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Adrift
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Human rationality and craziness
The most successful people are both rational and crazy.
As much as robots and artificial intelligence threaten our creativity, there will be some people who cultivate the randomness of thought to continue innovating.
Wrote Jean-Luc Godard: “It’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take them to.”
See the world, not its model
Patterns beg to be synthesized, broken down and encrusted with ingenuity to make something new.
Humans envision the future and work backward, mostly through the freedom of trial and error. They see holes and fill them in with new opportunities.
Folks may never know where they are going, but that is exactly how they get there.
The mind fills a silent GIF with sound.
The flags flickering in the wind, the lightbulb dancing at a Mexico City bar, to the whistle of leaves swinging outside your window.
Living in the distraction era, noise is ubiquitous. Standing still, the decibels around turn up to match the horizon.
But the calmer it becomes, the more you hear.
Silence deafens the external stimuli. In nature, it rings with the the highest volume.
TuRn it up!
One day we’re going to miss the powerful silence of the natural world, the way it smells and begs for an inquisition. That’s because “most people are on the world, not in it,” wrote the father of national parks John Muir.
In putting a “fence around nature,” we lock ourselves into a secluded wall of emotional current.
Nature nurtures, it humbles our deepest desires. Because we can’t control the skies, nor the mercurial blob of ourselves, we must give in to nature’s fickleness and beauty.
We’re going to be shocked when we wake up from digital’s second life and realize that becoming also means embracing the evolving whims of those things around us. We are overpowered by the Earth’s forces.
Perhaps naturalist Bernd Heinrich said it best:
“We all want to be associated with something greater and more beautiful than ourselves, and nature is the ultimate. I just think it is the one thing we can all agree on.”
The weathered we address: What kind of weathered is it?
It contains multitudes.
Graffitied
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Exhausted
Chipped
Bruised
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Split Tourist
Weather-ed
Exposed
Repaved
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Rushed
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….Retrofitted and restored
Weathered rock or stone, broken glass, ruptured pavement, blinding headaches, winters wear down New York but its city dwellers weather in, on, and through in flexible shifts.
All photos by Wells Baum
The leaves grow sideways, unimpeded from the downward force of nature.
The car with a dragon tattoo also roars its way into the future.
2017 is the end of the past
Revisiting the roots, 2018 promises to bend into unusual shape.
Let’s start off with the least significant photo of the year.
I shot the below soap bubble pool party while on vacation in the Dominican Republic.
While it’s my most downloaded photo on Unsplash, the only thing it reminds me of is the period where I was trying to finish up my book. Stuck in writer’s block, I remember walking around the hotel looking for inspiration when I heard party music and noticed large bath bubbles floating through the air. The 90s MTV-esque ‘spring break’ foam party was the perfect distraction from the agony of the unfinished manuscript.
What’s popular isn’t always what matters
However, my most meaningful photo from this year had to be the time my wife I and walked up Machu Picchu mountain. It was a true test of fitness, a devious mountain that tricked you into thinking the top was always closer than it was. It took an hour to go up and another hour to go down. But when you finished, we got to write our names in the logbook.
Here’s a few more…
From the masks of Mexico City’s cheeky lucha libra wrestlers to the walls of art in dive bars and parks, to the boyhood fervor of an old man in his special puppet, Mexico City is very much a lived experience. To quote Edward Burnett Tylor:
“Taking it as a whole, Mexico is a grand city, and, as Cortes truly said, its situation is marvellous.”
Transformation can be exciting, but it can also be retrograde.
Change doesn’t mean better. Boredom with the status quo can sometimes beget darkness.
The function of play, a style of art, a kind of government, are meant to be noisy but unrestricted.
The stimulation of calm and collected still leaves space for the unimaginable and disruptive. However, going back seems to be an evil obsession at present and the unfortunate direction of the future.
Transformation opposes progress?