Living For The Art

Despite being kind of fabulous in plenty of ways, my life has looked kind of like this for too long. 

In some ways I've just been too much in transition. A multi-client consultant's mental juggling, red-lining my vespa all over the place in heels and chandelier earrings just to teach myself to believe that the sweet breezes still blow. Living more in reflection and history than creatively and presently.

With the few hours of truly blank-slate time that my first days off following moving into a new house (still covered in piles of unorganized stuff), then going on a sweet little vacation and returning to discover myself on the edge of some possible shifts in job structure, I'm drawing something a little less pragmatic and a little more glorious than normal in this new space.

I've written before about the crucial value of how one uses their attention, but most of us have to address the past before we can really move forward. We need to get out of the red before we can really start to invest and create value. To move forward and create value with grace and poise - from a place of love and strength, not fear and protectionism - takes focus, courage and consistency. Transitory chaos easily overwhelms. 

Lines and Triangles, Guido Brandt.

In my experience, more often than not, the key to traction that allows for real, grounded value-creation is a combination of the help of good friends and especially the transcendence of praise. By this, I mean letting what is truly beautiful and good loom large. No weapon that's fashioned against it can stand. It tends to disarm common bitterness and strife that divides and kill us too often. To notice, give praise to, and feed the glory divides and shrinks the chaos. The chaos must be directly addressed by the minute, but it is much more easily defeated with this means of what is almost mis-direction, or maybe starvation. Centralize and praise what is good and glorious, especially verbally in wide company. You might call it living for the art.

Beyond the piles of shoes, electronics, beauty products, and growing belief in the sweet breeze, I'm painting some beautiful, vibrant shapes using pieces of the very chaos that encroaches. I'm beating my swords into plowshares, and maybe some kickass installation art. The void that surrounds us is immense, and constantly threatens to confuse, steal and destroy. Ironically, victory is only sure with a deep smile and an aesthetic eye. 

Value is created in living for the art.

A New Technology Capital?

Washington is well known as a crossroads of global influence with a constant incoming stream of some of the brightest people in the world. From among the elements of what may be a greenhouse for it’s development, DC’s local technology business sector has become strong and is positioning itself, along with the local economy, to grow and thrive.

David Zipper, DC’s Director of Business Development and Strategy at Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development said, “It’s a big deal that we have so many young people coming in and out of DC all the time. It can both help us and hurt us.” People often come to DC to save the world for four years (and often less), then move on. It’s known as “a company town” - not where people make their homes and invest in communities - but could that be changing?

Mayor Vincent Gray recently signed the DC technology sector enhancement act into law, which includes five years of corporate income tax abatement that starts when technology companies based in DC become profitable. All benefits of DC tech incentives are available to any tech company in the District no matter where in the city the company is located.

“Let me be candid, the bill could have done even more,” said mayor Gray. A major change to the DC tax code giving incentive to DC based investors was removed by the DC council before the bill passed, “Largely because it wasn’t understood,” explained the mayor. DC local government has been working in cooperation with leaders of the newly burgeoning tech sector, including attracting companies like Fortify.VC, a venture capital firm that houses a startup incubator and hosts an annual pitch competition, Distilled Intelligence, which relocated to DC this year, and has resulted in millions in investment for it’s participants. 

Visionary, Jill Maguire

Will DC be the next Silicon Valley? In a way, perhaps, but as Julie Kantor, CSO of Barrel of Jobs, one of the winner’s of Distilled Intelligence put it, these developments at least mean that “Startups don’t necessarily have to go to New York or Silicon Valley to get investment capital anymore. Winning Distilled Intelligence led to some phenomenal investor meetings.” Kantor, born and raised in DC, pointed out the potential strength of connecting improvements in the startup ecosystem and DC’s local education system to increase avenues to comprehensive social & economic improvements.

“We like to celebrate the city,” said Travis Kalanick, CEO of Uber during his keynote speech at DC Week, a celebration of the growing tech sector in Washington. “This is a place I’ve been spending a lot of time recently,” he continued. He had put up a picture of the Wilson Building, which holds the offices of DC council members, eliciting nervous, appreciative laughter from the crowd. The juxtaposition of historic & modern seen in that particular sample of DC architecture gave illustrative perspective for Kalanick’s overview of what it’s been like for Uber to succeed so wildly. “Not everybody is so happy about it, and I think a lot of entrepreneurs understand what it’s like to disrupt, what it means to bring innovation to an industry that hasn’t seen it for decades,” Kalanick explained as he  moved to an image of the first of many cease & desists that Uber has gotten.  

Indeed, the 2,000 member audience Kalanick spoke to, and at every one of the over 100 DC Week events where a direct question was posed, consisted of a majority of people from DC who were self-described current or aspiring entrepreneurs. iStrategy Labs CEO Peter Corbett, who also co-produced DC Week, is one of the main figures responsible for inspiring and regularly creating opportunities for these entrepreneurs to come together. 

“Everything we do, we want to make it so sticky they don’t want to leave. They’re gonna stay, and they’re going to build their businesses, they’re gonna build their families, they’re going to be here forever. And that’s selfish...I want to make this the most interesting place in the world, so I don’t have to leave.” said Corbett in reference to the developing community of tech entrepreneurs in DC.

Washington, DC has always had strengths. It has always been the nexus of some of the most powerful networks, but always transient. However, with a bit of collective consciousness, good leadership, clear avenues for investment and growth, partnerships with local government, and a willingness to disrupt what is in order to possibly bring something better, the District of Columbia may also be becoming a capital of technology and innovation.

Constitutional Love

This is the third in a series of posts about love. Read the others in this series, Poison Love and Medicinal Love.

Love is, perhaps, the most foundational thing in the world. The things a person identifies with, the places they hold the most confidence for where each one stands in life - the way we love or abuse love becomes our own constitution - a foundation by which we establish ourselves and build onto what we find. These establishments allow us to build and grow. They are given to us and we are built into their forms by love, or the lack of love. This is true even in toxic, mutilated parts of our identity - which can also form platforms for growth, but only like tumors - quickly and parasitically causing more demolition than construction. We are bound incredibly deeply to our own understanding of love and what connection means. It is the basis for all we do and manifests itself in all forms of our life. 

I want to make something of myself. I want to build something, but how, and what exactly? I'm not sure. So I go to my thoughts, search my talents, connections and ambitions. They come from the reservoir of what I am drawn to. Who I know or want to know. What I have compassion on. What excites me. I sit at my desk and stare at my computer screen, dreaming and searching for how I can build up and be built up. We commonly call these things our babies - and sometimes they actually are - but does the artistic wisdom and practical discipline it takes to build up a human child, a healthy company, an actual building, or any thing else come from entirely different places? We spend our lives building things. Creating edifices and looking to be edified. The passion and dedication we use to set out and remain on these courses - especially if repeatedly - points directly to the character of our individual constitution in love.

WWII Cannon Foundation, Three. By Wink.

The best place to start when you're trying to build something - to establish a foundation or make a create a new constitution for a way forward, includes two types of information: historical and differential. What kinds of similar establishments have already been made, and how were they constructed? How is what you are going to build be different and take what has already been done to new levels? Both must be thoroughly and simultaneously considered in overlap and by contrast and from every conceptual and physical or other kind of angle you can possibly imagine. Lots of people talk about and imagine these things, but do their loves move them to actually bring the thing to completion? Rarely.

The foundation of a building. The constitution of a nation or of a mountain climber's stomach. They determine, almost entirely, the character and integrity of the success of entire edifice they are supporting or feeding. Underpinning all these things, the authorial element highlights the nano-coding of love and love-turned-bitter into every millimeter of this for any version of any person involved in any kind of similar process. Who the founder (and eventually presider) is personally, and why they are doing what they're doing infiltrates the whole establishment. Under this, all things are tested and submitted. If you want to build and to be built up - start with where you are rooted, and consider the loves of those whom you are rooted among. Rotten roots and foundations will kill the whole edifice. Healthy, deep roots support, nourish, stabilize, and can even resurrect the edifice like a new tree growing out of what appears to be just an old sawed-off stump.

Our work. Our children. Our art. We cannot create something that does not bear our image. What we build will always have a profound connection to us and affect on us. Even small things. Even in mundane, seemingly soulless things - those we'd argue the opposite for - there is a sinking and a callousness represented in that desired disassociation. The glory or the shame of our creations edify or deconstruct us. What do you love? Who do you love? Why do you love it? How do you love it? The answers have shaped your human constitution. And everything you do will be built onto their platforms, and take on their forms.

Medicinal Love

This is the second in a series of posts about love. Read the first post, "Poison Love" here.

Love is, perhaps, the most remedial thing in the world. Most of us are quite confident that love is probably the answer to all of our pain and incompleteness. Love is strong medicine. It is a powerful substance. But, like any potent chemical compound the medicine of love can act as poison perhaps more easily than it can act as an antidote. It is a dynamic, volatile solution that - like dynamite or wet cement - left for too long in the wrong state, becomes obstructive, harmful or both. 

Love's natural state is active. It has to be applied to be restorative. It has to be given and received over and over to act as the remedy. 

The dilemma and the miracle of love both arise from the same characteristics: we cannot survive without love, love is more powerful than anything, and love is everywhere - it cannot be removed. 

We cannot survive without love. We were born incomplete. Individually, and collectively - we find ourselves taking the shape of simple, elegant equations, missing one key variable. We are symmetrical creatures, eternally searching for the piece that would complete our symmetry to make us as whole and beautiful as we sense we should be, but currently are not. Love is exactly what we need. In this need, most of us spend our whole lives. Children need to find belonging and provision. Women need to find value and beauty. Men need to find honor and respect. In this need for love, manifested in what I will not, here, attempt to list in it's potentially innumerable ways, we almost always try to use love for the sake of and solely unto ourselves. That will never work, because love is necessarily relational. It cannot be gained or kept. It must be given to be received, and it must be received to be given. For love to bring healing - both must hold hold true and constantly return to reciprocate. 

Better Me, Ilja Hackman

Love is more powerful than anything. Alone, we are weak - naturally moving towards death. Love is the thing that we can take up - we can wield it, but only for the sake of each other - to move each other towards life. Love is necessarily humble and sacrificial. Those you love are the ones you return back to serve consistently, whether in your mind or in the flesh. Love is to directly engage them, to come alongside and join them, to relentlessly vote with your attention and affection. Those you love are the only ones in a position to give you the love that can heal you, if they are able to rightly make use of it's power. Think about what fits the above description in your life. Really everyone is in love with something or someone, even if only in their minds. They are the ones you are in a continually revolving servant-master, master-servant relationship with. They are the ones that can love you - but how will they treat your trust? Love implies risk for the lover and the beloved. For the lover it is in fear of rejection - fear of what you will become if the love and service you give is not reciprocated, and risk that you will begin to wield love as poison on yourself or your beloved in your weakness. For the beloved it is in fear of mistreatment - fear of the lack of sufficiency and grace in your lover's wisdom for how to wield love to heal your ugly and delicate wounds. In these fears, love has more often been used to do harm than to heal, but even so, love is the only medicine. Like only diamonds can cut diamonds, even the wounds caused by mis-applied love must be healed by love, although it may best be done by a more wisely chosen lover. 

Love is everywhere - it cannot be removed. For most, "love" evokes sunset romance, and "medicine" evokes salve or antibiotics, but medicine and love are really much more broad than that. Either might more completely be defined as "what will do you good," or "precisely what will restore you to more complete wholeness." Both are necessarily subjective, and most commonly non-physical and non-erotic. This kind of love permeates and infiltrates every part of the universe. No one can escape it. No one can escape the need for it. No one can escape the desire for it. It is an implied, inescapable risk of danger - which would be horrible were it not the only exit from a worse fate. To approach love is to face fear, but to remain in love is to continually cast it out. Deep consistent healing love always results in the expansion or creation of families, whether biological or not. Love can rarely be sustained as an applied healing force outside of family.

Each of our lives - each of our families - are a history of love. Love desired. Love remembered. Love abandoned. Love grown out of. Love received. Love abused. Love restored. For each one to make sense of it, the history may be approached as an epic adventure or a tragedy. Many potential outcomes lay ahead of you, but you cannot survive or grow alone. To live in love, you must be a champion. You must continually risk pain and face fear. You must relentlessly serve, then allow yourself to be served. You must consider your resources, and wield them as agents of healing and strengthening. All of us interact with, and make use of love, but only those who take it up to heal, overcome and discover will be able to be healed, find victory, and be discovered.

This is the second in a series of posts about love. Read the next post, "Constitutional Love" here.

Lift Up Your Heads, O You Gates

Unsolicited, the thought came through my mind,

"Lift up your heads, O you Gates!

 And be lifted up, O you ancient doors."

I wasn't quite sure where it came from. It marched into my head like a victorious army processing back into it's hometown, building a bridge to something else that has recently been present in my thoughts. I've been reading about the habitual connections of the synapses in our brains. Discoveries in neuroscience over only the last few decades suggest that a healthy mental state requires perpetual interaction with other people's right brain. This gives experiences of relational narratives that create thinking templates. Once our brain's synapses have fired according to a certain template, they are significantly more likely to fire the same way again and again. Unused, many areas of the mind simply shut off eventually, like an abandoned, overgrown neighborhood on the outskirts of town.

Autumn Composition,  Deduar

Common example: "I don't know how to trust anyone, because I'm so used to finding people unreliable or untrustworthy." Even when we come across people who would break our mental stereotypes, we shut them out, because we're following the somewhat implicit neural template. The physical pathways in our brain literally form ruts. Once they're formed, according to some research, most people never change them. Although, unlike at least most other beings on the planet, humans do have the ability to re-form these pathways.

The psychological distress of many can be correlated with the literal lack of physical connectivity between the right (emotional, relational) and left (linear, logical) hemispheres of their brain. It could even be said that people whose brains don't integrate enough with other people's brains, will not be able to form healthy patterns of thought,  and have trouble integrating their own brain, as well as nerve connectivity to "the extended brain", or visceral organs (the heart, lungs and gastrointestinal system), eventually causing physical sickness in some. This gives new meaning to the old wisdom that you shouldn't have a divided heart, or a divided mind.

"Lift up your heads, O you Gates!

 And be lifted up, O you ancient doors."

It's originally from a song, written thousands of years ago, actually by King David, returning victorious from war, with the ark of the covenant, restoring authority, the life of the people, and communion with God back into his city.

For the first time in a long time, I've found myself venturing out into pathways I've left unexplored. After years of trauma, and subsequent hiding in fear, I'm daring myself to love again, to trust. What a welcome verse. What a bold procession. O, dearest hope, that I could find the right levers, that I could find the courage & stamina to join the song and open those gates.

Golden Days

In retrospect, we fawn over the golden seasons of our lives. They are the stories we love to tell and reflect on. The places we want to get back to.

I call the summer after I graduated high school the golden summer. Friends of mine had a huge house (aka the cabin) that everyone hung out at literally almost every night. You could go there at night and find people just sitting on the couches on the wrap around porch simultaneously talking theology/philosophy & the best youtube videos. We'd have impromptu sit down family dinners with 25 people (only a few of us were actually related). We drove around Corvallis in my friend's shag carpet van (no seats) with about the same number of people --sometimes playing jokes on frat party-goers, sometimes just all going to get burritos. We'd get out on the roof and smoke and talk til all hours of the night. You could come back in the morning and find people trying to barbecue pancakes on the charcoal grill (only succeeded once). Most days a good crew would eventually make it out to play frisbee golf (as long as you weren't stuck working) and a lot of the time you could stick around til the evening and do it all over again the next day. It wasn't uncommon that summer for my abs to literally being sore from laughing so much.

Karol Zielinski

For many of us, the golden days are scenes from childhood or adolescence. Although these seasons still happen as we get older, I wonder if they're becoming harder to spot. By this, I don't mean to say that seasons of gut-wrenching pain & hardship (which we all face) aren't without worth. On the contrary, I've seen that those who dig into their pain-- facing it bravely, and with God's help pulling wisdom from it like seeds, can plant the same in hope and eventually reap the most beautiful golden harvests.

I no longer have the luxury of structuring my day around frisbee golf and barbecued pancakes. With age, I find that my capacity for joy, as with ambition, compassion, and meekness among others are becoming more sophisticated. I'm able to accomplish bigger & better feats. I still appreciate simple games, but I can also drink more deeply of fruit I see in family, friends and work.

Do I recognize the golden days while I'm in them? I don't think they look as simple, or always as obvious as the great games I played as a child. I can let myself be complicated-not every area or moment is golden, but some are. For me, now, I find great joy in my work. A lot of that comes from having wonderful leadership--which does a lot to cover and bring peace and direction to my life and the lives of others under their leadership.

The good things in life are not just ideas, nor should they be allowed to only be emphasized in past tense as memories. They have real world consequences. They are producing tangible, pragmatic fruit today. Look for them. Speak of them. Relish their sweetness. What is golden for you today?

Your Constant Thoughts

The most valuable thing I can give is my attention. We listen. If not to things or people, then to ourselves. We draw on the world around us. What we put out is built on the back of how we process the things we experience. The things we listen to eventually come out of us. Most of the time, we eventually let our core relationships--whether they're with friends, television, accomplishments, family members, ideas --or worse,   your ideal versions of people--define parts of our identity. Constancy is closely related to intimacy.

kandinsky.painting with white border (moscow).

I have one mind, one body. Every day, I choose how to invest my time and my focus. In large part, this is influenced by what I'm innately drawn to. At least in some ways, what we gravitate towards will teach us about what is already going on inside of us. What goes through your head over and over? What is your constant thought? The thought you wish you could get rid of. The thought that drives you. Write it down. If you're like me, you're walking in circles on roughly the same ground over and over. But why?

I challenge you to try something: Write down your most constant thought--the thing that loops through your head when you disengage--every day for about two weeks. Usually it's loudest right when you wake up, and when you lay down to sleep. It can vary from day to day, but I'll bet that in most cases you'll begin to see a significant pattern over time.

Think about sharing it with someone you trust. Consider what it says about what's going on in your heart, and what you are listening to. Writing or sharing a constant thought helps with honest analysis by putting it on an external backdrop. It's often easier to learn by contrast.

Shifting where you place your attention and what you focus on can eventually change the way you interact with the world, and ultimately re-shape your identity. If you want to be different, start paying attention to different things.

Giving Your Life Away

I'm a student of Economics deep down to my soul. As luck would have it, I chose to major in ECON before I knew that. I love efficiency and the art of making things productive. I also grew up in a family that owned its own businesses -- knowing the empowerment and struggle of self-employment as a way of life. Lately life has been giving me a renewed love of small enterprises-- that risky business that costs a little more of your time and brain space, but gives you more than just monetary rewards.

We live in the world of the possible. I can communicate and transact instantaneously across the globe from the palm of my hand, and I'm not even rich. All this possibility, in my mind, sort of begs the question "what do we do with it?"

What am I doing with the best I have? How am I using my brain capacity? Do I write down those brilliant ideas and take the time to give them a shot, or settle back into the sofa for more re-runs of Seinfeld? They say if you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life. Well, I think you'd probably find a few of your days "work" no matter what field you love, but certainly a lot less of them. It makes me wonder though, how many of us have really researched what it would take to do what we love, or given starting or participating in small business a shot? Do we really know what would it take to create our own wealth from something we have passion for?

Are we trading our dreams for something safer? In our attempt to avoid risk are we sacrificing that stuff that makes us feel alive?