Entry #4: Here’s to 2025

Counting down these last few hours. Less now than half a day, until my personal clock in my personal region changes over and my calendars switch a 4 to a 5, a banal signal on the cosmic scale - signifying another cycle of our planet around our nearest star.

Many years I would celebrate this turning with grand libations and a howl at the moon, but I find myself this year much more somber and contemplative. It has been a strange and tumultuous year for the world writ - large, and for myself and many I know, in many small, personal ways as well. Looking forward into the next year, the one that marks half a decade since COVID-19 redirected history, it’s hard to know what exactly to expect. More psychic pain, unleashed upon each of us via the unifying funnel of the internet, is a certainty. War will continue, unimaginable suffering will indeed continue to be unleashed upon countless who don’t deserve it, and the throbbing raw nerve of humanity will continue to boil and blister. It’s ok to disconnect sometimes. We are not made to feel it so earnestly and immediately and powerfully. Perhaps that evolution will come in time, but at what cost? I have long been an abyss watcher, and long will I continue, but it is not without it’s consequence.

When I draw, Create, I pull from a well within myself; once which ebbs and flows and beats a force of life. I see with an eye in my heart and in my mind, a construct that changes with each new step forward in time, with each new experience and with the words and images I bring into me each day. Creating art is a magical, quantum act, and it’s power has manifested the human mind and driven our societies for thousands of years. Human life is expressive at it’s core, and each human will find it impossible to act without expression, regardless of their life history, ethnicity, background, or vocation. It is that expression that makes us each valuable, and special, and unique - as much as our individual lenses into life, into history. Sharing common experiences, emotions, and situations draws us together, creates empathy and understanding for the perspective of the other, and builds a sense a of community and kinship. Art does this, immensely, and powerfully in many different ways - whether through shared vibrations in our ears and sternums, refractions of light in our eyes, or the chemical reactions of the cells in our tongues. I can only act and create upon the life and perspectives that I have existed, and that is the greatest strength that every artist in human history can wield. How they choose to define that in space - by bending with or against the vision, and the will of the people around them - by choosing who and how and what they intake, and thereby filling their well to draw upon for their next act, reflecting their experiences back into the worlds around them, forms and confines them.

Art is, always, what the Artist makes of it. As I continue on my path with the brush in hand, I become ever more aware of it. Aware that the bounds we are held by is not one of technological capability, processing power, and microchips. For me: It is one of inner vision - of mental concept, exacted then in time and space. We are solar powered, awakened consciousness, filled with life, experience, memory and thought, individual spirit embodied in the electrical impulses that flit between the meats of our brains, into our bodies to interface with the world around them; Action, Acting.

Art is Act as much as it is imagination, and both together fuse into being the artifacts(see what I did there!) that give us our shared knowledge and human history. For the human Artist it is experiential - the entirety of that creator’s life - collapsed into one moment of Creative Act. It is power, immense and scary, and it is trite and silly and brief. It’s Consequence is often not even up to the artist themselves, but rather to the perception of the world around them, the interpretation of others, experiencing it through their own lens of eye and ear and life and mind. It’s something I have always taken seriously, seriously as the towers etched across our skies, or the vast plots of land tilled out for farms, or left to wilderness.

I read an article this morning, addressing the meta’s interest in promoting and developing fully robotic and artificial, profiles on it’s social media engines. I continue to exist in profile on these spaces, and often still in presence, but I sense our time is waning there. By Us, I mean - the Artists. Metric driven interaction will only continue to increasingly dominate the space, a space which will continue to be more and more artificial. For all of us, we should be conscious and aware of this - and if you are reading this now I encourage you to consider how this will construct a world further driven by advertisements, superficial, and exploitative content, devoid of human life or experience, designed solely and only to access your time and energy and manipulate your mind. It is of course all charmingly delightful, and rude, and hilarious and I think it will be just about impossible for any of us so attuned to completely divorce themselves, but it’s all so dangerous and absurd at once that I have to caution. I for one am grateful for the connection this common- read: internet - space has allowed (almost) each and every one of us, but it’s very quickly being purchased and divided up as it was developed - as a piece of land might have been to an ancient emperor or king. We will have little say on The Platforms, less than we already do - once the ever increasing majority is built upon the decades of scraped and digested data. Don’t allow those spaces to unduly influence your pen, your brush, or your strings.

I find myself, gravely so, concerned about the increasing power these forms of artificial unification - which seek to both draw us together in grasping and understanding a false representation of reality and human experience: however based in manifest physical history as it may be - as it does to separate and confuse us with personally tailored advertisements and information - further dividing us in knowledge and experience. It is a knife’s edge we crawl, and I believe the knives may have already won, though hope I will always hold out.

As we step into this new age, this second half of a recorded decade, this next sequence of planetary movement and human experience; I hope that we can all find places to dream of the possibilities we can create in Love, of Joys we have yet unseen, and in Acts yet untaken. For all of us have the ability to Act, and Act uniquely - with each and every thought, step, or word. This is how I continue to press forward, step after step and day after day, in darkness or in light - and I hope you join me.

Thanks for reading and Happy New Year!



Much Love,