Visual Journal Week 3

My dear few (very few) blog followers,

During our last class, the weather outside was doing the most peculiar things.  It had been raining all day and right when we seemed to have finished talking about Abrams and his book which is casting spells on my mind by blowing it, the sun illuminated the clouds to reveal one of the most beautiful golden hours I have ever been witness to.  Its as if all the sudden, the damp, dank grayness of the rain that had characterized the entire day ceased to exist and everything turned golden and majestic.  Following my routine, I took a shot of the big tree looking straight up.  However, I wasn't very content with it, so I took a video instead which I believe is much more effective to show how cool the rain was.

Large raindrops like these were falling all around me as the large trees above group smaller ones together and then fell.  Stumbling around the woods, I came across a tree vagina and butt hole combo.  Check it out!

Pretty cool right?  So..I lied.  I actually did take another picture of the big tree but I had forgotten about it.  It's below.  I think this picture is cool because it emphasizes how complex and old the bark of this tree is.  

Pretty sunsets in every direction.  I was completely overwhelmed.  This is one of my sunset pictures below though it does not even come close to defining how freakin awesome the light was.  There are some things that are just impossible to encompass in a photograph.  

The moss was out of control.  Literally.  I put this picture in for a couple reasons.  The first is to emphasize the moss.  Because the woods had been so damp from the rain over the last couple days, the green stuff was everywhere.  The second reason I put this picture here is to hate on myself for a second because this picture has shitty field of view.  This pic would be much better if I had been able to increase my aperture, something that was impossible for me to do unless I had brought my tripod.  I am now convinced that my tripod is ESSENTIAL to my next visual journal.

So, if you have been keeping up with my weekly blog entries (which I am pretty sure only my stepdad, Ross and my teacher Maia do) you will remember me saying that fungus is actually not a plant or an animal but something completely different altogether.  Many plants, animals, and especially humans are unable to share living spaces with each other and constantly resort to conflict and violence as a result.  However, here is three organisms: moss, fungus, and tree, all living together in the very same space.  Us humans could learn a lot from these simple creatures.

I love Fungi Period.

Booger Fungi below. (Also could have better depth of field)

The fungi is taking over!!  Fungi for everyone!

So many droplets of water hanging from so many tree limbs and leaves, suspended for moments on end until they gain enough mass that the limb cannot support it any longer and it falls to the ground.

My fellow IDSers Grace Lee and Amy.  They are good at drawing.

This is my most stunning sunset picture because it truly captures the different shades of color in the sky.  

Last week after our phantasmagoric show in the sky, we had two guest speakers, one a Fabio (I am kinda disappointed cause I was expecting the real Fabio) and San Fuchess.  They both talked about strategies that they used to get employed and their businesses started after they had graduated.  However, while they put on a front that what they considered success to be was other things like a wife and kids and a house (Sam Fuchess) it was obvious what they really thought made success was how much money you could make.  They both emphasized the horrible condition that the economy was in and stressed this point to us (it was kinda depressing).  Both are "successful" businessmen in common terms (as in they made a good amount of money) as Sam is a businessman with a few businesses and Fabio is a successful photographer mostly of furniture.  

There are certainly a few things that I took away from their talk after reflecting on what they had said to me.  Sam, coming from a lower class family, had almost flunked out of high school and had a kid before he entered Guilford College.  Therefore, he was living in pretty rough conditions before he became what he is today, and that part of his life surely motivated him to pursue making more money.  Fabio came to America from Brazil as a student.  He did not mention much else about his past before Guilford but I believe I could make a fair assumption that, like Sam, he was not in a very good condition financially before he attended Guilford College.  

Throughout their speech, they certainly embraced and had high hopes for achieving the "American Dream" and they even referenced this a few times.  

Comparing this to myself I find many differences.  I have divorced parents but both of them have remarried and are certainly upper middle class status.  Therefore, things have come much easier for me in my life before Guilford College than it did come for Sam or Fabio.  Due to this and some other of my beliefs, I still will not be taking a sales position at some mall for experience in the real world as Sam has suggested.

First off, I don't believe in the American Dream.  Not only that, I don't believe in America or much of what it stands for.  I embrace the way that America has allowed me to live my life but also look at how America has put my fellow people in much worse conditions, much for my well being as a middle upper class white heterosexual male.  As Van Jones said, people have blind spots or rough spots.  In my case I have blind spots all around me.  So embracing this, I like to think in the big picture of things.  

I would rather die of hunger on the streets in rags, vomit and my own feces, than take any position as an employee in any large-ish corporation as a salesman.  This comes from my hatred of capitalism in our modern day world.  I don't think that Capitalism was always a bad thing but it has long since reared its ugly head and needs much reform in our modern day world.  

Therefore, picking a job for myself, I don't give a flying fuck what I will be making salary wise.  Rather, I care about what I will be doing in my job and how that effects the world around me.  If I was a salesman at Dick's Sporting Goods as a random example (don't mean to pick on Dick's but as a manly man I ain't gonna be workin at no Belk's).  As a salesman, I would be selling products most likely that were manufactured by places such as maquiladoras or sweat shops around the world where Dick's or other companies send the materials and then pays super cheap wages to the labor that goes into making them and then sends them back to America where they put them on the racks for a much higher cost than what went into actually making them, inflated by the costs that it took big Dick's (no pun intended) to ship them there to the sweatshops and back to the states.  Furthermore, it is these maquiladoras and sweat shops that end up taking over small cities and villages outside of the U.S. where no other income or sustainable way of living is possible and forces the people that live their into poverty.  

Therefore Mr. Funchess, I'm sorry, but I will not participate in the business world so that I can continue the exploitation of millions of people not as privileged as us white heterosexual Americans.

While that was quite a bashing rant, I do not mean to sound like I absolutely hated Sam and Fabio and everything they said to me.  Quite the contrary, I respect where they are coming from and what they have done in their lives.  I actually took an important lesson away that they both emphasized during the speech.  This was the will to be assertive in whatever you do as a career.  This is SUCH a huge lesson that I have already learned about through some mistakes I have made in my life.  Calling someone is the hardest step to take but the step that will get you the most exposure.  Therefore Mr. Fab and Funchess, I will not be a shy person in the "real world".  

As for my future in the "real world" I foresee myself pursuing a career via social work and capturing my experiences through my love of photography.  Whether that means joining the Peace Corps, doing another year of AmeriCorps, both, or becoming a teacher, I will certainly be helping disadvantaged people and documenting it all with my Rebel Xti SLR.  

Looking back on all this, I hope I am not being naive as I have been a middle upper class citizen my whole life and do not know what it is like to not have that.  However, shouldn't that empower me more to be more sustainable and happy with what I have through the rest of my life?  Especially since I notice the bigger picture of being a businessman in a major corporation here in America.  

...As a side note, I still haven't talked about Spell of the Sensuous but I will be sure to reference it more in my next journal entry...

But for the time being...More visual candy!

For my photoshop picture of the week, I couldn't decide between three different ones.  I am finding the strangest and most gorgeous things in nature and turning them around in order to see them in a completely different way/ 4 different ways.  I hope you all enjoy!

Visual Journal Week 2

Here it is, week number 2 has came and gone, and now I sit here to write about it.  For my Visual Journal, I focused on the changes from the snow covered fauna the week before to the uncovered forest a mere week later.  First off, as I look up, I see the big tree once again. 

This tree is a little darker than before.  Its hulking trunk leaps up and then branches out with big arms narrowing down to fingers and then to mere twigs.  Because the contrast is so great in this picture there are really only two colors, the black silhouettes of the branches and the blue gray sky above it.  If I can remove myself completely from the knowledge of what I am looking at, it is interesting to notice that, especially in this picture, what is to say the gray blue isn't the foreground while the black is the background?
..But I know that it's a tree, unfortunately, so this is hard to do unless you can really trick your mind. Looking at all these branches against the sky, I can't help but think of all the synapses and nerve endings in my brain.  Maybe trees communicate with their neighbors by the friction they cause when the wind brushes their limbs together.   

I snapped this shot soon after Maia told us to start our visual journal.  I like it cause it has three of my friends gearing up for their visuals, and Krongle, though in focus and in the center of the frame, is certainly not the main subject of the picture. 

Life works in mysterious ways.  Especially life that is subjected to mother nature every second of its existence.  A week ago, this tree was completely bare and buried in snow.  Now, not even a week later, moss covers the bottom of this tree, as green as can be. 

I think fungus is really cool.  Have you ever walked through the forest just looking for fungus before?  If the answer is no, try it.  The stuff grows everywhere and in any condition that nature presents it with.  While I still found some fungus last week, the fungus I found this week is booming in comparison.  Fungus is no animal or plant, it's an entity all by itself.  The designs and colors it produces just show how unique it is.  Fungus is certainly one of those pennies, hidden within nature.   

On the way back to campus, I found something I had never seen before: a little angle.  The little guy was pretty upset so I decided not to disturb him for long but I was able to snap this quick shot of him before he scurried away. 

 

Because I was unable to get the "Spell of the Sensuous" until this morning, I am not including anything from the book in my journal this week, though I will be sure to make up for it next week.  Instead, I would like to talk about a speech that I saw that has deeply inspired me, a speech I saw at the end of class by a man named Van Jones.  Van Jones, formerly part of the Obama administration, spoke about how environmental justice and social justice are intertwined and put the pressure on our generation to keep this in mind when we finally enter the workforce.  After he was done, I couldn't help but think, why the hell didn't this guy run for president instead of Obama?  Personally, I believe the environmental and social justice Van Jones urged us to strive for would be much easily achieved if we abandoned the constitution all together.  I mean, how is a document written over 300 years ago going to apply to our society now?  And amendments are bullshit because they are too hard to get passed anyways.  If we really want an America that doesn't give the power to few large corporations to do whatever they please with our world, then I believe we should go ahead and bag the whole system that gave these corporations this kind of power in the first place.  Capitalism breeds corruption and greed and those two qualities have no desire to be environmentally friendly.  Before going on too much of a political rant, I'm going to stop myself and display my photoshop visual journal picture of the week.  

 

 I have decided that each week I will take a picture from my visual journal and do something cool with it in photoshop.  This original picture of the top of a tree under artificial light seems incredibly complex but its creation was rather easy.  There is no reason I can't easily make more great works of art like this..So I plan on doing so. 

My last topic I would like to include for this week is how I define Creativity and Success and there correlation.  I believe that Success is not possible without a lot of creativity.  What separates motivated successful people in a certain field with motivated non-successful people in the same field has a lot to do with creativity.  If Laird Hamilton hadn't built a completely different surf board he could have never surfed the largest wave than anyone else just like if Kareem Abdul Jabar hadn't invented the hookshot, there is no way he would be the NBA's all time scoring leader.  

To define success, this is a trickier definition because it certainly differs from person to person.  One could feel very successful doing very little and one could not feel successful after doing quite a bit.  I don't know what success looks like for me just because I don't know what life is going to bring me.  However, I would feel successful if our world changed for the better and I had some sort of part in that.  

For the near future, putting the Van Jones talk together with thinking about creativity and success, I have came up with a pretty cool idea.  For my AmeriCorps project, I have to keep serving till August but my work correlates directly with Reedy Fork Elementary school.  Therefore what am I going to do in June and July when I got no kids to help with their homework?  I am going to propose to my supervisor that we create a big garden in the community of trailer parks I work in that would be funded and created by me and volunteers I could solicit and then maintained by the residents of the trailer park.  The majority of the residents in the trailer park are Mexicans and I know for a fact that Mexicans are some of the best workers on the planet, especially when they are working for something they believe in as well as in solidarity.  I think this would be a great opportunity for this to happen and then the food could be distributed throughout the community.

Until next week

Volunteer Flyer

Below is a flyer I created for my AmeriCorps program.  I am trying to get more Guilford students involved in this program because it gives them a chance to speak Spanish to Latinos in the community as well as an opportunity to work with elementary school kids.  I will be hanging the flyer around campus today to try and get the word out.  I created it using photoshop.

First Visual Journal

As soon as Maia told us to begin our visual journal, I leaned back and took a picture of the view looking directly up, leaning back on the big tree of Guilford. 

Then, after taking one picture of the group, I tried to distance myself from any form of human and focus on the icy forest around me.

While walking around in the snow and ice, I let my mind calm itself by focusing on my breath.  By doing this, I was able to let all my thoughts and feelings of the day slip away.  Even the deep, piercing chills I had felt sitting in the snow on my Twister mat just a moment before ceased to be a distraction from what I was about to do.  Being in the moment, I began to walk through the forest.  Once I had developed a large distance between myself and anyone else, I began to slow down and take in each object around me in its entirety.  The first thing I stumbled across was a large tree that had been uprooted from the earth’s floor.  I urinated behind it because it provided sufficient shelter and I love peeing in the snow.  Because simply being out in the snow had been so painful for me while we were merely sitting down, I began to develop a large appreciation for everything that was still alive amongst the chilling whiteness.

Ivy still occupied the bottom of the forest floor, poking out between small patches of white.  A bush with spiky leaves remained intact until I ripped one of its leaves off, thanked the bush for letting me do so, and then took a picture of the leaf against the ice.

I climbed down across a creek and noticed how the ice had frozen everything still, as if time had stopped and everything remained unable to move.  The fallen stick that had been pushed back and forth by the currents of the creek now lay motionless, stuck halfway under the chilling ice, just as the random fallen leaves had traveled the current down the stream.  Now they were stuck, frozen in time and space.  Time has officially stopped.

Upon examination of more fallen trees, strange tones of orange and brown crept up and down the trunks of the dead mass.  Fungus truly is one of nature’s miracles, for it can grow, in almost any condition nature presents it.

It was also interesting to notice the very few spots where snow or ice had not crept over.  This fungus supporting tree also served as an umbrella for the dead leaves below it. 

In the distance, I heard Maia’s calling.  Time to get back to the group. I casually start to meander  back to the group when I hear another yell “Jason Straus!”  Okay, now it’s time to hustle…

.…Back in the circle, we read two poems: “Introduction” and “Getting Ready” by Mary Oliver.  Four people each read the poem aloud to the group and I noticed how the meaning changed depending on who read it.  The pronunciation of specific words, the rhythm and flow of the way each person read it gave new meaning to the poems.  By the last couple of people who read the last poem, the sun had fallen and it had become too hard for me to concentrate on anything that was being said due to the excruciatingly cold atmosphere.  Upon our walk back, the sun had almost fallen completely and the ice shined in the streetlights as we walked back to campus, to warmth. 

Below are the tracks to a rare breed...Guilford Students!

The lake was completely frozen over as we scurried back to warmer grounds.

I have been required to read Annie Dillard’s chapter “Seeing” in  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 2 times since I have been at Guilford.  The first time was in Kaylene Swenson’s English 102 class when I was a first semester freshman.  Back then, I embraced the words and thought how beautiful her writing was about the small treasures of nature, but I did not develop an outright appreciation for it until my voyage as a student at Guilford over the past 4 and ½ years.  Now that I read it, I understand what she feels when she says “These appearances catch at my throat; they are the free gifts, the bright coppers at the roots of the tree.” (16)  With the many distractions of our modern world, the endless electronics, nonsense mainstream media, and non stop paranoia of propaganda, there are too many people that are unable to take a step back from these distractions to appreciate the penny.  The Guilford woods have been an integral part in my appreciation for the penny.  There is endless pleasure in simply walking around in the woods and recognizing that there are so many living things in it and things happening that we can’t even begin to comprehend through our senses. 

During my visual journal and my response to my visual journal through m verbal journal, I embrace Annie Dillard’s writings and have adapted them as a sort of lifestyle.  When people ask me my political preference, spiritual preference or religious preference, I simply reply that I am concerned with nature and that is that. 

Below is a rendition of  a shot of the fungus I took on my walk. After a little photoshop editing...here it is... SOmething that I am going to strive to do is to take parts of my visual journal, manipulate them on photoshop and then put them up on this blog.  Please enjoy.