This post is a reflection of my ongoing exploration—capturing thoughts as they come, unfiltered, for my own journey of understanding and preservation. If you’re reading, know that these words are meant for me, but you’re welcome to witness this process.
From time to time, I wake up thinking about aging, my disease, and death. Not in a scary sad sort of way, just an accepting and thinking kind of way. I think it was the first grand meetup in Florida at Automattic, that Matt told us about an app that reminded him five times a day that he was going to die. I found it so amusing at the time. And then someone later re-wrote Hello-Dolly (a plugin made by Matt), to Hello-Death (so instead of a blues quote in admin, you get a reminder that you’re going to die). I loved it and installed it on every site I could that had plugins. Death isn’t always sad, or scary, it’s just another thing to think about and that plugin made me laugh when thinking about it, so thanks Matt and the a12n (whom I can’t remember, but…) who rewrote it, cause that one still makes me smile to this day.
I sometimes wonder what I’m preserving of myself, knowingly or unknowingly. Here online, in my journals, in the art I’ve given away, in those around me that I interact with, from animals (humans included here), to plants, to fungi.
When I sometimes brush my hair outside or clip my nails in the garden, I think of the fungi and microorganisms who might eat those little bits of me after they fall. Do they know some part of me by those bits, and should I lay dead on the ground or be buried here someday, would they know me? What part of the cycle am I and where am I in it?
When I think about how I train my animals, I sometimes wonder if they all (like crows have been shown to do) teach their future generations various lessons, faces, stories, or things we humans can’t quite interpret. If glowworms can inherit brightness or epigenetic modifications for up to fourteen generations even when the conditions change, is that a form of learning or teaching? What do the pigs that I’ve raised teach those that meet them, eat them, or their decedents that are born from them? If epigenetic’s matter, when I give something a good life, am I epigenetically modifying them in some way. If I’m patient, does that reward calmness and lower blood pressure of not just this animal but their future descendants? If I feed kale to the pigs and rabbits that is home grown, does their microbiome improve and get inherited by their children and those that might ingest parts of them?
If I were to consider that I may have had some impact in the art world in Manitou and Colorado Springs, what impact am I having now? And what impact do I want to be having?
Does what I publish, write, and explore on these sites, reflect the true me? Or even a large or small part of me? I feel like it may take years of evaluation, and by the time I have the answers, they may not be the ones I want.
So what am I doing now? Still exploring.
#rawanna
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