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Photoshop Tutorial: Making it Rain

11 Jan

These days, “the means of production” we proles are constantly striving for are as much digital as they are material. With that poor (and slightly Marxist) excuse, I now present you with my first Photoshop tutorial: how to digitally manipulate the weather in a photograph.

Original

Here’s the image I started with: a photo of Big Ben. It was a cloudy day, which will help us in manipulating the sky. Generally, a monochrome sky (blue or gray) background will make this process easier, though it is still possible with a sky with cloud shapes.

1. First, you should modify the image you’re starting with to create a more “stormy” feel. Use the Hue/Saturation tool to decrease saturation to -26 to remove some of the warm tones of the summer day the photo was taken. Then, use Brightness/Contrast to darken the image and increase the contrast (-60 brightness, +36 contrast) until you get the darker, starker image you’re looking for.

screen-capture

2. Use the Curves tool to do some more specific modifications. Look at the following screenshot:

screen-capture-3

Notice how there are two peaks on the histogram chart. You can use these as a guidelines to darken the shadows and blacks in the image, while lightening the highlights. Your curves chart will look different depending on your image and the effect you’re trying to achieve. Here’s the result:

screen-capture-4

3. Next, create a sky mask. This will allow you to edit only the sky without obscuring the foreground. In this image, it’s fairly easy–a few clicks of the Wand tool will achieve the desired selection. Note: if you turn off the “contiguous” checkbox, you’ll be able to select all values in the image which match the one you click on, which works especially well for complex architecture, trees, or other objects where many small sections of sky show through the foreground. Once you’ve selected it, create a new layer and fill your selection with black. Then invert the selection and fill with white. Hide the layer–this will be used to easily select the sky for future modifications.

screen-capture-2

4. Now put in the clouds. There are a number of great free Photoshop brush sites out there. I got the ones I used for this tutorial from Brusheezy, which is an invaluable resource for all regular users of Photoshop. Create a new layer, select the sky again (using the mask you created) and, with a black cloud brush, begin painting dark stormclouds onto the sky. It won’t look great right now–don’t worry about that. Set the layer to “Darken”, and tone down the opacity. You may have to fiddle a bit with the edges around your foregrounds, but when you’re done you’ll have a sky full of dark stormclouds. Fiddle with your hue, saturation, brightness and contrast on both clouds and background layers until they match up fairly well.

screen-capture-5

5. Now it’s time for the rain. Create the dark “background” rain first: create a new layer, and fill it with black. Add a mask, and fill it with black:

screen-capture-6

With the mask selected, add noise to it. I add quite a bit; use less if you want the rain to look less torrential. The black layer and the mask work together to give you a blotchy collection of black noise across your image. Add a motion blur to the mask, at an angle, varying the length to achieve the effect you’re looking for.

screen-capture-7

screen-capture-8

This is your dark rain layer. Set the layer to “Darken.”

6. In an image, depth can be created by varying shades of dark and light. So, we’re also going to create some light-colored rain. Create another layer, but this time fill it with white. Use the same process in step 5: black mask, add noise, add motion blur. You’ll have an overlaid layer of white rain against the dark one you created before. Your image will still look a little flat, so now it’s time to pull out the eraser tool. Making sure the layer (not the mask) is selected, erase bits and pieces of the light rain layer. You might want to use your cloud brush again to do this. Then, use a few grayscale colors and some black to shade different areas of the light rain layer. Remember, the eye is drawn to areas of high contrast in an image, so whatever areas of white you leave will have the effect of highlighting that part of the picture. If you scroll down to see the final image, you’ll notice that I used the light rain to highlight the right side of Big Ben.

7. Now erase a few areas in the dark rain layer. Go easier on this one, as you want more background dark rain than light foreground rain.

8. Finally, create a new layer called “highlight” and set it to “Soft Light.” Select the foreground using the mask layer and use a brush to paint highlights onto the foreground. This will serve to pull out images foreground and highlight the image’s centerpiece (Big Ben’s right side, in this case). Then, deselect and use brush and eraser to touch up the highlights.

9. Fiddle with contrasts, values, and saturation on various layers until they match.

Voila:

finished

And that’s it–I hope you enjoyed it!

 
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Posted in Skill

 

The New Year and New Destinations

02 Jan

2010

So. We’ve made it. We’ve completed the first decade of the third millenium–ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the future.

Anyway. I’ve yet to make any New Year’s resolutions, as I generally tend to forget them within a few weeks, so instead I’ll give the present, some plans, and some possibilities.

Mill Creek 321

The present: I’m still in Montana, and it’s been a surprisingly mild stay so far. I’d attribute it to global warming, except I know that it was 8 below zero here in early October and got down to -20 before the weather kindly warmed up to 10 or so for my arrival. We don’t have much snow, but there is snow on the mountains, and the pine trees up in the canyons are frosted white against the gray and black rock. I took a hike with a friend of mine up one of these canyons last Monday, and we walked up to some falls a few miles back. The falls were covered in thick white ice, and when you stood still next to them, you could hear the water grumbling underneath it all, like an underground river just below the surface. The cliffs were towering as high as I remembered them–one thing I definitely miss when living out east–and there were frozen masses of ice affixed to the rock where the mountain springs come down into the canyon. It was very quiet, with little moving except the low noise of the creek under the ice and the occasional woodpecker.

Mill Creek 181

I fly back to Virginia on Friday: that is where the planning begins. The first major item on the calendar is another month-long trip to Turkey and Georgia at the end of January, where I’ll be collecting gold and silver jewelry and other small works of craftsmanship for import and sale back in the United States. I’ll be flying into Istanbul and spending most of my time in eastern Turkey and Tbilisi, Georgia, so you can expect pictures and accounts of Istanbul in the wintertime, the abandoned Armenian capital of Ani, and the snowbound passes of the land border into Georgia.

Ice formation at Mill Creek Falls

Then, back to Virginia at the end of February. Possibilities: I don’t plan on staying in Virginia for very long, likely not past spring. So, sometime in April or May I’ll take my laptop and iPhone development jobs on the road. I’ll either buy a car and spend a year or so bumming around North America and getting to know my own continent better, or accept a volunteer job overseas in exchange for room and board. Currently I have a request in with a tourist service in Wadi Rum, Jordan, where I would be–wait for it–doing web design for a faux Bedouin camp. Cheesy? Yes. Awesome? Most definitely. I have yet to hear back for certain, however, so we will see what we will see.

Either way, looks like it’s going to be an interesting year. So, best wishes to all, and have a great 2010.

Looking out of Mill Creek Canyon

 
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Posted in Travel

 

The Second Coming

26 Dec

W. B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

~ W. B. Yeats

 
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Introducing … Red Revolt!

21 Dec

Red Revolt

After acquiring my first Wacom tablet, I just had to start creating some digital art. That, combined with an old idea I had, resulted in Red Revolt, a webcomic about a worker in a monochrome world, his discovery of color, and his struggle to bring it to the common people. Check it out–comments are currently disabled on the webcomic itself, but you can email me with any feedback you might have, or leave it in the comments here. It will be updated several times a week, and new updates will be posted on Twitter (along with new posts here at Good and Lost). You can follow me here.

Enjoy!

 
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Posted in Culture

 

Coming Home

19 Dec

The river that runs through town

When I left Virginia on Thursday morning, it was from Dulles International Airport. Out there the land is flat (aside for a few narrowly-enclosed hills the locals in all seriousness call ‘mountains’), and the suburbs of D.C. sprawl indecently across northern Virginia. Aside from the brief glorious burst of fragrance that is the area’s cherry blossom spring, the city smells of politics and bureaucracy, an odor perhaps fitting of the area’s history as a swamp, and real wilderness is nowhere to be found. Even Shenandoah National Park, a little over an hour away, is constantly in view of farmlands and other signs of civilization, and a day’s hiking through it means crossing a road several times. And when it snows, traffic shuts down to a crawling, petrified near-standstill. Newspapers talk about software firms, immense business developments, national politics, and the occasional gang crime in D.C.

The Bitterroot River

When I finally land in Missoula and begin the drive to Hamilton, my hometown, there’s snow on the mountains, which tower much closer and higher than I realized growing up among them. Half an hour’s drive away lies an immense wilderness of pine forests, mountains, and old dirt hiking trails. Snow can pile up in drifts and people still speed, trucks are everywhere, and people will nod and smile when you pass them on the sidewalks. Then there are the stores: bit and tackle shops, tanning shops (that’s turning animal hides into leather, not sunlamps and orange twenty-somethings), gun stores (two for a town of 4,000), other stores that also sell guns (like K-mart), saddle shops, and “western art” shops with their paintings of bald eagles, bronze moose, and chainsaw-carved wooden bears. There are the rednecks, with trucks and gun racks and loud country  music. There are the outdoorsy middle-class types moving in from California and the east coast for the skiing, hunting, fishing, hiking, mountain biking, and assorted other wilderness activities in the area. There are the local craftsmen, who might as likely as not call you at the last minute to tell you they can’t fix your plumbing problem until next week because they’re going to be flyfishing. There are the uneducated laborers who never went to college, not because they lacked the drive, but because out here, you don’t need nobody or nothing else. And as for our newspapers: today’s front page headline at the Ravalli Republic was “Mountain Lion Attacks Dog, Horse.”

Hamilton shop

These are all things I never noticed growing up, because for me, this was simply how the world was. Racism was generally limited to Native Americans, simply because very few other minorities had made it to our small town, and those who had were the fairly well off sorts who could afford to move there. It was perfectly normal for kindly and generous people to put up signs saying “we shoot survivors” as a joke, and to only be mostly joking. If you couldn’t safely and reasonably accurately fire a rifle by age twelve, you were probably from California (ie, anywhere outside of the rural northwest). Hunting wasn’t so much a hobby as a near-universal means of getting meat, and killing a first deer was a coming of age experience for most boys and quite a few girls. We had steak or hamburger two or three times a week, and nearly all of it we had killed ourselves or received from a friend who had. I don’t recall ever buying beef. Summer barbecues meant a collection of game, provided by each family: deer steaks, elk steaks, moose burgers, smoked duck and salmon, roast grouse, antelope filets, even the occasional bear sausage.

The Lakeland Feeds mill

Then there were of course the outsiders/city people/Californians, universally (in our eyes) ignorant, and begging to be messed with. I recall a local high school teacher’s story about meeting a man on a bus going west through Montana. The man was born and raised in New York City, and the barren prairies of eastern Montana were utterly foreign to him. The New Yorker asked some of the cliched city people questions, such as whether or not we had power and running water, and if we still rode horses to school and work. The teacher, being fast on his feet, confirmed all of these misconceptions, and went further: see those patches on the outside of the bus? he said. Those are arrow marks from the Indians, who sometimes set up ambushes along this route. The man was visibly shaken.

A shop in downtown Hamilton

When I left for college in northern Virginia, I began to learn the world was not in fact all like us. For one thing, for quite a few Virginians and other easterners, the Civil War was still important. We knew about it, of course–many of the famous Indian-fighters had gotten their chops in the Civil War. But to still be arguing about it? The idea was completely foreign to me: the sole content of “local history” in my home town, prior to 1900, are the Indians and Lewis and Clark, who camped along the river which now runs through town. That something over a century gone could still matter was fascinating to me. I was later to find, in Europe and the middle east, a wide collection of prejudices and controversies far older.

My neighborhood

I also learned that even if men are created equal, they are rarely created alike, and the world beats them into different shapes according to their surroundings. I found the people of the D.C. area upper-middle class to be driven, ambitious, and busy. Clothing stores in the mall sold t-shirts for over sixty dollars (!) and jeans with fake holes in them (I’m starting to see these showing up in Montana, but mostly a hole means plenty of wear and a few too many barbed-wire fences). Education was more important, self-sufficiency less. People had a superstitious fear of nature, and the woods made them nervous, despite a pronounced lack of man-eating wildlife (the small, flighty, and far-between eastern black bears don’t stand much comparison to the western Grizzlies, I’m afraid). On the other hand, they’re also less likely to shoot squirrels, rabbits, stray dogs, tourists, and other wildlife, and less likely to see dynamite as a proper method for both fishing and logging.

All in all, I always enjoy coming back to Montana. There’s a lot of the local culture I don’t identify with–logging contests, anti-intellectualism, truck envy, young marriage, and country music, to name a few–but overall I find a lot to respect here. Here, it’s still fairly common for a growing boy to learn how to fix a car, build a building, chop firewood, shoot a gun, skin an animal, and sleep in the woods: skills growing rare in our increasingly urbanized society. Here, you depend on yourself, your family, and your friends rather than on your company or your government. Here, a boy isn’t a man until he can take care of himself. And that, I think, is something to be proud of.

A walking path down by the river

 
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Posted in Travel

 

Community Without a Place

12 Dec

nomad-tents

There is a certain mode of thought that considers a good sort of life to be a stable one, where you own your own piece of land, cultivate your own garden, and live as best you can off of what you yourself can produce. You will have a front porch with rocking chairs for conversations on warm summer nights, a fireplace or wood stove for conversations on cold winter nights, and your nearest neighbor will be a pipe’s-smoke walk away. This idyllic view of community with a sense of place has a lot of attraction for me, and I’ll probably attempt it myself in a few decades when (if) I’m finally ready to settle down. It strikes me as a good way to retire, after I’ve finished raising whatever children I may have, and am ready to sit down and simply write for whatever days still remain to me.

Fairly often, proponents of the front-porch-and-pipe-smoke mentality go one step further in their reasoning, and say that such a life is the only way to experience true community. Such arguments are generally critical of the “modern lifestyle:” namely, the suburban, technological, fragmented state of affairs common to most of the American middle class. I agree with many of these criticisms: I’ve seen cities, farms, and wild mountains that I’ve loved, but have never yet seen a cookie-cutter two story I wouldn’t have liked better razed. The same goes for the stock attacks against consumerism and materialism (see the works of the philosopher Tyler Durden). The internet, of course, comes under regular heavy fire, ranging from the quaint complaints of  the uninformed elderly to well-thought out pieces like David Carver’s recent article over on Drunken Koudou (nostalgia about the internet–come on, David, I’m too young to feel old).

What’s generally lacking is any kind of alternative to the land-owning, gold-hoarding, gun-toting cabin owner sort of existence.  Here, then, is my two cents: don’t spend them all in one place.

ken-sabuk-camelsTo find my kind of alternative, go back to the good old days. No, not the good old days where everybody lived in a cabin  in the woods. I mean back to the days when cabins were unheard of, and we humans ranged the earth with everything we owned on our backs and horses, and the natural world was still a dangerous place. In other words, when our sense of community and place was not defined by a physical location (cabin or otherwise), but rather by those we were with and the contributions we ourselves could make to the group. It’s hard to make a mansion from a tent, so one’s “place” in a community was defined by merit: the greatest hunter, the wisest woman, and the oldest members of the tribe, in a time when old age was only possible with wisdom, talent, and strength.

Those were difficult and violent times: don’t mistake me for some kind of noble savage idealist. Unless you’re reading this from a yurt in Mongolia (if so, congratulations on your technological determination) you probably weren’t raised in a nomadic society, and won’t ever really be able to immerse yourself into any of the traditional ones. Don’t lose hope. Societies always change, and in this world cultures of every kind are constantly evaporating and condensing. So where are the nomad communities of the modern age? To answer that, one only has to spend the night in a hostel in New York or London, or look for the faces that stand out on a crowded bus in the Balkans.

That’s right. It is possible to find real community even in an internet-addled age, and of the oldest sort: the kind built of a common state of transience.  In my first real foray into the traveling life (the summer of 09) I made friendships that, while brief, were and are still stronger than those I had with many of the people I saw every day for three years in college. In some ways, those friendships were made easier because the sort of people who participate in long-term travel (not week-long-vacation tourists or spring break kids, in other words) generally share many of my interests and are fairly laid-back. You have to be to really travel–depend too much on hard schedules and set itineraries and you’ll eventually just lose it when that Turkish bus driver hands you off to yet another non-English-speaking friend/relative to get you where you’re going.

Really, though, I think the strength of these communities–brief and transient as they tend to be–lies in their shared experiences. In eastern Europe, for instance, I traveled for about a week with a couple of blokes called Alex and Kiril, and experienced stronger friendship in that week than I have with many I’ve known for years. There is the storytelling side of such experiences, of course–the broken train in Bosnia, the double night border crossings on the trip from  Sarajevo to Belgrade, and camping out in the woods next to Pula, Croatia, are stories we will no doubt all continue to tell, and which we will reminisce about should we ever meet again.

Another part of that strength comes from the tests shared experiences bring. You can know someone at work or next door for years, and never really know them, simply because you’ve never seen them react to real difficulty, and never had to rely on them. The shared experiences of travel, especially when you leave the beaten bath, tend to be challenging and difficult. You have to rely on others, and to be reliable yourself. It becomes apparent very quickly when someone can’t handle the stress of travel, or can’t contribute to the group, and I suppose that happens often enough. But when it doesn’t–when you experience and overcome difficult challenges standing side by side with fellow travelers and come out still standing–that’s when real friendships are made, and real community is formed.

So, I say, don’t worry so much about what the internet is doing to your social life. Don’t worry so much about owning a house rather than renting. Don’t worry so much about trying to conform to the standards of your geographical “community.” If you want to experience what real community is, do something hard, and do it somewhere outside of your comfort zone. That could be anything–hiking in the mountains, building a house, learning how to fight. If you’d like my personal recommendation, I’d suggest buying a one way ticket to anywhere, walking out on the road, and sticking a thumb out. The rest will come in time.

 
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Posted in Philosophy, Travel

 

So I’m a Sucker For Good Folk Music

01 Dec

The Duhks

I’ve always been a fan of folk music old and new, from traditional Irish ballads to Bob Dylan. I also enjoy a good violin, and love a good fiddle. So, it’s no surprise that I’m once again getting into the Duhks. If you haven’t heard them, look them up–a five-member band hailing from our Canadian neighbors, the Duhks make their music from the cultural background of old North American folk tunes, with some Latin flavor thrown in for good measure.

Their most recent album, Fast Paced World, is a good listen overall, with a few real gems inside. The title track, “Fast Paced World” is a fast-paced criticism of the modern commercial world in banjo-and-fiddle style, while “This Fall” takes its inspirations from love and love lost, with sliding violins and the smoky vocals of lead singer Sarah Dugas.

The Duhks ranges from  classic folk ballads, to instrumental bluegrass pieces, to more contemporary country-style tunes, to a combination of all of the above that is the signature style of the Duhks. Look them up–a few good songs to look for are “True Religion,” “Death Came A Knockin’,” “Four Blue Walls,” “Fast Paced World,” and “This Fall.”

 
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Posted in Culture

 

Heinlein: Master of the Talking Head

29 Nov

Three of the greats: Heinlein, Decamp, and Asimov

One of the biggest shortcomings I see in the science fiction genre at large is the overabundance of exposition. Fellow geeks will know what this looks like: in the midst of an intense interstellar firefight, the narrator pauses to let you know how a given weapon works: Then, in a blazing array of light, the starships fired their lambda cannons. Intensely focused gamma particles lanced across space, powered by individual microfusion generators, target-controlled by artificial intelligences, and tore into the defenseless colony …

Another common expository technique is to temporarily possess a character and give him/her/it (one can not always be sure of the proper pronoun in this genre) “talking head” syndrome. When done poorly, this is generally accompanied by  key phrases such as “of course” or “as you know.” As in, “as you know, the emperor of this planet, who technically operates under the mantle of the Galactic Commonwealth (GC), but is actually in the pay of the Star Thieves, plans to hold an enormous banquet in his court tomorrow evening at six,” or, “There’s a sunstorm approaching! Fortunately, of course, the thick rock of this asteroid will protect us from any harmful radiation, and we shouldn’t experience anything more than some brief communication difficulties.”

Hollywood, lacking the novelist’s luxury of plenty of words, often turns this into the complex-line-of-reasoning-in-thirty-seconds scene: the moment where the dashing archaeologist recalls to his buxom blonde companion a condensed history of this temple complex, the beliefs of the tribe who built it, and why retrieving the golden mummy head from inside it is the only possible way to prevent an ancient curse from destroying Great Britain.

Sometimes exposition fills a necessary role–giving critical information to string the reader/viewer along through the plot. This can sometimes be left out, though it may result in the audience becoming lost and/or feeling stupid (this means you, Primer). A common and more subtle solution is to include a character which serves as a sort of “exposition excuse”–the outsider to whom things must be explained. Simon Tam, for instance, often fills this role in that pinnacle of television sci-fi, Firefly.

Generally, though, exposition is pretty obvious, and often times it results more because the writer can’t help but let you in on all these cool ideas he’s had and all the hard research work he’s done. Sure, the way a city’s waste disposal system works might not exactly be necessary to the plot, but, as Victor Hugo no doubt thought before writing the chapter on the Paris catacombs, it took so much work, dammit! And then of course there’s that point in Atlas Shrugged were John Galt gets his hand on a radio transmitter and spontaneously ad-libs a philosophical treatise the length of a short book.

But every once in a while, you find a book where the exposition is ubiquitous, but, by Jove, it’s good exposition. By “a book” here I mean specifically all of the works of Robert Heinlein (you were wondering when he’d turn up, weren’t you?).

Heinlein’s works are, for the most part, good, active stories heavily padded with complex ideas that changed the face of science fiction. Read Starship Troopers and you get a war story, yes, but also a full, detailed picture of an entire society based on military service and social responsibility, a technological description of advanced far-future warfare, speculation on the possible nature of alien life, and the everyday problems of life that might face members of the military in an advanced spacefaring culture. Stranger in a Strange Land is the story of a man who grew up with Martians, yes, but it’s also a detailed critique of western society and utopian picture of an alternative way of life. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a good, bracing tale of revolt, but it’s also an entire political outline for a new free-market, minimal government society, made possible with technologies were in their fetal stages when Heinlein wrote it.

And half the reason we read it is because of all of those details crammed into the exposition.  For instance, take a look at a fairly typical paragraph spoken by Professor Bernardo de la Paz, Heinlein’s political mouthpiece  in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress:

“You have put your finger on the dilemma of all government— and the reason I am an anarchist. The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it contains until it destroys. I was not joking when I told them to dig into their own pouches. It may not be possible to do away with government— sometimes I think that government is an inescapable disease of human beings. But it may be possible to keep it small and starved and inoffensive— and can you think of a better way than by requiring the governors themselves to pay the costs of their antisocial hobby?”

Exposition? Yes. Interesting reading? Most certainly. Victor Hugo and Herman Melville were literary giants both, but let’s be honest: if I wanted to know about the scientific classifications of whales or the entire history of the Paris sewer systems, I’d look it up. If exposition is absolutely necessary, writers would be wise to look to Heinlein for how to do it well.

If you’re an aspiring science fiction writer, though, take care. Lengthy exposition is rarely necessary, and almost never fits well in a narrative. When you read Heinlein, think of it like those trick driving videos, with a big warning: “Method conducted by expert writer with proven education and intelligence. Do not attempt at home.”

 
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Posted in Culture

 

Giving Thanks

26 Nov

Thanksgiving dinner

It’s that time of year again. Quite possibly the best holiday ever invented, Thanksgiving is a holiday dedicated to eating, and eating, and eating, with a cool-down period of weeks of turkey sandwiches and chilled leftover pie. But wait! say alert readers: Thanksgiving isn’t just about food! It’s about friends, family, community, and, well, giving thanks. And so it should be, as much as our consumption-oriented culture would have us believe otherwise.

But what does it mean, really, to give thanks? What does it mean to be grateful? Be grateful, say parents across the country to stubborn children seated before plates of green beans. There are children all over the world who would love to have what you have. Be grateful, say employers to employees taking pay cuts. In this economy, you’re lucky to have a job. Be grateful, we say: at least you’re not like them.

And I am grateful. I’m grateful for a loving family that supports me in what is rapidly becoming a very unorthodox life. I’m grateful for thoughtful words from friends. I’m grateful for meaningful actions and useful gifts, books read and passed on, and songs recommended.

Today is Thanksgiving. In a few hours my house and I will begin preparing a feast designed to induce good conversation and, after that, a long and heavy food coma. We’re going to do so in a warm house, with good company. And I ask myself: am I grateful?

Today, Americans across the country will be thanking someone or something for the blessings we have. We’re grateful, we’ll say, that we have food on the table. We’re grateful for warm beds and safe streets. We’re grateful for our freedoms. And, God help us, we’re grateful for our big screen TVs, environmentally friendly hybrids, SUVs, guns, flowers, fat turkeys, and fat vegan-soy-turkey-alternatives. We’re grateful for these things because there are millions of people around the world who don’t have them. We’re only grateful for our jobs when the economy’s down, only grateful for our food when we see those who starve, only grateful for our lives when we are confronted with death. No one is more grateful for oxygen than a man who escapes a drowning.

We tend to think of these things as gifts, from God, from chance, from fate, but a gift is something given with no expectation of repayment, as an expression of love. That necklace, that book, yes, even that tie is a gift. A beautiful sunrise, the song of a bird, and the way the air smells after it rains, those are gifts.

So we are grateful; but let us be careful in our gratefulness., for these things you are giving thanks for today are not all gifts. Your social position, your prosperity, your talents, and even your life itself, are not gifts. They are responsibilities. So, when you gather around your feast this afternoon, give thanks for these things, but remember that they’re not free. All of us have a responsibility to act in this world and act well. Whether that means feeding the homeless next thanksgiving, or volunteering for a charity, or even just creating a beautiful piece of music, is up to you.

Being a child is about learning to give thanks; being an adult is about learning to give back.

 
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Posted in Philosophy

 

A Crossroads in the Dark

23 Nov

2640305389_014d9a6cef_b


Things are not always as they seem, and the world is full of shadows. What few lights we have are weak and flickering, and our eyes will always strain to make out what is in front of us.

Two things are clear: one cannot know everything, and one cannot know anything for certain. Truisms are only true within themselves. One and one is two for certain within mathematics, it can never be more than an approximation of reality.

And yet we must choose a path, for life always goes forward. But how can we choose, when we have only limited information?

Our minds work in paradigms, or models of what we perceive reality to be. These paradigms determine how we act: a man whose paradigm describes his life as an individualistic struggle against overwhelming odds will act differently from one whose paradigm describes a world ordained by the total providence of God, and differently from one whose paradigm describes a world that is illusion concealing an underlying oneness.

Because these paradigms are the basis for how we act, it is important that we choose them carefully, and change cautiously. Most humans simply accept the paradigm they are given in childhood. Others change their paradigms based on a single emotional experience. Some are based on the closest thing we have to truth: our physical senses, our communications with other thinking beings, and the ineffable inspirations of human souls.

These conduits to truth introduce experiences into our minds. The existence of ourselves, of others, and of the physical world are experiences. So are experiments which demonstrate how closely the language of mathematics can describe those parts of reality which seem to operate according to uniform laws: physics, chemistry, electronics, medicine. So are the perceptions that occur when we hear a beautiful piece of music or read a beautiful work of literature. The look in a lover’s eyes when she trusts you is an experience. The shattering of your heart when a lover betrays you is also an experience.

Paradigms arise to contain and give structure to experiences, in order to make them useful for action. A woman betrayed often by men may form a paradigm wherein men are pigs, and act accordingly. A man for whom women fall easily may form a paradigm wherein women are whores, and act accordingly. A brilliant man like Einstein accumulates a vast array of seemingly unrelated experiences, both his own and those related to him by others, and form a paradigm that changes the world: relativity. A great man like Christ may take experiences of action and consequences, and form a paradigm to give men peace: Christianity. A corrupt man may take experiences of control and material gain by the belief of others, and form a paradigm to wage war in a peaceful savior’s name: religion.

So how may we best choose our paradigms? The easiest way is to simply accept one given you. To accept whole the stories told you by your government, by your pastor, by your employer, is easy, and may result in a sort of peace. For you, peace will be easiest if you are ignorant, for education introduces new experiences which may not be compatible with your current paradigms. If you are clever, you may be able to stretch your paradigm to accept the facts. If your desire for your paradigm is strong enough, you may be able to rewrite your experiences in your own mind, the way a doting wife might willfully ignore the scent of a different perfume on her husband’s dinner jacket.

These are easy. These are safe. These will make you a willing sheep for whichever shepherd you choose to follow, and it cannot be denied that most sheep are at least content.

Reality–the Truth–is infinitely larger and more complex than we will ever understand. Our paradigms will never be more than crude diagrams, and no matter how hard we try, most of them will be wrong. Insisting on forming these paradigms for yourself will result in a life of constant struggle, constant doubt, and little peace of mind. As a certain book says, the way is narrow, and there are few who follow it. So don’t bother–learn little, think little, and whatever it is you believe, believe it with all your heart. Do not question authority, and you will find your place in life as another gear in a great and ponderous machine.

But of course, you are still reading. You are still reading because you know, from the part of your mind that is deeper than words can reach, that it’s the narrow path that’s worth walking on, as steep and long as it may be. It will be lonely: every journey on it will be different, and at its heart, everyone must travel it alone. Take some comfort in the fact that your fellow travelers will make for interesting company.

There is no sign pointing to this path. Here is how you will find it. Question everything.  Question authority, question common sense, question the first glance and the first impression, and most importantly, question yourself. The first step is yours; understand yourself, or you will understand nothing. Always learn, always seek new experience, always seek, always struggle. Pay the most attention to those experiences which conflict with your paradigm; either your paradigm is false, or the experience is. Always look at both sides of an argument, and realize that there are never only two. Always be willing to change, but change carefully–the way is as rocky as it is narrow, and flightiness is the surest way to stumble.

Above all, realize that this is your path. Walking here was your choice. Your mistakes are your responsibility, as are your successes, and only your successes. On this path, you have no right to blame your upbringing for your beliefs, to blame your neighbors for the state of your own home, or to blame the social structures for your own condition. You have declared yourself to be yourself, and personal responsibility is the consequence of your declaration. And if you succeed in your path, try not to let it go for your head; earnest inquiry in any direction will reveal that this universe, this reality, is a far bigger place than any of us could possibly imagine.

You stand now at a crossroads in the dark. Don’t follow the hoof prints and the sound of bleating. Stand straight, breathe deep, and look carefully. What you choose will influence the rest of your life.

Walk well, and keep the wind at your back.

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Image credit: LostMyHeadache

 
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