I haven't posted anything in the last couple weeks. I've been struggling this month with being positive. I was feeling anxious to move forward in my life, in many ways, but have felt like I've been walking around in circles for longer than I care to admit. So, I decided to throw myself into some projects that are positive and personal to me.
Firstly, I discovered this company called Terracycle. They are a recycling/upcycling company that creates products from "waste" materials. They often make products from things that when regularly recycled get turned into disposable products, but they turn them into products like clothing, bags, CD cases, kites, and a wide variety of things. So, they do great things for the environment. A lot of their waste resources comes from people shipping it to them, so I decided to start a collection in my garage. I've got a few bags full of things and very soon I'm going to print out the free shipping labels that Terracycle provides and ship the stuff in to be turned into things. It's great to know that certain hard to recycle things won't be ending up in the landfill. Our household has already cut the trash down to about one garbage bag a week and with this it might be even less. Another great part about Terracycle is that for every single thing you send to them, every scrap of plastic, every chip bag, every can and every bottle, they donate a small amount of money to a charity or school of your choosing. So, by collecting your "trash", sending it to them for free, you are helping the environment AND making money for a cause you believe in. I've talked with a couple of people who have also thought it to be a good idea and have started to contribute to the collection themselves. Also, I've talked with my college (The University of Rock County) and am on the way to getting a collection center started there as well. So, that has been going well and I have felt like I've been making a positive change.
Secondly, I've started to think about more ways to promote recycling and upcycling and thought a good way to do that while doing something I love is to start creating some art out of "scrap" materials. So, I started a couple sculptures out of old fence and electrical wiring. One of which is a slightly larger than life size human body, the frame made of old fence and the body filled out by weaving wires in and out of all the fencing, to create the solidity of the body. The second is a dragonfly, about two feet in length, body and head made of wires, legs of metal and wings made from the transparent key matrix inside of a keyboard. Neither is complete yet, but coming along well. Also, my older sister's fiance is going to teach me to weld soon, and we will be making a couple pieces together, first of which being a two foot tall recycling symbol made from a combination of old scrap metal pieces, circuit boards, nails, etc.
The rest of my time has been spent preparing my essays for my transfer to the University of Madison this spring, working out daily, reading some good books (most recently Call of the Wild by Jack London, Nature by Ralph Waldo Emmerson and The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara by Terry Brooks), helping my sister move to Platteville, celebrating my mom's birthday, slowly but surely recording an album with a friend of mine, adopting my sister's bunny, attended an animal rights protest in Rockford, gardening for another friend of mine, working on a follow up article on Veganism for the Community Conscious Newsletter (a rebuttal against the editor's piece trying to "debunk" Veganism in response to my first article), getting ready for my multiple tutoring jobs this semester (Sociology, Anthropology and general writing revision) and still trying to spend time in the woods whenever possible, talking to the trees and seeing what they have to tell me.
So, I've been trying to stay on the right track with things, but I will be posting more frequently now, hopefully every couple of days, for anyone who reads.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Thursday, August 1, 2013
Where does the reflection end?
Are you what you want to be or a reflection of your desired self?
It is so incredibly easy now in a society with social networking, in which you can create a representation of yourself that isn't accurate in relation to your life, to lie about who you are. What happens even more prevalent I believe, is a sort or reality distortion field in which you create a vision of who you wish to be, who you hope to be and then slowly begin to believe it yourself without actually pursuing that desired self. You can take thousands of photos of yourself, edit them to perfection and select those for others to see as representations of your appearance. You can take quotes, ideas and slogans from others and "post" them, acting as if those deep thoughts were birthed from your mind alone. You can show all the highlights and excitement from your life and exclude all the mistakes and dull days, creating a vision of a dynamic and exciting self. You can totally alter the perception that others have of yourself, creating different first impressions, shifting opinions and changing judgement, all based on who you desire to be but not who you really are.
When you get sucked too far into this however, picking and choosing exactly what others see, creating an alternate "perfect self", the drive to actually better yourself starts slipping away. Sitting on a river bank during the hours of the day, you can see reflections of the trees along the bank, upon the water. The reflections are wavy, blurred, ephemeral, not perfect representations of the tree, and if you trace the reflection to the shore, you can clearly see where the reflection ends and the trunk of the tree casting the reflection begins. This is how our selves, and our desired selves should be. To find truth in who we are and to better ourselves, we need to accept that we have yet to get where we want to go, that we are flawed but that some of those flaws can be corrected in time, that we are not the person we wish others would see. We are not perfect. We are the "solid tree" (an odd example, taking into account past blog entries, I know), in the realm of "being", and the reflection is what we hope to be someday, separate from us, but dependent on us entirely and it is our responsibility to reach for that reflection that we admire and better ourselves as people.
However, when night comes and the only light that guides us comes from the stars and moon, the distinction between the reflections on the river and the trees themselves disappear. They are a black mass of limbs, reaching and clawing, invisibly joined somewhere, but where one begins and the other ends, from a distance, is impossible to see. This is what many of us have turned into, an unenlightened half-truth, even unsure ourselves where our real selves end and our desired selves begin, forming all into one falsity that inspires complacency and further deception.
I sat upon the bank of the river last night, under overcast skies, trying to decipher where the river oak started and ended, realizing powerfully once again, that as Plato taught as his students walked enlightened from the cave, light is truth and truth should be the goal of all men.
It is so incredibly easy now in a society with social networking, in which you can create a representation of yourself that isn't accurate in relation to your life, to lie about who you are. What happens even more prevalent I believe, is a sort or reality distortion field in which you create a vision of who you wish to be, who you hope to be and then slowly begin to believe it yourself without actually pursuing that desired self. You can take thousands of photos of yourself, edit them to perfection and select those for others to see as representations of your appearance. You can take quotes, ideas and slogans from others and "post" them, acting as if those deep thoughts were birthed from your mind alone. You can show all the highlights and excitement from your life and exclude all the mistakes and dull days, creating a vision of a dynamic and exciting self. You can totally alter the perception that others have of yourself, creating different first impressions, shifting opinions and changing judgement, all based on who you desire to be but not who you really are.
When you get sucked too far into this however, picking and choosing exactly what others see, creating an alternate "perfect self", the drive to actually better yourself starts slipping away. Sitting on a river bank during the hours of the day, you can see reflections of the trees along the bank, upon the water. The reflections are wavy, blurred, ephemeral, not perfect representations of the tree, and if you trace the reflection to the shore, you can clearly see where the reflection ends and the trunk of the tree casting the reflection begins. This is how our selves, and our desired selves should be. To find truth in who we are and to better ourselves, we need to accept that we have yet to get where we want to go, that we are flawed but that some of those flaws can be corrected in time, that we are not the person we wish others would see. We are not perfect. We are the "solid tree" (an odd example, taking into account past blog entries, I know), in the realm of "being", and the reflection is what we hope to be someday, separate from us, but dependent on us entirely and it is our responsibility to reach for that reflection that we admire and better ourselves as people.
However, when night comes and the only light that guides us comes from the stars and moon, the distinction between the reflections on the river and the trees themselves disappear. They are a black mass of limbs, reaching and clawing, invisibly joined somewhere, but where one begins and the other ends, from a distance, is impossible to see. This is what many of us have turned into, an unenlightened half-truth, even unsure ourselves where our real selves end and our desired selves begin, forming all into one falsity that inspires complacency and further deception.
I sat upon the bank of the river last night, under overcast skies, trying to decipher where the river oak started and ended, realizing powerfully once again, that as Plato taught as his students walked enlightened from the cave, light is truth and truth should be the goal of all men.
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