Language

I am increasingly interested in language, both visual and written. How these arenas can inspire our everyday. It is language that binds a culture and helps to solidify a belief system, a way of self governing both in the individual and the collective. 

 Visual language is our first step to understanding the world, how we process information.  As we take in the visual landscape and digest its stimuli we then interpret it through words, personally deciphering and editing according to how we see and understand our reality. This process runs through the mind and gut, emotion and intellect. Emotion is key here, it is what transports information forward into a bigger picture, into inspiration and action. Igniting the cannon of time.

It is not through rules and regulations that we live our best lives and reach our potential. Though necessary to counter our fallibilities, It is through understanding our innate selves that we best navigate, weaving through time and experience. Emotion and fact. It is through our connection of self and language that we piece together and connect the dots, creating meaning while vacillating desire, wants and needs. The manifestation of life well lived, life affected. 

The languages of the self activate an inner expansion, an explosion of who we are as matter and ethereal emotion. They affect our cells and frontal cortex, eliciting forward thinking  and evoking introspection. Binding together the outside, inside. What we see and then feel. This is how change occurs. How fears are faced and how politics are tweaked as growing buds. It is through language that possibility is born, from which emotion becomes physical. It is not fully through fact that life moves forward, it is through the culmination of all things human that pulls us and drives us to create. It is first and foremost the emotion of language that catapults our need to understand and counter. To smooth the wrinkles and settle the vibrations. To then take the streets, build the signs and defend our humanity. 

CB 02/07/18

Steady Wins The Race

It's not the goal, it's the journey. Steady wins the race. These days I yearn for steady and continue to chase a seemingly elusive goal. A goal of fog and mirror. Minefields of wants and needs. It's not that I do not have goals, I have them and confront them daily with determination. It's just that my goals are of the heart. Emotion before fact. My goals are lofty, they float over the horizon. Taunt and plead. Of ego and fear. 

I have a romantic default setting that steers my desires. Counters my rational fact-needing self. That trips me up, picks me up and dusts me off. Self be damned, I live for this. For me, this is what life is, this is what goals are made of. The golden grail. The end all, be all. 

Life for me is beyond myself. As life is huge. Or seems as such from my perspective. Speck amongst the stars. Boy Scout in the woods. Determined survivalist. 

There is a bigger picture here. Albeit blurred, I know its outlines as I envision it daily. Create it in my dreams and write it down in words. Its shine is familiar enough to find in the dark, warm enough to desire it and far enough to frustrate. But steady wins the race no matter how unclear the path. Or so it seems. So they say. 

If I were to define my goal, I'd pin it to the future positive. Vague as it may be, this is what I call it. How I paint it in my mind and trace it in my everyday. This is my goal and my journey. My steady race, push and pull. 

This is what I live for. My breath in frozen air, seeing what I feel. Being led by emotion, pulled by determination and fed by facts. This is my living. Mine to rescue and to give. To write it down, build it up and paint it. To set it forward, floating above the horizon line. 

CB 02/02/18

Meaning

It has been my intention for some time now to build a life of meaning. Not one of happiness as happiness is fleeting. Meaning has weight. It is in the truest sense, sustainable. What moves the ebb and flow and nudges chaos back to its order.

I believe meaning to be the objects that surround us. The house that becomes a home and the hello that turns to love. It is without doubt the mountains we scale, the fear we push through and the whispers we speak in the ending of our day. Meaning is where words cannot fully go. The abyss of the gut. 

I can say with all honesty I do not know where my path leads. These words as I write them are my spectacles. My bobsled and pack mule. I can say with all honesty that my life lacks. Time has a way of taking. But I too can say with conviction that my determination is what drives my meaning. It is what finds the gaps needing to be filled and then pushes and pulls, giving meaning its room to breathe and sow its seeds. 

In this time of uncertainty, of so much bad emotion, meaning is our life vest. My parachute as I glide and fall knowing eventually I will land. Knowing my course will avail itself and meaning will become my map. That meaning will become our map as time clears the brush for future viewing. Future building. 

CB 01/28/18

This Is My Desire

I feel as if I grapple with all that I do. What I have to offer this world. I am consumed by the weight of our current times. Our two stepping approach to the future. I know that design cannot save the world and beauty is simply a pillow on the path of the weary. So what is my resolve and how do I perpetuate my active determination. My need to facilitate the future positive. 

Thoreau once wrote, "It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." Perhaps it's my approach to the problem. My instinct to push. Unaware of what I am not seeing and blinded by my own determined path digging.  My compass fixation and overreaching desires. It could be then a matter of easing up on the reigns. Allowing that I may not know where it's all heading. Where I am heading and being fine with that. Or at least ok..ish. 

There is one thing I know for sure. I know who I am. I live here. What I have to offer may not put a dent into this world but I am determined to scratch the surface. Make my mark. Give, not because I have been given but because this is my desire. This is my composition. My all, outward. The determination of one who does not have the answers but lives for possibility. Lives for the bloom of beauty. The bloom of inspiration. 

CB 01/26/18

I Live For This

We're living in an era that requires much more action. Much more inspiration. Social media's screaming into a pillow no longer satiates our need to express. That dam has broken. We have gone beyond the rim and are spilling over to the streets with marches, graphics and installations. Into our everyday.  

We are now at a place where our emotions require a physicality to boost our voices and expand on our words. This is a turning place. A marker of what is needed. It is a socio-political mindset that is showing up increasingly in architecture, product design and site specific installations. This is a manifestation of a growing desire for change. To act. Our need to make real our emotions and over rote minds. To put arm to arm, brick to mortar and to walk the walk. 

History has shown us this need to express. Our documentations of protests seal our troubled past. We have erected statues and built museums to somehow solidify and make peace with our emotions. Our struggles to gain the universal freedom we are born into. To come to terms with the past and somehow learn from mistakes and celebrate the winning. 

The future will tell us we are on the right path. This I know to be true. I live for this. The inspiration. The hairs on my body raise as I dig and sift through the inter-web, searching. Satisfying my need to know. My deep desire to be a part of a bigger picture and express my frustrations. To pick up a stone and throw it into the abyss of the future positive. 

CB 01/20/18