny photograph of so much effort? A rug is for warming your feet, or wrapping around your body, if it is a blanket. How very strange it is, to reduce all of this work to a coffee table coaster, to match your Southwest decor theme!

Thus, it happens that the coaster becomes, for me, the inspiration: to weave, with real wool, on a real loom, a yarn painting, mounted on a frame, for hanging on the wall, a small version of a blanket or rug. I call it, “A Weaving of a Painting of a Rug”. 

Full circle. The rug has now gone from weaving to weaving. Over the years, this phrase, “a weaving of a painting of a rug” comes to mean, to those of us in the know, a shorthand, for this process of reducing a real thing to a sort trivialized and hollowed out version of its original essence.

There is an artist who weaves traditional Persian rugs, Faig Ahmed, who wonders one day what the rug would look like if it somehow partially melted onto the floor below where it was hanging on the wall. It is a sensation, they call it avant garde.

The resulting melting rugs are a huge hit. He now has a large staff who cranks out his designs. The wall to floor to rug art is now hanging all over the world.  

Is it art? Is it home furnishings? Is it conceptual art? 

It is about to be:

The newest iteration has arrived. When I first see the large woven portrait of a face hanging on the wall of the gallery in the photo, with its colors dripping down from it, puddling on the gallery floor, I think, wow, this is a tapestry artist who is taking this concept the a new level. Indeed they attribute their inspiration to the Persian rug artist.

But then, like the tapestry in the picture, my face falls. Reading the fine print below, I realize they are saying that the picture is an A.I. generated depiction of what it “would look like if” this this face were a woven rug that was made like the Persian artist’s ones.

A weaving of a painting of a rug. 

A photo of a concept of an idea. 

It is a joke on me.

Recently a small person I know grew out of their baby bouncer, a devastating loss for them. I suggest a hammock chair, with a spring added, to replace it. A quick perusal of the interwebscape comes up with something even better. It is a colorful line of dinosaur and dragon mouth hanging hammock chairs. They are truly amazing to behold; you sit on pillowed tongue surrounded by great armrest teeth. Wow! I click on the picture and they are only $39.95, seven to ten days delivery, free shipping if you buy two! They will take PayPal, or your credit card, etc. 

I send pictures of the site to their parental unit, as a joke, really.

Indeed it was another joke on me alright!

 Isn’t it amazing what A.I. comes up with, they reply.

 Duh. 

I scrutinize the background of the photo. 

There are object-ish items on the shelf in the room, and toy-ish things in the playroom.

 Take a look.

 Once upon a time, you had to have at least one actual physical example of the product you were selling to run a scam like this.

We have entered a new pseudo reality zone.

When I first start playing with A.I. generated art simulator programs, I get nightmares with strange mutilated body parts. I learn to count fingers, and look at background details. 

(Above: count fingers)

This phase won’t last long though. Soon you won’t be able to tell. Soon this type of image will be MOST of what we see online.

I wonder what we are going into.

Taking the Accelerated Course

The Accelerated Course

 Thank you for signing up for the accelerated course, Incarnation on Planet Earth at the Time of the Turning of the Ages. It is an intensive participatory seminar with fieldwork. The accelerated course is being offered at this time because of the great urgency of need.

Suffering is the hallmark of this class, for discomfort is an invaluable guide to what what we need to do or not do as we encounter the obstacles given in the course. 

This is an advanced course, but you are well qualified to join. You would not have been admitted unless you are capable of passing and excelling, so even when your doubts are the greatest, always remember this. Many souls have lined up to be in the course here at this momentous time, and you are fortunate to have a seat. 

Though this is not a required course, it is the only one being offered on this planet at this time. You will emerge from this ordeal with great wisdom and love, and all of the flying colors of the rainbow. 

None of your suffering is ever in vain, for in overcoming, you will receive the ability to help others so afflicted.

We are all so happy that you have chosen to join us, for every single one of us is mission critical. I will be your fellow student, and we are all teachers as well. There will be tests every day, often many tests a day. There are no true-false tests in this course; all are multiple choice. There is always a third option, and a fourth, and so on. 

Grades are determined as we go along, by our choices. While there are no wrong answers, there are an infinite array of possible choices leading to a different infinite array of new choices.

There are no individual grades for this class: the entire planet will pass or fail, with many different levels of achievement possible in between. 

(Just between you and me, we will all pass.)

Be gentle with yourself, even as you would have others be gentle with you. Stop and rest, nourish and replenish yourself and your fellow students as you scale the heights and navigate the depths.

Things will appear differently when you slow down enough to attend to the seemingly very small matters along the way. Celebrate these, and be grateful for everything you can find to be grateful for, and these things will multiply until it is eventually all you perceive.

When you look back on the most difficult and trying times, as you will, someday; you may behold that you were doing perhaps your best work. You may then cherish those times with great affection.

You will know you are doing well in the class when you feel your love expanding out to ever more beings. Early humans were instructed to simply worship the Great Parental Unit; later, they were urged to love one another as themselves. Now the challenge is to love all, and notice your oneness with, all beings, all life everywhere forever.

I wonder what we will create together on this beautiful planet school?

The Black Mood of the Moment

(To the tune of the Stones’s song, the one about painting the rainbow black:)

I’ll buy a house to flip, so I shall paint it black;

Soon I will sell the house, and get my money back..

Back in the black, are we? All over my town, the houses are turning black. Sometimes you see two or three in a row. Whole apartment complexes are going dark. What inspires this hideous trend?

With all of the forests being blackened by the wildfires of climate catastrophe, and the ubiquitous darkened smoke filled skies of the fire seasons, you would think we might find this new trend a little depressing. It is as if they are pre charring their houses. Giant house shaped lumps of charcoal now line our streets; do these house painters anticipate that the surrounding forest will match this un color scheme soon?

Don’t they know black makes the house look smaller? With the higher quality pigments we are developing today, one can hope that these houses may shrink, so much, that they disappear altogether!

Touch a black car on a hot day, you feel the heat radiation; touch a white car, it’s not hot, but light is bouncing off. The black lowers the vibration of the sunlight to infrared. I just don’t get why people are painting their house black when the world is already overheating. 

It is hard to manufacture a good lasting black. It is rare in nature. The sun bleaches everything white eventually, stones and bones.

In truth, if you can see it, it is not truly black. But lately there has been a run on, and then a shortage, of black housepaint.  I am curious how these black houses will fare in the elements of rain and wind and sun as the next few years go by.

At least these houses will go with the Halloween season. They will look appropriate with ghosts and skeletons dangling around their windows.

Black is not an evil color, per se. Lately I brush my teeth with pure charcoal, emptied out from the capsules that food grade charcoal comes in. 

Charcoal is used in filters. It works really well to filter out pathogenic microbes. Charcoal pulls and binds toxic chemicals and pathogens into itself, kind of like a magnet, so they can be washed out of your body.

Makes my teeth feel like they were just cleaned and polished at the dentist’s clinic. My tongue is shockingly black for the next few minutes. Then the sink needs scrubbing.

If you can even call black a color, as a fashion, it has surely withstood the test of time. Called “basic” black, it has returned again and again to the garments of the humans. Since black is at variance with the natural grays, tans, and whites seen in nature, it is perhaps a statement of defiance, as wielded in the built environment, or worn as a garment. But back away from a black object, and you see it fading to grey. 

But black is forever aspirational; at its highest expression it is simply a concept, for as a color, it does not actually exist. It symbolizes therefore, the idea of non existence, lack of light, light being needed to see color.

The symbolism of black is fundamentally negative. That is one reason I have always felt uncomfortable with the labeling of particular colors of peoples skin as black. I think the term “black people” was introduced to have a kind of shock value, as part of a general movement to embrace and accept the power of self acceptance; taking ownership of who and how we are.  We are, more accurately, each some kind of brownish. We are all together a beautiful rainbow of nature colors.

Black is always hiding something. Why the secrecy, the obfuscation? Blacks ops, black projects, black budget, black helicopters, black clad secret agents, why? What is all of this trying to keep from the daylight of our attention? Why do we need things to be blacked out, censored from our knowledge, forbidden? Who and what does it serve?

In some realms where wimmin are oppressed and considered to be the property of men, wimmin are kept in wearable black bags, if they are allowed out of the walls of their compound at all. Nuns have historically worn black to make the statement that they are cancelling themselves out as separate individuals so as to be completely devoted to a higher ideal of oneness with the divine. Conversely, black is worn by anarchists, as a statement of freedom from the constraints of the rules they do not agree with. Black is worn by the self important and by those who want to disappear notice. By those with over sized egos, and those who are depressed and feel they have no value. Black is a color of those at the pinnacle of earthly power, the high priests of money and political power. Or black is worn to cover “naughty” or forbidden pleasures. Or to keep you down, as in “don’t get too happy, life is harsh, then you die!” 

Black is used to keep out others who might seek to allow light into the matter. I would suggest that black is an idea inspired by fear.

For those who might hold that darkness is good, darkness is restful, consider that even in the darkest night, the infinite sky twinkles with light from an eternally luminous universe. At higher levels of consciousness, there is no black, only a spectrum of frequencies of light. Consider that even as we rest, we dream, we glow with life force even in our deepest sleep. Truly, there is no darkness anywhere, only silly constructions and obstructions contrived of our delusions and fears.

But someday black will go out of fashion.

As we rise higher in our evolution and development as individuals and as a civilization, we move from light into light, into light. People respect each other’s autonomy and individuality, but there are no secrets and no need for secrets, for there is no fear, only love and more love. People have intimate moments, people give each other space, but everyone knows everything about you, for everyone  is telepathic, and you have nothing to hide and no need for shame. The world grows more transparent. Everyone accepts you as you are and loves you, even as you learn and grow even more beautiful on forward, without limit. People shrug off their tired and ragged black garments of shame and fear, and trample them on the ground, indifferent, like toddlers gleefully dancing naked in the morning sunlight.

Infinite Painting with the Whole World

Yes, I love my A.I. drawing apps. I use ALL of the cyber superpowers. To me, the art of living in an age in which all of the culture and knowledge that has ever gone before us, is freely available, at the touch of a button, is an unfathomable gift. I do not to judge the tool, for all tools can be used for good or ill. The true art of this age is what and how to CHOOSE. What is the intention? We now have an infinity of choices, a wealth of time freed up from drudgery work, and a true choice of what to spend our precious time, attention, thoughts, energy, and love on.

I have a very irreverent attitude about so called intellectual property. “Whoever thinks an idea can be copyrighted has already forgotten its Source” -(does not matter who said it, right?)

In the days of many ancient tribal peoples, all things were held in common. If people signed their writings, which often we did not, it was only to further communication, not to inhibit it, and certainly we had no thought to monetize it.

All of my art and music and writing is free to all.  I love that I can give away a picture to a million people, yet still have it! I invented true correct spectrum sequence rainbow tie dye, for example. That was my baby! I see it everywhere now. It stands for freedom, beauty, unity in diversity, psychedelic wisdom, and of course, the hippies of the world!

I “steal” freely, for the work of culture means nothing except in the context of the culture that creates, perceives, receives, interacts with, understands, appreciates, holds it, and changes it, which is all of us. It all belongs to us all. The first cultural creation was language. Can you imagine how preposterous it would be to claim ownership of say, a word, or a letter of the alphabet, or a number?

When the humans from Earth can be nice, and just get along, we will have free energy, and everyone will be an artist, musician, writer, etc. Whatever we want to do. Freedom can not be given; it can only be taken. The universe is abundant and there is no reason on Earth we can not afford for all to have adequate sufficiency. We should not have to beg for money for art. Nor do we need to own it.

I have been doing every kind of art in every medium you can name, for many years. Never a dull moment.  My visual art bifurcated from my physical art, maybe ten or fifteen years ago, when the amazing cyber art tools became available to me with finger painting on iPad. 

My fiber art had gone from simple woven rainbows, to rainbows with up to seventy five pure colors, bumping up against the range the human eye can distinguish. Then imagery began to appear. I reached a point where a detailed tapestry would take me months of weaving. 

My felted paintings, toward the end, were becoming quite realistic in style. 

The prismacolor pencil drawings then  sprang sideways from that.

Then I got my first iPad and started playing with the art. I was amazed at how I could mix my photos, with my drawings, with any thing and everything I saw. And there were endless virtual brushes, canvasses, paper, and paints of every kind. Some times I printed up my iPad work, which itself may have derived from my previous drawings or photos or collages, with who knows what, onto large canvasses, then painted on them some more, with physical paint! 

At this point, my artistic process reflects the same chaotic convergence of everything in the world, as indeed, what is going on swirling around in world culture. We obviously stand at a turning of the ages. Will it all end up as gray confetti? Who knows. As Bob Dylan said, don’t speak too soon, for the wheel is still in spin, for the times they are a changing. It is what it is. 

But what about the feel and touch of real materials, art supplies, the hands on aspect of art? Did I miss that? Well, first of all, I’m glad I started out with real stuff. I see a lot of art today that suffers from the shortcuts gained from a purely cyber created image. The look is cartoonish and lazy. I am grateful to have learned to do art with real paint and pencil, because it gives a greater breadth to the cyber art. I do think the downside is there is the temptation to be be lazy and impatient! Like every thing else these days we want it fast! I’m glad I learned how pencils, paint, chalk, etc, work on various surfaces. But I don’t miss the toxic dusts, heavy metal derived colors, and fumes!

Gradually, and conversely, I moved backward, in the fiber realm, getting whole sheep fleeces from the neighbors who had beloved, well cared for, pet sheep.  We, too, adopted fiber goats, who jumped for joy in the spring, when we helped them out of those heavy fur coats.

I love the smell of the raw fleece, hand washing, and finding out what color the wool really is, under all that dirt, gently combing and carding, the joy of dyeing, never knowing what colors will come out, and the texture and feel of spinning it up, a handful at a time, then making things. Right now, this very hands on art is equally my flow. I am on the eighth in a series of hand woven Shetland blankets. I sleep under them and cherish the colors and textures.

Does that diminish the absolute joy and bliss of creating new, never before seen, beautiful images on my iPad? Not at all! Yes I am really having fun with my new art superpowers, even more than what I had before.