Tag: Art

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Everything is Keep Changing

chaos, change, covid-19, 2020

Why do we fight the idea of change so hard? We know it’s inevitable. We know it happens. Just in the process of reading this short missive, imperceptible changes are taking place in both you (the reader) and me, having written this however many hours, days, weeks, months, years ago.

Everything changes.

We should know that by now. We should have embraced it. But, if one thing this COVID-19 pandemic has shown us is just how much we HATE change and how EASILY we can adjust to a different level of “normal” and function in a way similar to how we did before.

While we think we want a static, predictable environment, I think the human machine is really an instrument of change both internally and externally. We adapt.

Our ancestors adapted–first to the cold of the ice age and then to the rewarming as the ice melted. Did we like it? Probably not. Imagine the communal grunts of complaint at the extra foot of snow one year to the next, or the wetter than normal annual thaw (assuming those that disliked living on the walls of ice moved to warmer climates).

And that’s the thing. We adapt. We move on to the next sustaining thing that moves us back into a zone of comfort and security. We find a “new normal” which is a phrase I hate. Really, our environment is just changing. There are no real peaks, plateaus, or valleys of “normal.” It’s not new. It’s just normal.

The title for this missive came out a new story where a reporter had asked a homeless person what they thought about the adjustments because of the coronavirus. Their response was broader than that. Their response, in my hearing, had everything to do with their life in general. “Everything is keep changing.”

And so do we. This is just a moment in time that will become an end or a start of a chapter for many, but not for all. Bad will come of it for some (which I wish wasn’t that case) and good (measured on a relative scale) for others.

Such is the lightning bolt of change–in a flash, what was, isn’t anymore. It’s something else.

Everything is Keep Changing.

Featured image: Chaos transmutes into chaos. Change changes everything, even time itself.

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Murmuration

ambiguity, birds,

How do you deal with not knowing?

I don’t know if I mean the unknown, but more the not knowing despite having the pieces of something in front of you but without a clear understanding of how (or even if) the pieces fit together.

It may just be a personal picadillo, for ambiguity, in situations where the overall control is out of my hands, makes me feel anxious.

Not my favorite mode of being. Maybe it comes with wanting everything to fit into a nice neat box. Or that all the variables are accounted for and thought through. Some of my favorite ways to work are puzzling through a problem, solving for the nuance. But not knowing something (or someone) can stomp through like a bull in a China shop…annoying.

I’m not even sure how to depict something like that, visually. Ambiguous, unformed. Even a cloud has form, it’s a cloud, a visually plastic thing that is at once a bunny, a car, and or a loved one’s face. And then, it’s nothing as it evaporates in the sun.

Maybe the perfect visual representation of ambiguity is a murmuration of starlings. Random, chaotic, twisting, wheeling. It’s ambiguous in its shape, where it’s going or in what direction.

Perfect chaos.

That kind of ambiguity feels beautiful. Random. It feels like a murmuration.

I think I love that idea of ambiguity.

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What’s Old is New

Here we are, the Primitive Rite. Why settle back on the Primitive Rite as a personal essay blog and portfolio of past work?

For close to the past 15 years (beginning in 2005), I’ve written and worked extensively in posting and behind the scenes on Freemason Information. While a passion project, it wasn’t too far into the work that I realized the edges of what one could do (both with the site and with the institution).

So, like any property owner who finds themselves at the edge of their patch wanting more, I spent the time (and still do) working on the interior. New posts, new art, videos, social, the works. That work evolved into an eBook and then 4 print books published under the FmI imprint. In that process, it occurred to me that I had again run into the creative wall of what was possible.

Mulling the situation, it occurred to me that I had options. One idea was doing work under the banner of the Hermetic Circle. That that quickly fizzled as I have other plans for that still…one day.

Another property was out given the bagged that came with it was more than I wanted to try and work around.

Stuck again.

Then I remembered this forlorn site, the Primitive Rite, that I’ve revived and abandoned more times than I can count. The thought struck me that it was the right name for the subject. So too was it the right time to make use of it to catalog the work that I’ve done.

What’s old is new again.