The Age of Sharing

 The Age of Sharing

“I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.” -Georgia O’Keeffe

(from “How to Do What You Really Want While Saving the World at the Same Time”:)

Some guy claims that “The Artist Is Dead”. He wrote a book. It whines about how you used to be able to make a middle class living at being an artist, but now, because of the internet, (He calls it “Big Tech”) sadly, everything is free. (In truth, he means IF you were a white male fancied by the gatekeepers like the record companies and galleries and rich art collectors and fine arts endowment founders)

Hmmm. I’d say the artist is very much alive. More like, it is the death of the gatekeepers. Now, it is a direct relationship between an artist and the discoverer of the art. It is now, yes, a game of discovery, not selling. A million books a year are self published. There are billions of beautiful photos floating around on the cloud, with millions more added daily.

Kids are making zillions of little movies every minute. More self published songs bubble up on the interweb every day than you could listen to if you played them all day for hundreds of years.

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.”- Dr. Seuss

Some just don’t bother to look for this stuff anymore, and allow the lowest common denominator to feed them cat videos or whatever. But the beauty, creative miracles, and free richness is here now, if you want to look for it.

“The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.”- Neil Gaiman 

“But are they good?” (Scream the unemployed gatekeepers.) “ Are they professional?!” Well if you mean, “not free,” then, no...

“Every artist was first an amateur.”- Ralph Waldo Emerson

New curators will arise to help us sort through it all. Networks will arise to share this creative bounty. It is as if we have been through a long winter where the only flowers you ever saw were in some exotic orchid greenhouse and suddenly spring arrives and the fields and roadsides everywhere are thick with abundant carpets of velvet flowers blooming in every color.

Actually I like the lowly common dandelions. And cat videos. And Etsy crafts. This great blooming of art, from the most basic to the most highbrow, is to be celebrated. But it is time to mentally unhitch art from the cart we have been making it drag around, which is the stated need to make it pay us money.

This is the dawning age of everyone as artist. The age of the gatekeeper is over. You don’t need a degree in art. You might get one to help you understand it, but not to do it. Most of us do not get a degree in talking, or walking, or eating, or singing or lovemaking, though all of these things do require immersion in the culture to learn and do well. There is some technical mastery in involved, but this is no mystic priesthood.  Art is no different.

This is an age in which you can, for the first time since we lived in isolated tribes, just do it and share it with everyone. Only now the tribe is global. You have the whole world in which to look for and find the ones who like the things you do. This is not a problem!  This is awesome!

In the past, you needed to have money if you wanted to be an artist. You needed a patron. Customers, to buy your work. A job on the side at a university to train others that they needed to appreciate and buy your work. A network, a circle, a fan base, a mailing list, a go-fund-me, a spouse or relative to support you.

“Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.”- Oscar Wilde

But now, you can just do it. Yes, the math does not support superstars anymore, especially if we are all artists now. If everyone is either an artist now, or about to realize that they are, there will soon be a one to one relationship of artist to art appreciators, formerly called “consumers.” You will not become a superstar. Nobody will. But do we need superstar eaters? Superstar sleepers? 

Everyone and anyone can and does take photographs all day now. Gradually we are getting better at it as we share. Yes, share. It is a word that means give it away free. Not sell.

You can now turn your photo into a Van Gough, a Picasso, or a Peter Max, in seconds, with an app. Another app composes your tune as you sing it, into a fully orchestrated song in the style of your choice. And what is the limit to how many stars there can be? The more deeply our telescopes peer out into the universe, the more stars we see. Every pinpoint magnifies into a whole galaxy or something.

The age of the superstar is over. It actually peaked decades ago. There is no shared mass media anymore, so no superstars, except for the star of the day, or hour, or... minute? And only among your cohort of shared interest in that subject.

“An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.”-Charles Cooley 

Art is just what we do. It is just who we all are, really. There are still some indigenous cultures left on Earth in which everyone sings. Pretty much all day, often together, in lovely intensely coordinated patterns and harmonies.

Give it up, gatekeepers, you time has passed and you are now historians.

“In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better.”- Ernest Hemingway 

“The best reason to paint is that there is no reason to paint.”-Keith Haring

Words Matter

Words Matter

My mother taught me to ignore the mean things people say: “sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you”. But it was not true. Words matter.

There was a period in my childhood when I was in the habit of frequently and offhandedly saying, “I’m gonna kill you,” just as a way of casually disagreeing with my friends. “I hate you” was a way of expressing admiration. I knew a teenager who called anything he liked “sick”.

Nowadays I often hear success being described as “killing it”.

How about, let’s not. Even when we know what we mean to say, our subconscious mind hears it differently. This is abundantly illustrated by the bias research showing we make judgements about things we perceive, long before we are even aware we are doing so. 

Who has not had a few words spoken to them that changed the course of their life, encouraged them in a crucial moment, or hurt their feelings so deeply that they rang in their mind for years after?

And our conscious mind is really the tiny tip of the iceberg sticking up above the unconscious waters of our mind. Most of our mind is bopping along on automatic, almost all of the time. This part of the mind is the overwhelming majority, despite the impression, and conceit, really, that you, the Awake One, are in charge, calling the shots. 

And while we are on the subject, could we stop “shooting” each other an email? (Maybe we could chute it.)  We have so many violent expressions, remnants of former times and things we no longer do. Who kills birds with stones these days? Who even wants to?

We disempower girls when we refer to the generic person as a he. We confuse

dark skinned children when we constantly refer to bad things as dark and good things as light.

It takes extra time to compose our thoughts into words that truly are congruent with the meaning we want to express. But it is worth the effort, for we are not only putting forth the enhanced coherent power of these memes to affect those who hear or read our words, we are also reshaping and sharpening our own minds, and clearing the clutter. 

“Whatever words we speak ought to be chosen carefully for those who hear them will be influenced by them, for better or worse.” - Buddha

Mother Sky, Father Earth

Mother Sky, Father Earth

History is full of stories of the “Mother” Earth and the “Father” Sky.  But why do we have to think of it like that?

I do find one story of a Mother Sky and Father Earth, from ancient Egypt, Nuit and her consort Geb. Nuit, the goddess of sky, makes love with Geb, the god of earth, continually, by just lying over him with her infinite blanket-body of stars. Their children grow up to be the famous Osiris and Isis, featured in tales written in stone.

Why not Father Earth?

And Mother Sky?

I mean, if we must sexualize and anthropomorphize everything. Which, by the way, I do not advocate. But if we insist on going there, ok, let us notice that while the dna of men and wimmin is 98% the same, the two percent difference is mostly related to the sexual apparatus involved in making babies. The male contribution is sperm donation, and the female contribution is the egg cell and a nice place for the conceived baby to grow in. Each contributes half of the DNA to the baby.

Of course, one way to look at it is that the Earth is a nice place for a baby species such as ours to be nurtured and grow up. Acknowledged. It is all about us humans with that one. 

But what if the Earth itself, as one body, is the sperm? It contains all of the information needed to grow into the greater being of our destiny once it finds its Cosmic Egg and begins to develop into a post terrestrial being. Hmm, what a conception!

 Or, do we assume that we have already reached the apex of evolution? Oh Goddess, I hope not!

What then, if the Universe is that nice place to grow up into? Did not She give birth to our solar system and galaxy? Did not same Universe do just fine without the humans for billions of years before we came along?

Can we think beyond the blip of time when we Earth humans have been around, back into Great Time? And beyond the tiny sperm of a planet we are on, out into the vast Galactic Ovum or Universal environment in which it has been ejaculated?

If the Universe is self similar “above” as “below,” then each planet-seed is different in terms of the genetic information it carries, according to its adaptation to its particular conditions. Some planet seeds might carry sturdy creatures like polar bear people, bigfoots, stocky Neanderthal types, good at living mostly underground in icy worlds. 

Others might be teeming with elven bird people who perch in great trees on forest planets. 

Herds of horse beings with single central forehead horns and wings may run and fly in rocky grass worlds. 

Somewhere, massive Herbertian sandworms burrow through desert worlds, creating spice prized by spacefaring monkey people. 

Maybe some worlds are full of great telepathic whale super minds who sing to one another from all the way across the water covered planet.

Maybe even this imagines it in a too human centric way. What if most planets find oneness and enlightenment in self realized, whole planet mats of asexual one celled life forms?

One thing is for sure. Stretch out your mind! The story is not over. The love affair between the Mother Universe and her lover and planet creation donor, Father Earth, or WHATEVER it is, is ongoing.

“Humans are the most important entity in the universe …only to most people.” -Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Creepy Hallowen Stories

 “Be afraid... be very afraid.” – The Fly

It is the scary season. Polls say most people are walking around right now with anxiety about the upcoming election. But I am worried about the rest of them. There was a bumper sticker a few years ago, “if you are not outraged, you are not paying attention.” But the attention is just tension now. The outrage is all used up. It has burned to ash.

There is a scary old crone at my house. I caught a glimpse of her at the zoom call to the doctor. She looks like she might be two hundred and forty four years old, at least. She is missing one front tooth, and the other one hurts. She has fallen. Now she lurches about the house with an irregular, halting gait. 

The right leg is weak and painful. The left one is blocked, maybe clotted.

You cannot walk unless your legs, both left and right, cooperate. No progress will happen.

Out front, the pumpkins from the garden are pale, the result of mixing with the seeds from last year’s white pumpkin.

This year’s  jack o’ lanterns will be yellow, like the smoke damaged sky. 

The Concord grapes never quite got blue this year. The birds began to pick them off when they were still a reddish purple, so we had to bring them in.

Night comes too early these days. Every evening of late, Jupiter and Saturn, paired in this October’s skies, peer down over the treetops, into our bathtub, like peeping eyes. 

A heavy, overbearing, hotheaded, red Mars hovers each night, presiding over a heavily damaged moon. An angry red monster stalks the internet. He has been hit; he has been wounded. This is the dangerous kind. The red color is bleeding out of his hair and down into his face. Lies are flying all around him; or maybe those are bats.

Zombies with headphones stagger about the streets, mumbling to themselves. Almost everyone I see seems to be wearing a mask. This year, Halloween just goes on and on.

Notes From The Climate Front

“The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, 

but by those who watch them without doing anything.”– Albert Einstein

Notes From The Climate Front

Sometime in September; Somewhere on the Left Coast; Somewhere in the Smoke Clouds

As the fires from climate catastrophe swirl around us, I become particularly aware of the flood of refugees. More numerous than in recent years, they are apparently flying in from elsewhere. 

Luckily, our house did not burn down last week in the firestorm, so at the moment we are in a little island of safety, despite the worst smoke I have ever seen.

People around us report that cougars, bears, foxes, and coyotes have been displaced and are helping themselves to any local cats and dogs they can catch for lunch.

But our refugees are of the feathered kind. This year they seem more present and close to our watered island and pond in the forest clearing. We have never used any poisons here, and have long ago stopped trying to grow anything but what the forest itself plants here, so it is bit of a refuge. 

So all day we watch through the filtered smoke as more than a few local birds, plus a lot of new ones, hang around, stop in, and move on. I have seen quite a few new visitors and species that I have never noted in this location before.  Whole flocks of species I have never seen. 

No one is outside or driving around in this pandemic combined with toxic smoke event. It is so quiet! Maybe the birds are just glad the humans are all indoors as they cower in houses to escape the smoke. 

Fall migrations are underway now, and surely this is disrupted. The entire west coast of north America is smoky from the fires that are sprinkled over the landscape. Each successive year seems to be record breaking over the previous one.

Each successive year, until now, there are fewer, not more birds, overall. But this year feels poignant and pathetic. The birds are more numerous, apparently, only because they are refugees from habitat they are losing elsewhere, so even more of net loss, overall.

Still, when I look out my window, I wish that I too, could fly away to a better place. As soon as I figure out where that is. Some other planet?

Looking for Peace in the Garden

From The Flower Child’s Garden Planet:

Everyone knows who the flower children were. The iconic photo of the girl putting a daisy in the gun barrel of the trooper at the peace demonstration says it all. Peace and love sums it up nicely. 

That girl has probably grown up and has grandchildren, if not great grand children by now, but the message is as fresh as this seasons’ daisies.

Around the same time as the iconic flower child photo appears, the humans from Earth first see an actual photograph of the whole Earth from space, another moment marking photo. It is the beginning of an era.

We are all globalists now. The time of taking sides is passing because you can’t take sides when you know the world is round.

And what goes around, comes around. And around. Everything is not just connected now, as it always was, really. We are connected visibly, in real time. Causes and effects are accelerating. Images, each said to be worth a thousand words, now fly around the world by the billions daily. 

A single meme, story, event, or image that once produced a wave of reaction and response, now is just another blip in the roaring tide. The cacophony is now a constant storm on a choppy sea. Even the big waves come one after another, without time to recover or process the impact.

I once nearly drowned. I got stuck while swimming in the surf off the coast of Mexico, in the place where the waves repeatedly broke over me and pounded me into the rocks. Each time I stood up, I was hit again. The water was not deep, but the waves were big, and I was little.  If not for the big strong Mexican man who noticed my plight and pulled me out of that zone, I would not be here writing this now.

The world feels like that to me now, as I sit here, in the eye of an enormous human caused climate change storm, as the waves of global pandemic crash over us, and the flames of firestorms across the West lick at the door of my town. We are in the stage in this drama now of realizing that things have seriously gone awry and we must do something. 

We need help. We have got to get ourselves back to the garden. All one planet garden. If there is not rescue, things will not get better. We gotta stop the way we’re going, or we just might arrive. We long for peace. The answer is still love.

“The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.” -Michael Pollan

Getting Woke

Global warming gets real when it comes to your house. The whole left coast is on fire, from the bottom of California to the top of Washington, skies are orange. The sun is vermillion even at high noon, that is, when you can see it at all on this otherwise sunny and theoretically cloudless day. The air quality is toxic for all.  

That’s it, I say to myself. I’m moving. I’m so outa here. I’m moving to...

Um...

Another planet? 

There is no place left to run. I’m out here on the wet side of the left coast in the most progressive neighborhood on the planet practically.

Fires are burning all around us. There is no landline phone service, the power is down, so no internet, and no water because that’s powered by electricity. 

If a fire came up through the forest where we are, we might not know it, because visibility is so poor. No one would be able to come to help put out the firestorm anyway, they are triaging and only able to warn and evacuate people right now, if that. All of the firefighting crews are overwhelmed. Whole towns are burning to ashes in an hour or two, just upwind from here. Ashes of these towns are falling like snow on our portable folding solar panels, which are just barely and intermittently charging our phones, to keep a connection with loved ones.

The radio is our main source of news, with disturbing noises alerting us to announcements of evacuation areas and routes. This is a level three alert, they warn of a nearby area. “Do not stop and gather your things. Leave now!”

We hear of friends who barely make it out because they evacuate too late. As they run away, they turn to see their cars blow up.

These things happen fast. The forest has been drying out in a half continent sized mega drought going on decades now, a result of climate change. 

Actually it is dying out. These trees burning now will be changed out by nature for more dry climate trees, the kind that live south and east of the wet coast, pines for firs. New animals will come to replace the ones who have lived here because the habitat will be different.

But when the hot east wind came up a few days ago, the sky turned brown and the air turned smoky. A balmy blue sky on a quiet afternoon became a hell world in minutes. All night we hunker down with the radio left on, half sleeping while the howling hot wind slams tree bits onto the house.

It’s funny what you think of putting in the car and the go-bag at such a time, if you have the luxury of having time to do that, which we do, so far..

The dog and cat carriers sit by the front door, of course. Then you wander around the house in the dim amber light of mid day, rating the objects you may never see again. Oddly dispassionate, I pack a few bits of clothes, all of them blue, from my overflowing closet, some daily body care items like toothbrush and so on, and move on to my studio with my art and tools of my art. 

Many years of my artwork is here. Many carloads. Much of my life’s work. I can fit only a tiny fraction of it in a car. I end up putting only a few of the projects I’m actually working on, right now, into the car. I feel I have to finish them! That is where my heart is with them. A few of the materials and tools I will need to do so as well. 

The rest, well I already finished them. Funny logic, if that is what it is.

Later I sleep. In my nightmares, I dream of my packed car rolling into a lake. All is lost. Then I cry. 

I wake up, with my head throbbing from smoke inhalation, glad to see I’m still at home, with the strange orange light in the sky and the red sun again, coming in the window. 

“Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people, to give them hope, but I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is.” 

 

Greta Thunberg, 16 year-old Swedish Activist