Dear Reader,
I mentioned my relationship with Man's Law vs. Nature's Law in another post. My unadulterated respect for one and my grunge-y eye roll at the other. The simple recognition that there is a perceived hierarchy, that some would think one law to be above the other, has a new sense of clarity since meeting Dr. McGhilchrist's work.
The episode One Head, Two Brains from the podcast Hidden Brain features Dr. Iain McGhilchrist, a former Oxford professor who quit the biz because he loved poetry too much to see the defamation of it due to Spark Note-esque approaches, and decided to return to academia as a student and trained in medicine to become a psychiatrist specializing in a wild, broad landscape of areas within neuroscience.
Iain McGhilchrist cracked my glow stick.
His work, without going too much into it, states that a shift in the balance between the two hemispheres of our brain has caused a shift in our perception of the world around us. Think about the difference between the 'what' and the 'how'. Illustrated through countless case studies focusing not on 'what' each of our brains' hemispheres do, but the way in which they perform their functions- the 'how'. And the ways in which the performance has, and is, changing.
That's where the renegades live.
They live in the 'how', not the 'what'.
Dreamers vs. Schemers.
The world we live in doesn't look much different than I can remember it looking 30 years ago as a child. But, the way we move through it does. It looks very different.
There have been over 400 mass shootings in the United States this year. So far.
I'm fucking over it.
We are engaged in a kind of suicide due to our inability to see the whole picture.
We've caught ourselves in a hall of mirrors.
A hall of mirrors being reinforced with iron clad algorithms.
Our paranoid, efficiency obsessed, analytical left hemisphere has slipped from the role of the Emissary, into the role of the Master. And with a distorted balance between our two hemispheres, everything we perceive becomes distorted as well.
We become unable to see the whole.
We put our neighbors in danger and our community by extension.
We buy guns and Bibles.
We stigmatize peace while normalizing violence.
We're falling short on ourselves.
Our scientists are using the word 'extinction'.
We turn a blind eye to Mama Gaia.
We must get back to putting equal weight in the 'how' as we do in the 'what'.
How we move matters.
We must crest on the wave.
We must diligently seek the balance between the right and the left.
Two balanced hemispheres create a balanced whole.
I keep seeing this cool word 'artivism' and others like it.
I'm in.
I don't have anything more important to do than promote the need for calmness and to reunite, the need to connect.
Fight for the need, really, not just promote it.
There's a few really exciting developments churning within ToolBoxEarth and I'm burstingly excited to share them with you soon.
But until then, let's work to get to our collective...
FIGHTING WEIGHT, January 2023
Thrifted picture frame, cotton fabric, plastic bag*, jewelry ribbon, paper bag*, gift ribbon, raffia yarn, film, tissue paper*, and daffodil rope*
$275
*These materials I processed into cord. Think taking flat strips of something, and twisting it into a 2-ply rope. The daffodils used to create the cordage were out of our garden after the Spring bloom of 2022, celebrating our first Spring in our first house.
This piece was selected and hung in The Memorial Art Gallery located in Rochester, NY during the bi-annual event, The Rochester-Finger Lakes Exhibition (RFLX), showcasing established and emerging artists from a 27-county area. It's one of the most prestigious group exhibits in my local area, and I am humbled to have been one of the selected artists to participate.
When we serve each other, we serve ourselves.
Make someone's day.
Our two year old pit bull, Posie, and I go for two walks a day. My goal is to wave at or acknowledge each person I interact with, even in the smallest way.
Consider this love letter my wave to you, dear Reader.
Glad you are here- please stay tuned for some juicy new developments.
Thank you for reading.
Kindly,
Rachel