Blog

Reading and Deep Ownership

Dec 17, 2020 As more time passes, the more I recognize how fortunate I was in my upbringing. Please take a moment and watch this revealing story video. I started reading at 8 years of age. By 9 I was deep into it, riding my Schwinn Varsity 10 speed, from our home in Whittier to the library in La Mirada once per week, where I would pick up my next week’s reading. I read 1-3 books a week fairly consistently, till I was about 14. At 15 I had completed reading the bulk of the science fiction section in our

Understanding Motivation: Covid 19 Reality Series

I saw this view one day while doing some long lens work at Pipeline. I know many of the surfers in this frame. I like them a lot, and care about what happens to them. Joel Tudor is amazing. Way more to that man than most will ever know. Then there is Bethany. I first met her one day at Off The Wall as she and Mike Coots, another shark attack survivor, were getting ready to paddle out. Housing in hand I had actually teased them a bit about the missing limbs. Each absolutely floors me with their heart

COVID-19 and Psychosis

It hit me the other day while trying to explain an aspect of the Covid-19 pandemic in the same manner I would to a 4th grader, that the intelligent and normally very well balanced friend who I was speaking with, was suffering from stress, and possibly more. This distressing realization woke me up to the fact that I had been brought into study of the viral pandemic months ago. As a result I was months ahead in comprehension of what is possibly the most complex challenge since working on the disaster at Fukushima. I had been actually made aware of

How to Thrive

“The mass of men lead lives of Quiet Desperation” Henry David Thoreau, from Walden In the midst of a complex and demanding day yesterday, my phone rang. As I looked down at it on the desk, I saw the no caller ID notice on the screen. That tap on the shoulder I get when shit is about to go down said: “Here it comes, may as well deal with everything” And the call was in many ways, more alarming and violent than I could have imagined. By day’s end, most of the challenges were met and managed, but

What Matters

It was five years ago today when Donna von Hoesslin and I, along with an incredible throng of our friends, met at Refugio beach on the Gaviota Coast. People came from all over. Our purpose had been clear from the start, to stand with our friends and combine lives and families under the presence of God, in the place where I grew up, and became a child of the sea. Pretty simple, now that I look back on it. Tom and Anne Stone along with their son Kawika and brother Pake Ah Mow came over from Oahu, to

Art and the HUman Condition

Again, big HT to Titus Levy for this interesting piece. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/second-opinion/these-nine-artists-will-help-you-understand-future-planet-180963576/#mBT2Bo3J7ibEu9VD.99 Oddly enough of course, it is under one of the pretenses (There are two main ones, Art and Sea) that I am asked to contribute to projects. At Blue Mind Block Island I was to present after Dr Helen Reiss gave an emotionally stirring talk on the value of Compassion. In it she used a film about plastic pollution and the albatross on Midway Island. The film stated basically that the Albatross were under threat from plastic pollution. As one of three Artists presenting at the Summit, it wound

Earth Day: 2016

I am not a huge fan of the entire Earth Day movement. I see it as a politically inspired facade where people masquerading as leaders, do and say stupid shit, and pretend they care about you and I and the blue marble we spin through space and time on. As my colleague, Photographer Chris Burkhard put it in his instagram post of a stellar image shot in Alaska: “Every day is Earth Day”. I see it similarly. The image above was a shot at the end of the day, “Earth Day” 2016. It is a single frame from a time

Focus

I have noticed a lot of confusion amongst my friends, who really are quite a diverse lot (and some not so simple to peg themselves, really). What confuses some of them? Me, apparently. There are things which I have little patience for, as I view some issues and how society approaches them via political process, as being rather childish by design. As I have matured, I determined to put aside childish things as well as inconvenient things, like following politicians or religious leaders who are in point of fact, just doing their jobs. (It is important to know just what

A Faithful Paradigm

A close friend sent me a story about a researcher who was suing to get a university job position restored, after getting fired for being different. Here is that news piece. Nothing remarkably enlightening about the story. But as is frequently the case, the informative bits are found in the post article commentary left by readers, who for the most part are more concerned with the deployment of ridicule on the researcher, than the larger question of illegal termination of the man due to discriminatory bias and personal agendas of school staff. In fact, it appears that not only

Blog

Categories