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About Diary Writing

Summer Changes – Goodbye Facebook!

I’ve decided to limit my Facebook usage to the point where I will be disabling my personal account with the intent of deletion while keeping certain other pages (for my art and my music) alive under other accounts.  These other accounts will not accept friends.

Facebook announced that it would no longer allow third party apps like Buffer to post on personal accounts.  I’ve been using this to limit my real-time interactive usage for at least a year or two.

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Friday night I went to the Whitney Museum in lower Manhattan and was struck by a few things –

  • The amount of people who were lined up just to get into the museum and do something “in real life.”
  • The amount of people looking at their smart phones who were missing out on a fuller experience of art.
  • Instead, people were more interested in the art as something to post online.  This is cool because well…maybe they are artists of one type or another or big fans but it did seem initially somewhat distracting to me – a negative thing.  Not to mention that two people walked into me because they were too busy looking down at their devices.
  • Distraction is distracting!  No other way to say it…

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I believe in alternate process.  Believe me, this is no reaction to the “digital world.”  This is no “analog rules” post.  That stuff makes me sick.  I’ve always been an advocate of two things…

#1, There is more than one way to skin a cat, meaning digital art is just as valid, remixing is just as valid and…

#2, Be mindful.  Realize that flipping through a bunch of pages on the MoMA site is not the same as sitting in a museum and getting lost in a painting for more than a half hour.   Both are valid but they should be conscious decisions and appreciated as such.

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While I have so much more to say and write and I’m still working on notifying people on Facebook and exchanging contact info, if you care about me just know these three words – it feels right.

Thanks for reading!

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Photography Poetry

Look Truth Straight In The Eye

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Truth. What is truth?

Truth is what actually is.

Fine. How about your connection to the truth? What happens when you find out that what you thought you knew wasn’t actually true?

This truth…how did you get there? Who told you about their truth? Did you assume that their truth was yours? Did you wait for their attention to validate that this shared imagined truth was actually true? Did it suddenly make less sense when you found that their truth was not for you? Did it suddenly make less sense when your imagined truth about them was not the truth after all? What if you decided to go along with their truth and leave yours behind?

So many times I have thought I knew the truth. So many times I have waited until I thought I knew the truth so that I can build a firm foundation upon it and move on. What if we don’t need to do that? What if any connection to the truth will always be an oversimplification of “what actually is”? What if waiting for the truth is just another way to take the easy way out and cave in to fear?

The problem with truth is that you have to constantly reevaluate exactly what it is. You can’t stand still. Once you sit back and stop paying attention, you run the risk of losing your connection with the essence of it. You also have to admit every once in a while that you can miss it. You need to understand that you only sometimes get it in pieces.

You can’t let the fact that you missed the truth this particular time stop you from looking for it again. Because then you can’t move on. If you can accept that things are the way they are yet at the same time accept that the point of convergence of control is actually within your own head. The truth itself may never be fully known — it may not even exist. That is the only part of the truth that you actually ever needed to know and that you can be comfortable within your own skin knowing that you didn’t know….then you can move on.

What if the truth was wonder, dreaming, hoping, planning and promise? What if the truth was just simply the purposeful act of doing? What if the truth was actually the struggle to do.

The truth is quite possibly that you wake up in a slightly new place each morning and what you actually are is yours until you yourself die. The truth is love and that truth is already within you.

I look truth straight
In the eye
When the world around
Crumbles into dust
I remain unshaken

I am not open
To your evaluation
My value is not
For you to set

My love
Comes from within
I was born this way
Can’t take it away

Don’t wait
To reach the goal
Don’t think
You can know

I never break a promise
To myself
Because I alone
Am the truth

…and what I have to offer
You
Is
Me

(published today on Medium https://medium.com/@JimLMusic/look-truth-straight-in-the-eye-93ff129caa53 and to my Facebook friends)