Libra

This is an excellent time to celebrate the pleasures of emptiness . . . to extol the virtues of the blank slate . . . to be open to endless possibilities but committed to none . . . to bask in the freedom of not having to be anything, anyone, or anywhere. Are you smart enough to need no motto to live by? Are you resourceful enough to rely on nothing but the raw truth of the present moment? If so, you will thrive in the coming days.

Inside to Outside

Have you ever gone to a museum and seen an exhibit or a work of art and felt like you were in love with the world? That is a silly question? Does it happen to you? I feel like I empathize with creativity. It triggers in me a response that makes me want to rush out and express myself.

Here are two thoughts to bring that big thought up there into focus.

1. My mother is a psychiatrist and with older individuals that struggle with drug abuse and addiction. It is interesting that in this city and in the environment I find myself socially sometimes, people are quite fascinated with why I am here in the first place. ("Whoa, what a name! I've never heard one like that before...") "Where is that name from?" and so I explain. I've had to explain my history many times to strangers in recent weeks... a lot. And it forces me to confront my history. Why am I here? Things more often than not spiral back to my mother and her efforts to become a doctor in this country. People are confused, though, amazed. What happened in Russia around 1992, something with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Huh, what did happen there? What does a sponsor family do? Why did he lose his language? What is West Virginia like? The questions that I am confronted with, directly and indirectly, eventually force me to re-evaluate them, too. I have a history that I seem to lose sight of at times. If I stand in a museum like I did on Thursday at the ICA in Boston , I become separated from those questions. My emotions are universal, inspirational. I am lifted out of my body! I float on the beauty of two artists I learned about. philip-lorca diCorcia and Damian Ortega[see above].

That is the emotion where I feel endless love. I want to rush out and create. My mother told me a story about one of her patients. She had him deconstruct the word ExPress. Ex has latin roots and means to go out or away from, out from within. Press could be loosely associated with pressure. Expression is the release of pressure from within. Art makes me want to release that pressure that I have after a long day of silence and observation and frustration, after a week of wide-eyed ferocious labor at the lab, 10 things on a check-list, marked off one by one. It is amazing how much I can store inside of my body. I am but a speck in the universe and, like an atom, can release much energy. The task: find creativity.

2. empathy. A theory on empathy, the significance of yawning. Yawning when someone else yawns is a good sign. Can you feel the feelings other experience? What does it mean to feel what others feel? Does everything in my mind, my subconscious, have a structural, cellular correlate? Yes... I do believe this is true. The mystery of neuroscience is the elucidation of how protein and voltage potential and physical change at the cellular level results in consciousness, art, expression, emotion. Why do I yawn when you yawn? Mirror cells exist in our brains that activate when we observe others doing an action or feeling an emotion. And these cells activate in the regions of our brains that would be active if we ourselves were doing the action or feeling the emotion. I seem to recall that the level of activity when we are empathizing is at about 20% if we were doing it ourselves. Yawning could indicate that you are an empathetic person. If I see a work of art that moves me, do I activate my own creativity? Is it then surprising that my mind spirals off into its own creative processes? No... but how do I harness that? Strengthen that desire to create? I believe it is possible. Practice. Where to start, huh? Well, I decided to begin bringing my journal to museums and writing as I experience the situation. I think that would be fantastic. I will see where that leads me.

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Also, I want to have a small exhibition here of my own. I wanted to explain about patterns. What patterns do I see in my life? What negative and positive patterns happen to me that I perceive and also that I fall into. Fall into indicates a sense of negativity and I do believe I have negative patterns in my behavior. When I was little my mother explained to me how my nail biting gets wired into my brain to a ferocious degree. So from then on I had quite a concept of behavior being structurally based in the mind. Yes. This is reinforced by continuing the behavior and if you want it to stop, it seems logical that you must practice the opposite, to really reorganize your mind. It is quite healthy, I think. Expound, expound, posit, posit.

to patterns:























to chaos:



















and to a fellow explorer of both: