CURATE OR BE CURATED
A few of the notebooks I've made mine over the years... Photo Credit - John VonPamer
We live in a beckoning world. There are a lot of external forces actively sending messages to us. Every minute of the day or night that we have our eyes open (and our screens on) the ordinary world gets to have their say and send their ideas into our consciousness. But we have all the power when we choose not only what we consume, but what we let stay with us. So we can let THEM send us thoughts for thinking, or we can close our eyes and curate our own. The choice is ours...
I feel like you know where I stand on this, but for more you can listen to the IMAGINATION episode of Experiment with the Idea. Also, you could do the meditation that started it all THE WHITE ROOM and practice curating right away. Or just read the brilliance below and get fired up about choosing meaning independent of the matrix/machine.
"Each of us is the curator of his or her life. In our galleries of meaning, certain displays may be chaotic at times, but meaning emerges by the very act of trying to arrange our treasures, even by accepting what cannot be rearranged. More important than the final result is our willingness to work at our lives in the same way a curator might work on his or her collection, keeping the storage rooms in order, rehanging this gallery or that. As curators we are also artists. We can paint new canvases and restore old ones, as well as mounting and displaying them. Setting priorities and holding to them is more important even than the material given us to shape or the talent we are born with. There are limits to life itself, but no expiration date on making or finding meaning within it. For the things that matter most - the parent project, the child project, the partner, friend and God projects - the only limit lies in our willingness to take such projects seriously. When instead we neglect them, reacting helter-skelter to every little demand life imposes, we squander the most important gift we are given both as artists and as curators of meaning, the gift of time."
- Forrest Church, Lifecraft - The Art of Meaning in the Everyday
“Create your own culture - don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”
– Terence McKenna
