Music, words, and imagery. A truth seeking wanderer.
There are innumerable methods for achieving success and pursuing happiness in life — likely as many as there are philosophies and ideologies, values and belief systems. This is the beauty and complexity of the human experience; you can be who and what you want to be — you can at the very least try, and then choose something completely different. Even in the darkest of places, in the most chaotic of times, we are adaptable and capable of transcendence.
Ever since we’ve had psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, pharmaceuticals and grandiose illusions of purpose, meaning and happiness, we’ve had stigmatization and violent prejudice toward those who don’t sort nicely into categories of “normal” behavior. We’ve also dehumanized vast swathes of societies in favor of political, ideological, economical or dogmatic ignorance and stupidity.
Every lifetime has its ups and downs, peaks and valleys, flurries of activity and depressions or lulls — and ultimately, its end. The same can be said for a forest, a tribe, state or nation; a civilization, a religion, or a species.
It feels true to me that we write primarily for ourselves, whether it’s poetry, prose, a script for stage or screen, music or commercial copy. We are ultimately the ones to satiate and to satisfy; we will read it (repeatedly, during its creation and editing), listen to it (I call it “singing practice,” but, let’s be honest), or be subject to its repercussions (good or bad) once released into the world.
Observing people and listening to their earnest conversations is a subtle way to get the pulse of a community, and a limited, but general sense of where the broader collective is currently at — with regards to conscious awareness, beliefs, moral consensus, cultural values, and ideologies. It’s just information, but I invariably find it to be telling. There is always more to what’s merely said or shared, and I find it useful.
