Stealing Your Eyeballs? (Observations of the Week)
1. They’re Coming For Your Eyes!
THE QUESTION: What is the internet?
The Answer: Oh boy…
It is the place we go for the latest news, which is mostly terrifying, disheartening, or in the very best cases, vitriolic. In the last week alone, I’ve been: (1) swept into the Omicron craze (Omicron, my conspiracy-theorist social-media buddies have claimed, translates to the “end of time” virus); (2) informed of abuse allegations in an international non-profit I’ve supported in years past; (3) told that Pope Francis is somehow ruining the Catholic Church again (everyone is always ruining something); (4) put on notice that inflation, which was once called transitory (meaning “temporary”), might not be transitory at all.
Cheers to you, Internet, says I, raising my $25.00 bottle of acid-rain polluted tap water.
We live in the Age of the Eyeball. News organizations, social media influencers, and political parties do their best to buy our eyes, to attract our attention, and what better way to do this than by the constant churn of negativity? According to a 2019 article in the L.A. Times,
A new study involving more than 1,000 people across 17 countries spanning every continent but Antarctica concludes that, on average, people pay more attention to negative news than to positive news.
The takeaway? People in Antarctica are extremely positive folks.
The Observation: A local request.
Pause and consider this: How much of the fear mongering and outrage stoking is nothing more than hook and line? How much of it is designed to lure you in, to direct your attention, to pull you in a direction that benefits another? And how much of it distracts you from the needs in your very local life?
2. Monday Photography
Some things are still sacred.
3. A Drink With a Friend: Year-End Reflection
Five Photos Proving Beauty is Bigger Than #2020
In the waning weeks of 2020, the Great White North came to visit. In my almost-southern hometown, the magnolias and bamboo bowed low, showing deference to the weight of a year. 2020: It’s been heavy.
Before the snow came, I sat in our local adoration chapel, a thin place in this world where the silence speaks. There, I reviewed the year—COVID-19; the George Floyd protests; the presidency that will not end. I offered a few prayers for peace and resolution, and as I did, other things came to mind. The grace of confirmation. The trout stream. The beauty of Amber’s tiny garden. The Farm. The anniversary. The exquisite food. There’s been enough grace to go around.
There is a temptation to treat 2020 as its own sort of hashtag, a meme of all things negative. This, I perceive, gives the darkness too much weight. We are not bamboo. The world is not snow. Beautiful things are bigger when given their proper place.
What good have you seen in 2020? Reflect on it. Steep yourself in it. There is more beauty than horror in this human life, if only we’ll slow down long enough to see it.
How Beauty is Saving a Friend
Over coffee, we cut loose on the stuff of life: the news; marriage; children; art; the journey into or out of faith as the case may be. We talked about the creeping despair in America, too, how I’d had two acquaintances who’d passed in the last 14 days, perhaps by their own hands. “Precarity,” he said, “is baked into everything these days: the economy; the ways we make money as freelancers; the family; life.”
I rolled his statement over again, played it back in my head. Precarity. That’s an apt way to put it.
He looked at his camera (a camera that he loves and I covet), then said, “This thing might have saved my life.” The pursuit of art opened his eyes to the beautiful stuff of the world, to the people staring down the barrel of his lens. He collects those people, those places, those tiny snapshots of life and considers them, smiles at them, sometimes posts them on Instagram for others. It’s this art that serves as a hedge against his own despair, against the precarity that is the genesis of that despair.
Can beauty save the world as St. John Paul II and Dostoyevsky’s idiot claimed? Maybe not. But it can save a middle-aged man or two. And these days, that’s enough for me.
Life Examined: Curating Beauty
Are you practicing your own artistic curation somewhere? Are you resisting despair through beauty? I create photography (and sometimes share it online).
Grab a Copy and Wake Up
THE BOOK OF WAKING UP —a book on addiction, attachment, and the Divine Love—launched TUESDAY so order a copy or ten at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookish (my favorite indie bookseller). Then, forward this post to a friend and ask them to read along.
Observation #18: Every Building Has a Story
I slept in a guest house built in the shadow of the abandoned mill. In the morning hours, I bent my ear to the wind just so, right at the angle of nostalgia, and I heard the histories of the men and women who laid the bricks of that mill. People of another era grinding grain for the community, for themselves. I heard the humming of the the woman whose thee young’uns were waiting for pops to cross the Atlantic after having been holed up in Italy. The whistling of the man between wars who fought off the ghosts with high pitched sounds. The foreman, a devotee of the Baptist church who worked up a good lather through work instead of preaching. The bricks men lay carry their stories. So often we walk on by, deaf to the wind.
ANNOUNCEMENT:For photo prints follow me to my Smugmug account. For behind the scenes content join the inner circle.
*Photo taken with the Fujifilm X100S.
Observation #9: Inspiration Everywhere
Inspiration is everywhere these days. Is it any wonder? In these days of division and vitriol, don’t we all need some good vibes?
Observation #9: Good vibes don’t make themselves.
*For behind the scenes content join the inner circle. Photo taken at The Church On Morgan in Raleigh, North Carolina with my iPhone, edited with Lightroom Mobile.
Hello, World!
Observation #8: Observing the Bones
On a trip to southern Louisiana, I saw the bones of the old oak. The erosion of the marshland, the encroaching salt water, the change in climate—all of it takes its toll on living things.
Observation #8: Bones make beautiful photos, though that’s no silver lining.
*For behind the scenes content join the inner circle. Photo taken with the Canon M-50.
Hello, World!