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
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