Is to give ourselves time to make our own meaning of life. Is to allow ourselves to experience reality as it presents itself to us and believe in what we are perceiving. It is to know how to differentiate between what we are truly seeing with our senses and perceiving with our hearts and what is being presented to us. There are too many distractions, too much noise to separate us from our own nature. As the word is precisely that one, the confusing, conflated, misunderstood “nature of a human being.” Which always presents itself as culture. But is nature in the sense that we are the same as the mountains, the animals, the trees. We are material and we have life, and life is in fact, the only fact, the only literally, the only thing that we actually have. After life is over, with death, we just don’t have human nature or culture anymore. It is such a confusing time to live when many seem to have forgotten the simplest idea that there is: that we are alive, and that for being alive, the basics is that we experience life, we see, feel, smell, touch, notice, and then make meaning of it all in our own ways.

I’m writing this after seeing Mark Zuckerberg’s IG account, where he is promoting the developments of a virtual reality glass that integrates the reality that we are living in the image that is being provided. In other words, the glasses project onto the view of reality extra information for one to see and engage with. The creation of such a glass is based on the belief that when we are looking at the world we are plainly seeing all that there is to see, so there would be no harm in adding more to it, of adding virtual reality into our vision. This assumption, which of course lacks in complexity and sensitivity, disregards the subtlety of perception and the grounds of creativity. It provides one more tool for the continual displacement of our bodily inherent knowledge. In other words, it perpetuates the traumatic schism between us and nature created by colonialism and sustained by American military hegemony nowadays.

I know I went far, but I won’t come back. I’ve been loving having a blog, this unimportant place for publication, with no peer-review, where I can publish my thoughts as they are. These thoughts I know are valid. They come to me and connect all sorts of meaning while I breastfeed my baby. I’ve been breastfeeding nonstop for almost five years now, so I’ve learned how to notice the stream of consciousness that this activity brings to my body. While breastfeeding, my mind connects past and present with glimpses of clarity in the midst of the agitation of my emotions.

I now know that when I look at the world, more specifically when I look at people or at trees, plants, in short when I look at a singularity, I can notice much more than just the materiality of that singularity. I know my ability is shared by many, probably by most, as it is only a matter of attuning to our capacity to notice. It is not a super-human skill, but a basic human condition that we don’t talk about enough. And that we need to acknowledge more and learn how to improve and how to make good use of. We give life to others when we do this, and we enhance our living experience when others do that with us. My friend Barbara Campbell Thomas wrote about it these days, and I wrote about something similar when I was photographed by my friend Tahila Mintz once. 

It’s a blog post! I can stop here! Continue later! Oh god, I love the freedom to write like this!