Literally and figuratively. At least here in the great white north it’s hovering just below zero on a bright, sunny day.
We’ve started pushing outside our comfort zone and making connections and friends in the community. Vermont’s town meeting day is tomorrow. Getting involved locally is the most effective thing you can do, and will probably be the most valuable as things decay around us.
At the beginning of this year, I realized it’s been 25 years since the Y2K New Year’s Eve when I had a primitive web cam for the first time. I remember how crazy it seemed to have a camera the whole world could (theoretically) see. Now you have live broadcast on YT, and it’s almost too easy. But that just leads to a lot of people digitally shouting into the void, and if someone shouts on the internet, who actually hears it? It’s both depressing and reassuring. Not even sure what that means, honestly, but it’s accurate.
I’ve been playing in my studio and I want to make mixes again. That’s a part of me that never goes away – the joy of playing records, finding one I haven’t heard in forever. I love the way I look at a piece of vinyl and can hear the intro, the drop, the end – and remember the places I played it once upon a time.
Somewhere on a comment thread a million years ago I read that Chinese people call cannabis the old person plant. Not sure how true that is, but it tracks, because the appeal for me is in thinking and the ways I think differently on it. There’s a part when my brain slips into that place and I have a moment of thinking “every person in the world has an entire life (including “rich inner life”) and relations and they’re all going on at the same time, right at this moment. It’s that tiny-mind-blown moment where you realize how big the world is, and how you’re just one tiny part of it, no matter how big everything in your life feels – the traumas, the joys, the love for the people around you. Just a tiny speck on this huge, blue ball. Humility is one reaction, anger and fear is another. We want to make sense of our confusion, we want to still our fears. It can lead us in destructive directions if we can’t manage it sufficiently. I’ve been working (and reading) on how to manage those feelings despite where the world seems to be headed.
The good (?) news is that the world is going to do what it does, regardless. All we can do is react to it and make our best peace with it. Find joy around us, breathe in, try to make a difference in the part of the world we can see and touch, physically or electronically/virtually. Physical world (meat space) has a lot more immediate feedback.
Today I’m taking care of tasks that tend to pile up over time. Getting something done feels good. Being in the studio working feels good. Having expressive outlets feels good.
Take the joy where you can, try to do good. What more is there to life, when you get right down to it?
