yoga!

Hey! I found my yoga blog that I forgot existed.... what a pleasant surprise!!

http://yogaofmysoul.blogspot.com

Decisions

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/devdutt_pattanaik.html


How do people make decisions? Why does your sun rise? What are the stories that you have been told that make you act the way you do, that have led you this far and continue to direct the course of your life? What is your reason for being?

Two lovers sat on a park bench with their bodies touching each other, holding hands in the moonlight.

There was silence between them. So profound was their love for each other, they needed no words to express it. And so they sat in silence, on a park bench, with their bodies touching, holding hands in the moonlight.

Finally she spoke. “Do you love me, John ?” she asked. “You know I love you, darling.” he replied. “I love you more than tongue can tell. You are the light of my life. My sun. Moon and stars. You are my everything. Without you I have no reason for being.”

Again there was silence as the two lovers sat on a park bench, their bodies touching, holding hands in the moonlight. Once more she spoke. “How much do you love me, John ?” she asked. He answered : “How much do I love you ? Count the stars in the sky. Measure the waters of the oceans with a teaspoon. Number the grains of sand on the sea shore. Impossible, you say.”

Comfort

I just want to be comfortable. and never anxious. Eliminate the unneccessary. Now how do I make that happen?

Nihilsm, Narcissism, Nostalgia, Curiosity, Contemplation, Creativity

A man said to the universe, "Sir, I exist."

"However," the universe replied. "The fact has not inspired in me a sense of obligation."

-Stephan Crane

When writing first emerged, Socrates voiced concerns that this new way of cataloguing thoughts was “taking the soul out of an exchange." Likewise, media critics today argue that Google (as emblematic of the Internet) is killing memory. The present resonates with the past no matter how badly postmodernism tries to transcend its claims to absolute Truths and grand meta-narratives about culture and society like history has routinely done. Because “truth” has been proven to be contextual and impermanent, a key lesson that postmodernity has learned from history's fluctuations is discontinuity. Postmodernity, in its suspicious approach to virtually all forms and practices, has taken to constructing the progression of human existence as a series of discontinuous events in order to justify its lack of allegiance to any one paradigm. What does this mean for the way we approach the past, the present, and the future? According to Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the paradigms that both shape our world and allow us to acquire knowledge about and within it fluctuate according to their capacity to meet our needs at any given point in historical time. Each new idea, both scientific and cultural, must be looked at in light of its location in historical time rather than for its ability to explain the world we live in today. “What must the world be like in order that man may know it?" is the question that not only drives scientific truth, but also sociocultural reality. Postmodernism must then be situated and sought to be understood in relation to the paradigms that have preceded it both historically and adjacently along the line of historical time. The paradox of postmodernism lies in the juxtaposition between its desire to transcend this outmoded reliance on a grand meta-narrative or underlying condition in order that we might “know” our world and the reality that it does, in fact, rely on an underlying condition, namely the “continuity of the condition of fragmentation, ephemerality, discontinuity, and chaotic change."

Progress, it seems, has been fetishized. Because we have been endowed with brains that can think, hands that can labor, and souls that can feel, we must, as we’ve been taught, harness complete control of and seek to constantly ‘better’ our faculties. Because we’ve seen the evolution from cave painting to the Internet, we are inspired to invent ever further, despite the ramifications this has on things like the environment and human rights. Human beings are notorious for discontentment and, thus, because we can, we usually always do simply because we feel we need to do something. Our fetishization of progress has inspired postmodernism to not only reject modernism’s forms, but also to reject that it is a mere historical moment in the grand spectrum of time. Because it is pretentious, we are pretentious. Because it has annihilated history, we are nihilistic. Because it assumes its own prestige, we are narcissistic. And because it selectively uses the past (ie. art, music, performance, principles, practices, stories) to produce the present, because “it is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours… The desert of the real itself," we become nostalgic for reality itself and look to the past, to the same place that the simulacrum has looked in forming itself as the lining of our lived existence, in hopes of finding it. These are the lessons that postmodernity has taught us. How, then, can we help but literally personify these very lessons in our own lives?

If the symptoms of postmodernism are narcissism, nihilism, and nostalgia, then I’d like to pose what I'll call a “Three C” approach as a remedy. This is a three step approach to making like meaningful or, at the very least, bearable, that many of us, especially academics who thrive off of inquiry, already use sporadically. Yet here it is; consolidated, alliterated, and spelled out in the very words it seeks to overcome. Curiosity, contemplation, creativity. It is being offered as a proactive way to approach the “problem” of postmodernism, as it has been fashionably construed through the simply act of living consciously instead of blinding accepting the forms, principles, and practices that the world throws our way. Above all, these three steps involve consciousness or a heightened awareness and healthy skepticism about the world around us. Curiosity tame the wiles of egotism because, in approaching our new postmodern world through the eyes of a child, we are already assuming that we have something to learn. Contemplation involves taking what our senses have allowed us to be curious about and engage in the all-important acts of thinking, questioning, and inquiring. Creativity is the natural spring of both of these things. It will allow us to fashion a way of being that is not prescribed to us by any institution or historical conceptualization of how we should act.

The Three C approach may help thwart the magnetic gravitations towards nihilism, narcissism and nostalgia that are the natural outgrowths of a society that is going through massive changes. Individualism, nationalism, totalizing grand narratives, religious fundamentalism, the family as the locus of society, confidence in the nation-state, the dominion of the signified over the signifier, our capacity to distinguish the simulacrum from reality, our ability to distinguish between high and pop culture, mass culture/marketing, one-way communication, dichotomies, boundaries (ie. in art, technology, music), social hierarchies, clear sexual categories; these are all quickly becoming the residues of modernity, artifacts of an age that is quickly being superseded by an erosion of these constructs into hybridized, intertextual, boundary-less, cyborgian-like versions of each of them. The postmodern condition is characterized by a marked ambivalence about the world we live in. It is not merely an outgrowth of modernism, although its emergence and defining moments do rely on the extinction of modernism’s forms. “Postmodernism swims, even wallows, in the fragmentary and the chaotic currents of as if that is all there is." Postmodernism is a period that has tried to negate its ties to history because it has come to determine that the construction of history and the forms, technologies, theories, and knowledge bases that have historically resonated within the chambers of each other’s are only valid according to how far, or rather, in what direction, society, globalization, gendered/sexual identities, political regimes, social structures, religious thought and scientific recapitulations have come. Depending on where the sociocultural pendulum is located, so the “revolutions” that have historically allowed us to weigh the constructs that appear to us against a larger ‘condition' come to be. Such cultural constructs are now weighted against that enigmatic construct known as postmodernism which

sees itself... as a willful and rather chaotic movement to overcome all the supposed ills of modernism. But in this regard postmodernists [may] exaggerate when they depict the modern as grossly as they do... There were, after all, many cross-currents within modernism, and postmodernists echo some of them quite explicitly."

Again, we catch passing traces of the past in the present. Although it advocates change and discontinuity as emblematic of an ahistorical periodization of time-space, these characteristics come to be the very underlying condition that enables historical “moments” to be rendered comparable.

It goes without saying that the value of trends lies in their capacity to point to reoccurring instances of conscious and subconscious articulation. Along with every new technology or paradigm shifting ‘revolution’ comes a fear about it. What we fear appears to be not so much the new, but the renunciation of the old. The pervasiveness of nostalgia films and other cultural products that invoke imaginings of a distant past when ‘times where better’ clearly point to this. According to Buck-Morse’s description of wish-images, “the old never sets itself off sharply from the new; rather, the latter, striving to set itself apart from the recently outmoded, renews archaic, ur-temporal elements." How is that young adults born in the 1980s can long for the lifestyle of the 1950s? The 1960s? The Middle Ages? What we long for is the real. What we have is a world filled with pastiches. The old thus get constructed as the archetypical golden past simply because it supposedly embodied originality instead of hybridized products, principles, and people. What we long for is the authentic and we are willing to even go so far as to construct an imaginary "golden past" in order to legitimate our longings. Should we use the Three C's, we might begin to see that the present can be just as authentic as the imaginary golden pasts that we construct.

"Miscommunication is the scandal that motivates the concept of communication." The eerily reminiscent resonance that this postmodern moment has points to a Nietzschian positioning of disillusionment as the backdrop against which the frightening realization that “we can never grasp the true meaning of things – the uncanniness of the things we take for granted” took form. The 1920s birthed cultural artifacts like Munch’s “Scream,” Eliot’s “Wasteland,” Schoenberg’s chaotic musical scores, and Picasso’s 4D art. These were all responses to telepathy's failure, to a mass realization that one consciousness could not be transmitted intact to another, that you can never wholly understand me. Today, we see a frighteningly similar trend occurring with the rise of the Internet. We have birthed a medium and imbued it with all of the capabilities that we think should warrant its hoped for telepathic capacity. This affinity with the past suggests that maybe we are not as far removed from history as we’d like to imagine ourselves as being. “To the degree that it does not try to legitimate itself by reference to the past…postmodernism typically harks back to that wing of thought, Nietzsche in particular, that emphasizes the deep chaos of modern life and its intractability before rational thought." In the 1920s solipsism-inspired artistic expressions of man’s realization that the mind is a private space, the artists dealt with the impossibility of communication through abstract expressionism that acknowledged the chaotic space of the impenetrable mental divide. Today, we are alleviating a recognition of this reality by consuming, entertaining, and literally seeking salvation in the very world that has failed us.

Solipsism and telepathy are two sides of the same coin. When we realize that our dreams of telepathy cannot possibly come true, nihilism, narcissism, and nostalgia set in. This may birth a nation or, worse yet, a world, of apathetic individuals who retreat inside their own self-absorbed minds and inhibit their ability to live meaningful lives. This is dangerous – for politics, for law, for culture, for the climate, for our sanity, for human rights, and for love. If “anything goes” and “nobody cares” then what stops another human being from turning to his left and shooting his neighbor? If we live in fear then we cannot possibly live in love – the one thing to which we all must strive if we seek things like equality and the innate value of a human life. Life then becomes a mere game of survival wherein we turn to drugs or sex or consumerism and a million other “therapeutic” ways to try and derive some pleasure out of it. And then, before we know it, we are, as the founder of NYU Steinhardt warned, “amusing ourselves to death.”

Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment.

When we realize that all of these things are finite, that we cant take drugs or have sex or buy products forever, then we ironically become numb because we seek so strongly to feel. We turn to anti-depressants or other self-depreciating behaviors because we long so deeply for something that has been promised to us by mass society, yet, in reality, is no where to be found there. Horkeheimer and Adorno spoke warned us about the pervasive ‘culture industry.’ Walter Benjamin was worried about mechanical reproduction and its effects on society. Humdog wrote about the commodification of human beings on the web. These pessimistic notions of media/cultural theorists who assume little to no human agency in their qualms about the media’s effects on society are true to the degree that we blindly accept the world as it is offered to us and allow sanctioned ignorance and apathy to undermine our capacity to act proactively.

The nature of communication is constantly changing. The radio rendered communication one-way and enabled mass messages to be dispersed without any feedback. The telephone birthed two-way communication, a built in response system that allowed messages to be sent back and forth. The Internet has reinvented the way communication works, yet again. It has compressed time/space and, in many ways, has made our lives easier. But in many other ways, it has started us on the same downward spiral that Plato philosophized about when he spoke of the value of dialectics and the debasement of writing; nihilism, narcissism, and nostalgia. Social networking has globalized the public sphere and made audible all sorts of different voices. There are an innumerable amount of communicative devices with which we can send messages, get quick responses, read news, create virtual identities, share information, respond to information, learn about the world at large, and enter into new worlds at the click of a mouse or the touch of a screen. With so many different ways to communicate with each other and shape ourselves digitally, we seem to be becoming ever more removed from each other. We become nihilistic about life and view life as meaningless because all the promises of technology and the digital world have done exactly the opposite of what they claimed they would; they have turned our worlds upside down and enabled us to be in the same physical space, yet enter into completely different virtual worlds. Or we become narcissistic because our worlds have been rendered subjective by virtue of the sheer amount of information that the virtual world enables to circulate. And then we become nostalgic about the days when life seemed more authentic and less mediated, our thoughts communicable, our worlds more intimate. This is solipsism magnified. In Charlemagne's court, music was sentenced to written notation so that cacophony might be reduced and voices standardized. Ironically, this enabled music to be manipulated because it had been ‘made to matter.’ This same phenomenon has occurred with the rise of Internet and our obsession with commodifing our thoughts - and it is slowly driving us further and further apart. Marx talked about the “mystical quality of commodities,” or the nature of commodities to act as if they had magically appeared for consumers who pay no attention to the human labor that went into their creation. Ironically, this is the same phenomenon tha happens when thoughts are ‘made to matter.’ When we type out a thought and send it out into the virtual world via one online stream or another, the thought takes on a life of its own, a mystical quality wherein in stands for something greater than itself. It becomes lost in a sea of thoughts. It not only says “this is what my creator is thinking,” but also “this is how my creator views technology,” “this is what my creator’s relationship with technology is like,” and “this is how technology is being used.” In essence, our thoughts have taken on the same mystical quality that Marx attributed to commodities, which doesn’t seem so farfetched in light of the fact that thoughts rendered digital become commodities.

The Three Cs may help to halt our gradual cyborgic circumscription by these increasingly anthropomorphized machines. It is the construction of technology as an instrumental object to be imbued by us as subject instead of its status as an “articulation of us that provides an understanding of being and shapes the way we come to perceive the world” (Heiddeger) that makes it enfeebling rather than enabling. If we look at technology curiously rather than as a taken-for-granted part of society as we know it, then what we see is a vastly different animal. We might see technology as a product of mankind, made of parts that are collected in uncolonized nations by migrant workers who have no clue as to why they are collecting shards of glass or metal from the Earth. We might then be inspired to contemplate issues such as human rights and the digital divide and question the taken-for-grantedness of the technoscape and its impact on our lives and the lives around us. Lastly, in light of these contemplations, we might then be driven to create; to create ways to use technology without allowing ourselves to be consumed by it, to create new constructs and paradigms that proactively inform the way we think instead of incarcerating our psyches in technological prisons that limit our capacity to act authentically, uniquely, and in ways that inspire us to resituate ourselves as active agents who are consciously aware of how the world is affecting us and how we are affecting it.

The irony behind the internet’s aspirations towards a Platonic model of communication (my ideas transmit to your consciousness) via social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Wave that collect and disperse thoughts is that we have become more disillusioned and mediated than ever before. Our thoughts are now made to matter, in both senses of the term. Consolidating our identities online has enabled the very environment that Manovich cited as being constitutive of a society undergoing computerization; numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding which means that we are in danger of becoming what humdog identified as “a community of signs, nicely boxed, categorized and inventoried, ready for consumption” instead of real human beings revealing real uncommodified memoirs of the mind. The lively world of Facebook birthed Twitter, which extracted status updates and harnessed our obsession with materializing our private deliberations. Recently, Google Wave has consolidated virtually every aspect of our virtual existences into one format, much like the IPhone enables us to carry music, the Internet, gaming, and telephonic capabilities in one tiny plastic box that fits right into the palm of our hands. The irony of it all is that while we have reimagined technology to be the world so that we might imagine ourselves as holding it in the palm of our hands, what we’ve really done is become so accustomed to technology that we are threatened to be consumed by and subservient to it. We’ve become so accustomed to technology as “standing in reserve," as available at the snap of our fingers, that the miracle of technology itself has been effaced. "Technology [in its everyday sense] is not equivalent to the essence of technology." It is this essence that we must discover and to which we must defer our awe if we are to begin to understand the power of and effects that technology has on our very being.

"They were the best of times, they were the worst of times" (A Tale of Two Cities). This quote, though written in regard to the French Revolution, can be applied to any historical moment. Today is both a horribly frightening moment of economic instability, cultural/moral relativism, environmental decay, information overload, and overall uncertainty coupled with the exciting revelation that life is one glorious adventure, a hotbed of experiences, events, and people that we can use to create, interpret, and imagine a life that is ours for the making. Postmodernism has negated the grand narratives that have characterized

each of the generations that have preceded us. It has reimagined the way we write history and the way we tell the stories of yesteryear. What effects will this have on the value that has been traditionally placed on antiquity? Will great minds of bygone times like Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Nietzsche continue to inform the way we think? Will the Schoenburgs, Eliots, and Picassos of old be held in such high regard? Should Beethoven and Jay-Z be comparable? Or are all these figures and their creations only valuable if they can be rendered into some sort of postmodern pastiche? Will the lessons of the past be eclipsed by the novel, by subjectivity-obsessed netizens who claim transcendence via wormholes through the now? If Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revelations is correct, than this current postmodern moment is merely a phase in the great story of mankind’s existence as a thinking, feeling, being subject on this planet. What lies ahead is yet to be

told. By approaching postmodernism itself with an air of marked curiosity, we can contemplate its existence and situatedness in historical time and develop ways to create the next great historical movement. While we

think ourselves unique and nonconformist when we adopt paradigms like nihilism and narcissism or become nostalgic about an imaginary golden past, what we are really displaying is the archetypical postmodern mass subject rendered in a pseudo-differentiated manner by individuals the world over who have taken to imagining that the world owes them a favor. And who can blame us? This is what digital technology has taught us. Nihilism, narcissism, and nostalgia are trendy. Curiosity, contemplation, and creativity are not. The former three will lead us to apathy, the latter three to one more C; consciousness. "Two paths diverged in the forest, I took the one less traveled and it made all the difference" (Frost).

The Technoscape; Where Thoughts are Made to Matter

We are fundamentally ambivalent about technology. That's what I think. We are fundamentally ambivalent about social networking sites and how, exactly, to deal with this new power that previously silenced individuals now have.

This is what I think about technology and social networking... I think that social network sites like Facebook, twitter, and Google Wave, although I don't actually know much about GW, are making us more impatient. They are informing the way we think, act, feel, and approach the events/situations in our lives. Now, it seems, that experiences are not weighted as heavily if they cannot somehow be captured and exploited on the internet. It doesn't so much matter how we are feeling, sensing, being, becoming if we cannot share it with others. These social networking sites are also making us take ourselves to seriously. You have a thought, you put it online without even thinking about what you are saying most of the time, and then, before you know it, it is out there in the world and others are giving it weight, responding to it, allowing it to shape the way they view you and, correspondingly, the way you view yourself. We become interpolated by our own thoughts because now our thoughts have a material quality about them. The internet allows us to make our thoughts real. Karl MArx wrote about "the mystical quality of commodities"... about commodity fetishism and how commodities always stand for something larger than themselves. Now our thoughts have been commodified by virtue of the internet. One of the most important things that a yoga instructor taught me was to "let thoughts pass by like clouds." Don't get bogged down in your thoughts. This is EXACTLY the REVERSE of what the internet causes us to do. We can't help but attach substance, life, meaning, and longevity to our thoughts because they are written down in words; because we can remember what we were thinking at any given point in time via tweetz, status updates, and blogs. We become nostalgic or bitter or in awe of our former selves and often compare what we used to be to what we are now via this new way of remembering.

We are depressed, sad, sick, lonely, and afflicted in a million other ways because WE ATTACH SO MUCH WEIGHT TO OUR THOUGHTS. We think every little thought matters, but really very few of them do.  and the internet intensifies our capacity to attach weight and relevance to our stupid little thoughts.  Here's an example: recently, I was frusterated, so I wrote something online to someone I love that was completely insensitive but it was only becuase I took that one little frustration and threw the weight of the world on its back and forced it to matter, to be real, and now it's out there in the world, on the internet, referential, and it came from my head and out of my fingertips and now it defines a part of me. And, ironically, that moment was such a rare moment. But THAT'S the one I chose to put out into the world?!?!?!
what the F Leila?
The reality of all this is, however, that OUR THOUGHTS ARE FLEETING AND BARELY MATTER. I remember another good friend of mine called me up once because he/she was having suicidal thoughts. I gave them the same advice that my yoga teacher had given me; let thoughts pass by like clouds. But that sometimes seems so hard to do when you are caught up in a depressing, weighty, lonely moment... AND because we are living in the digital age where thoughts are made to matter (...hey..that's punny.. and awesome..I'm going to make it my blog title.. I LOVE THIS BLOG!.. sometimes stuff just materializes and i'm like whoaaa where did that come from and it's totally groovy and i can go off on tangents or use run on sentences and mispspell words becuase i have no one to impress and i can follow streams of thought and see where they lead without even stopping my fingers as if they had minds of their own and then either read or not read what i've written and either clarify or not clarify my intentions or jsut scirbble and scribbl;e and scribble and scribble ).

Speaking of creativity and tangents...
something else that is so fascinating to me is creativity, how human beings have historically approached it, and how it is changing in the age of mechanical reproduction and digital media. IE. when great creative artists of old like Beethoven created works they were only legitimate if the source of their creativity came from somewhere out there.. from somewhere divine.. was something that transcended themselves. And apparently African music is not copyrighted because it comes from "the Gods" etc.etc.etc.

This is what a renowned artist whose work I deeply love had to say about creativity...
"I feel intuitively that this work inhabits the same space as my painting "Causeway" but from the other side of the ocean, so to speak.
When I felt the vision [sorry to put it that way, but that's how it seems to me] i just sensed that I had to paint it, not question it. In such experiences the action of creation becomes a matter of faith or trust, not will. i approach it from the mindset of being a channel and interpreter rather than that of a "creator". Does that make any sense? It then falls upon me to do the best I can to realize the vision, not question it. Sort of like being a midwife instead of being an artist." (MW)



How cool is that? So I sent him some of my own thoughts about creativity and a TED talk video by Elizabeth Gilbert  in which she speaks of the weighty expectations we place on artists and the idea that "instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius."

And his response...
"I know what she means about "losing it". I feel that when a creative idea or vision comes along, it's like as gift, not meant to be squandered. You gotta catch 'em as they fly by! That's why I always have a little sketchpad in my back pocket, a pen and paper on my bedside table!"
I love this.. life is a gift not to be squandered!! so how does that relate to digital media? If we are so caught up in attaching significance to every one of our thoughts then (maybe) we cannot distinguish the truly world-shattering, mind-altering, great ones from the mundane, worldly ones. If we are so caught up in experiencing life in order to project it online or use technology to capture it or manipulate it then don't have time to "catch" these creativity revelations. Technology is loud, and creativity feeds off of silence.

I'm presently creating something and the advice that my "mentor" has given me the most is "Let go. Just let go." Let go Let go Let go Let go Let go. of our thoughts, of hatred, bitterness, the past, imaginary ideas about the future, constructions of other people that we form in our own small minds and then project onto them, expectations, ideas of ourselves, of how we should be, of who we are, of what we are, of who we are, of who we are.  I'll write more about this particular statement/topic after Christmas. 

I remember one of my business professors at Fordham used to constantly stress the value of reflection. He taught us to act and then once we were done and had achieved results to go back and reflect on our actions. He taught us this idea as if it were common sense, as if reflection were an undeniable force by which to maximize efficiency and strengthen future results. I remember trying to argue with him about the value of reflection as an undeniably positive step, but he brushed my attempt off as if it were nonsense. But he was coming out of an age that didn't have the internet as a tool. He was so out of touch because he didn't account for the fact that the internet enables perpetual reflection. So I think win that one, 10 points.

Another grad school professor posed the question: "is Google destroying memory?" Maybe. I think what it is destroying is our capacity to appreciate life for what it is, a life for life's sake sort of approach. This is what the internet is diminishing.I've been trained not to reduce the study of life/humanity/technology to a hypodermic needle type model wherein a single acting force automatically "injects" effects into an object/subject, but I think that technology is a BIG cause of depression, sickness, lack of love, human suffering, and unequal human rights. What I'm suggesting is more than just a medium as message type deal. Human beings have feared new forms of media ever since the dawn of time. what does this tell us about human beings in general? Probably that we fear big changes. I know I do! In this respect, living through this time period will probably make us stronger, more flexible, and able to deal with change better than our parents or maybe future generations who are being born into the digital age and weren't around for its birth and subsequent integration into society.

In another discussion about music, my professor told us that he had attended a talk given by a bunch of big recording executives and attended by a bunch of talented Steinhardt musicians. The musicians were being classically trained, were struggling with their instruments, with perfecting their craft, sitting for hours in practice rooms, aspiring to be someone in the music world. Eagerly, they asked the executives what it would take to become someone who mattered, if they had to put in more hours, perfect themselves as musicians, etc. etc. and the executives' response was: learn how to use technology. Learn how to work music programs on the computer and manipulate sounds online.

That sort of makes me sad that the internet now even has the power to supersede struggle, practice, and patience. Actually, I think that when I get older and the world begins to come into its own and we come up with an acceptable technological infrastructure then I'll look back on these years, on my days in college, on my days on the web, on my forays into technology and remember them as depressing, scary, and characterized by marked ambivalence. These are things I love about life: silence, yoga, nature, changing seasons, when people I love use their talents to create gifts rather than buy things for me/others, love, family, macrobiotics. But I only love these things because technology is so pervasive, because I've seen both sides, I've been to heaven and back. But heaven is everywhere, so maybe giving in to the digital landscape instead of shunning it because the things I truly love about life are no where to be found in it is the answer.

When I embarked on this grad program I did so because I was fascinated by human beings and the ways in which they created themselves/forged their own identities. I was fascinated by neuroscience, by sociology, by language, by the many isms that comprise our world. The last things I wanted to do was study technology. Why? Probably because I've convinced myself that it is SOOOOO not "me." I'm a movement girl. I don't even really like words and talking. I'd rather dance. But maybe I've reduced myself, restricted myself, imprisoned myself in this false prism of Leilaness that inhibits me from truly appreciating/loving things like technology, the internet, movies, news, people who are heavily mediated, the media in general. But it is soooo much a part of our lives. Our lives are sooo heavily mediated that we can't help but be shaped by our surroundings.

So maybe loving people means loving the media, technology, the internet too. Afterall, it came from people. A part of me will probably always be partial to things that are REAL (ie. not mediated or manipulated by technology).. but maybe things of this sort don't exist anymore? Afterall, if people are so heavily mediated and it is people who we engage with, who we fall in love with, who teach us things and help us grow and make life meaningful (???) then there is truly nothing that is not mediated.???


As always, I DON'T KNOW! ertj9034tj340kgdrger There are ups and down and highs and lows ans trends that this blog goes through, but a few things have remained constant for me thus far; that learning is perpetual and life is constantly in flux and that Love is the answer.

A part of me feels like this segment of blog should be the end of this blog in its entirety since it is so important, and so truly, truthfully, deeply and honestly how I feel about life...

On another note, fear and love are opposite sides of the same coin and I have been excessively afraid lately. But this is not really who I am, it is just something temporary. Anything that comes out of my mouth (or anyone's for that matter) that is written in letters or blogs or spoken or acted out that is not all-encompassing, unconditional love is fear - fear of transitioning, of relinquishing the past, of newness, of being on my own, things of this sort. Any words, thoughts, actions or creations that I manifest and bring into the world or thrust upon you/anyone that are not aligned with this ultimate goal of seeing the beauty in all things, of truly saying Fuck you to everything that is not unadulterated, unconditional love are not really me- they are just some ulterior me, some ego-bound me speaking or acting or thinking on some worldly whim. 

And this, I think, (what do I know?) is where the logical fallacy of life and love occurs - in the space between the real and the false - in assuming that one is the other, that my very essence is validated by what I say, do, act out, or create.... even though these manifestations of "me" might be motivated by fear - a transitory state of being. And this is why we tire of love, why we move on from a person or get anxious about the circumstances that we are in. But, ironically, it is these material manifestations that draw people to each other... so how now brown cow? hahaha... I just felt like saying that..... but really, people come to love each other for their idiosyncrasies so... I guess how now brown cow is a good way to end that thought.... hahahaha.  

I'm blessed to be forgiven.
I'd like to run away
From you,
But if you didn't come
And find me...
I would die.

Music, Dance, Love

"All art constantly aspires to the condition of music."


The logic behind this quote is that music is the closest we can get to embodying and touching the human soul. It is something that transcends words, and, although words often accompany it, they are nothing compared to the language that music itself speaks. Music consumes us. It envelopes us. And sound, unlike sight, which many (all?) of the other arts rely on, is nondirectional. It takes us to places, unlike, say, a painting, which gives us something to look at rather than something to be consumed by.

Movement, likewise, can have that enveloping quality about it. I say this from the perspective of someone who has experienced moments of transcendence via yoga/gymnastics/dance/movement that are outside of myself. In the act of doing, it is transcendent. And maybe because I have experienced that, the act of seeing, for me at least, is transcendent because I can project this experience unto the dancer. Music has the capacity to change our mood in an instant. Dance is a gateway to discovery.

Music, Dance, Love.. they are really all the same thing. They are about transcendence.. about experiencing a yourself that is not yourself, and, thus, when I hear beautiful music, I am in love and when I dance beautiful dances, I am in love.

When I dance.. and I'm talking very specifically about dancing that transcends (the electric slide can and cannot be this depending on how we approach it), I am outside of myself, something greater than myself, something that escapes the confines of words or identification. I am moving, feeling, being, becoming.

And being in love and love are truly not the same thing. Being in love is sort of unidentifiable, although I do think that the act of loving can be offer us a path towards being in love.... you can't make yourself fall in love, but you can find a way to get to a place where it may or may not happen. No expectations! Just witnessing the progression through stages... which is why I do not believe in love at first sight.. no struggle involved, no love involved, just pure "falling in love?" Doesn't seem possible. Maybe you can meet someone and "just know" that that person may or may not be the person that you aspire to fall in love with and then wait an see if it happens?

Play beautiful music and dance beautiful dances, not because you know how to, but because love is all there is. Everything else is false, socially constructed - just a way to survive, to get by from day to day. And so music and dance are all there is. And music and dance are love. AND LOVE IS ALL THERE IS!