In a different light.

I love these moments.

I am surrounded by students who are apparently busy working.

I can hear my colleague encouraging them in their research.




I am here early.

I ignore the other people in the room.

I avoid eye-contact.

I sit down.

I tune out.

I am elsewhere.

I am nowhere in particular

I contemplate photos in no particular order.

I am not looking to do anything.

I let myself wander.

I love this feeling of freedom.

Where will I be taken today?

I pick an image out of thousands.

It will be this one.

It catches my imagination.

I reframe it in my blog.

I wait to see if anything comes of it.

I may well have binned this a line downwards.

I enjoy this feeling of being on an edge.

I am writing a fine line between survival and oblivion.

There are no ideas here.

No matter.

It is a doodle.

I identify this as a militant act.

It doesn't answer to any prompt.

It doesn't reply to any request.

It doesn't follow any instructions.

It represents freedom for me.
 
The image came out of a moment such as this

I have lived with it for over 16 years.

It has become familiar.

Back then, I had a couple of cans of black and gold spray paint.

I don't remember why.

No matter.

I could choose to dive back and explore.

No matter.

I choose to focus on the image.

I had a large piece of paper.

I had some old empty frames.

I had the remains of some Japanese wallpaper that a cat had destroyed.

I had a few bits of wood, a broken hat-stand.

I  had  made three or four images with these materials over one day.

I remember being completely taken up with the creative play.

I am not sure it this is artistic or autistic.

No matter.

I seem to remember having destroyed one I preferred in a fit of nihilism.

I feel an instant of sadness.

This picture remains.

A few weeks ago, it caught my eye again.

It was propped up against a wall.

I messed around with a smartphone, taking photos, playing with my reflection in the glass of the frame.

I mangled it, I cut it up with two or three apps, transforming it, giving it new life.

Somehow, the image has travelled down over the years to reappear here in a different light.

I shall take pleasure in contemplating it here.




 

Diving for pearls? (they're all cultured now)

Before the beginning of the 20th century, the only means of obtaining pearls was by manually gathering very large numbers of pearl oysters from the ocean floor, (or lake or river bottom). The bivalves were then brought to the surface, opened, and their tissues searched. More than a ton were searched in order to find at least 3-4 quality pearls..

Bored yet? Not to your fancy? I give up!  No, I didn't write that introduction, I know nothing about all of this; I cribbed it off Wikipedia, and here's the photo to prove it:









Now I don't know about you, but I hate wasting my time reinventing the wheel, searching for that link...(yawn) somewhere on page 46 of a Google search. After all that effort, when you have found that rare pearl, there is a temptation to hide it away, with your precious favourites, or to show it off proudly at meetings to less well endowed colleagues.

- Look what I know, aren't I a clever clogs me?

- No actually, he found it on the internet...on his phone.

Another tempting lure for us learners is to copy and paste the content from the oyster which is our world (wide web) and to pretend it's our work. Never done that? Of course not; we are pearly whiter than white (unlike those poaching students).

So in this age of collaboratively cultured pearls (thank you Wikipedia!) it is getting easier and easier to find stuff to learn and to copy, to make us seem really bright. Yes, it does help if you know the right type of mollusc which interests you, something about its natural habitat, and even where the other expert pearl divers or farmers hang out....

All these points I will return to, but for now, let us just cast our gaze across the ocean which is the internet and reflect........

All done? OK let's go on.

No question, our apprentice fishers will need to learn how to search effectively, how to work together and where to find friendly experts to save their precious time. Joyous with a successful trawl, they will need to know how and where to share their find(ings) and/or how to transform it/them into culturally valuable individual works of art/science/cuisine etc.In this way, they themselves might become recognised one day as unique...

Knowledge, it is safe to say, does grow on trees.

I have a particular fishing tool that I would like to share with you today. It  works in  net browsers, in and out of Twitter, it enables you to organise your links with tags in organic coral-like structures, and makes your diving or culturing work available to all by embed, by mail or by inviting others to join in the fun.  Want a shift of paradigm? You are not alone in our ecosystem! By clicking on the little pearl,you can even fish as a team, err, as a school...of fish, together, in the high seas.

Here it is, take it all, take a single pearl... my colleague did this afternoon. Here is my priceless tree just below. I confess that it is not all my own work.



I shall be teaching my students how to fish the net together very soon. It will save my breath.  Why should I dive so often at my age? The kids can do it.


Original Photo Credit for pearl diver :Kuwaitsoccer  http://tinyurl.com/639kz4f