I’m part of Gallery @ Packard Place’s Photography & Light Media 2013 Invitational at 222 S. Church St. in Charlotte, NC!
You should go because ooooooh, it’s an Instagram photo show!!!!
Each photo has a story along with it. The installation is called “The Moments” and will grow over the next 6 months with more stories and cityscapes: Rorschach style!
I’ve somehow stumbled into being a fine art photographer/artist/thing by fartin’ around with photo apps and architecture around the world on my phone and I could not be more excited. I had no idea how much I wanted to be in an art show until I was invited to be in one!
My relationship with Packard Place is a dynamic one. I first stepped foot in the space a month before ground broke in May 2011 while interviewing one of the owners, Dan Roselli.
Then, I was one of the Garage at Packard Place’s recipients of free office space when The PPL was burgeoning. The Garage is a not-for-profit entity that exists to advance startup activity in the city of Charlotte. One of the photos in the show is even from that day in April 2011.
When the 2012 Democratic National Convention came to Charlotte, The PPL was housed in Packard Place on multiple floors.
Now, I’m one of the artists on the gallery walls on the way to the RevTech Labs space! RevTech Labs provides free work space, mentorship, and programming all geared toward revolutionary technology startups.
In trying not to get into some artist-esque existential crisis about it I’ve found myself in one about it. I’m excited and terrified (but mostly excited!)
If you’ve not been alone much, or if when you were, you weren’t okay with it, then just wait. You’ll find it’s fine to be alone once you’re embracing it.
We can start with the acceptable places, the bathroom, the coffee shop, the library, where you can stall and read the paper, where you can get your caffeine fix and sit and stay there. Where you can browse the stacks and smell the books; you’re not supposed to talk much anyway so it’s safe there.
There is also the gym, if you’re shy, you can hang out with yourself and mirrors, you can put headphones in.
Then there’s public transportation, because we all gotta go places.
And there’s prayer and mediation, no one will think less if your hanging with your breath seeking peace and salvation.
Start simple. Things you may have previously avoided based on your avoid being alone principles.
The lunch counter, where you will be surrounded by chow downers, employees who only have an hour and their spouses work across town, and they, like you, will be alone.
Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone.
When you are comfortable with eat lunch and run, take yourself out for dinner; a restaurant with linen and Silverware. You’re no less an intriguing a person when you are eating solo desert and cleaning the whip cream from the dish with your finger. In fact, some people at full tables will wish they were where you were.
Go to the movies. Where it’s dark and soothing, alone in your seat amidst a fleeting community.
And then take yourself out dancing, to a club where no one knows you, stand on the outside of the floor until the lights convince you more and more and the music shows you. Dance like no one’s watching because they’re probably not. And if they are, assume it is with best human intentions. The way bodies move genuinely to beats, is after-all, gorgeous and affecting. Dance until you’re sweating. And beads of perspiration remind you of life’s best things. Down your back, like a book of blessings.
Go to the woods alone, and the trees and squirrels will watch for you. Go to an unfamiliar city, roam the streets, they are always statues to talk to, and benches made for sitting gives strangers a shared existence if only for a minute, and these moments can be so uplifting and the conversation you get in by sitting alone on benches, might have never happened had you not been there by yourself.
Society is afraid of alone though. Like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements. Like people must have problems if after awhile nobody is dating them.
But lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless, and lonely is healing if you make it.
You can stand swathed by groups and mobs or hands with your partner, look both further and farther in the endless quest for company.
But no one is in your head. And by the time you translate your thoughts an essence of them maybe lost or perhaps it is just kept. Perhaps in the interest of loving oneself, perhaps all those “sappy slogans” from pre-school over to high school groaning, we’re tokens for holding the lonely at bay.
Cause if you’re happy in your head, then solitude is blessed, and alone is okay.
It’s okay if no one believes like you, all experience is unique, no one has the same synapses, can’t think like you, for this be relieved, keeps things interesting, life’s magic things in reach, and it doesn’t mean you aren’t connected, and the community is not present, just take the perspective you get from being one person in one head and feel the effects of it.
Take silence and respect it.
If you have an art that needs a practice, stop neglecting it, if your family doesn’t get you or a religious sect is not meant for you, don’t obsess about it.
You could be in an instant surrounded if you need it.
Each spring, for many years, I have set myself the task of writing a personal statement of belief: a Credo. When I was younger, the statement ran for many pages, trying to cover every base, with no loose ends. It sounded like a Supreme Court brief, as if words could resolve all conflicts about the meaning of existence.The Credo has grown shorter in recent years – sometimes cynical, sometimes comical, and sometimes bland – but I keep working at it. Recently I set out to get the statement of personal belief down to one page in simple terms, fully understanding the naïve idealism that implied.
The inspiration for brevity came to me at a gasoline station. I managed to fill my old car’s tank with super deluxe high-octane go-juice. My old hoopy couldn’t handle it and got the willies – kept sputtering out at intersections and belching going downhill. I understood. My mind and my spirit get like that from time to time. Too much high-content information, and I get the existential willies. I keep sputtering out at intersections where life choices must be made and I either know too much or not enough. The examined life is no picnic.
I realized then that I already know most of what’s necessary to live a meaningful life – that it isn’t all that complicated. I know it. And have known it for a long, long time. Living it – well that’s another matter, yes? Here’s my Credo:
All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there in the sandpile at Sunday School. These are the things I learned:
Share everything.
Play fair.
Don’t hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
Take a nap every afternoon.
When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
Wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.
And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK.
Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.
Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or your government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm. Think what a better world it would be if we all – the whole world – had cookies and milk about three o’clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.
And it is still true, no matter how old you are – when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.
- Robert L. Fulghum. All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
What do you get when you put the world’s largest collection of brilliant Internet nerds plus music and alcohol all in one place? 2013 SXSW® Interactive Festival, of course!
I’m only (half) kidding. But guess what?! CL Charlotte is taking you there beginning tomorrow, Thursday March 8th!
Scheduled March 8-12, the 2013 SXSW® Interactive Festival will feature five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology, scores of exciting networking events hosted by industry leaders, the SXSW Trade Show and an unbeatable lineup of special programs showcasing the best new digital works, video games and innovative ideas the international community has to offer.
On the plane from Vegas to New Orleans for a quick vacay with my dad before he goes on a week long cruise and I go to DC for this job fair I got a scholarship to attend from the New Organizing Institute called RootsCamp. : )
Tomorrow = Airboat rides across the swamplands! I’ve never been to NOLA so I’m curious what it’s like post-Katrina.
Yesterday I spent 15 hours in the desert and in Yosemite alone. It was supposed to be an 8.75 hour drive but I kept stopping, taking the long way, and soul searching. I have a lot of change in my life coming and a lot to thing about & consider…
- Like my next job
- Like my love life
- Like who I want to be
- Like where I’m coming from
- Like where I’m going…
in general.
lots to process.
I stopped in Yosemite and cried at the simple beauty of this world.
I stopped, taken by the Earth, and I made a pilgrimage to Mono Lake…
the same ancient waters my miwok ancestors looked into.
