Distractions, . . . and what is Curation

Okay - I admit it - I LOVE facebook,
no false humility here - I LOVE mash-ups, I love memes, I love the fact that I have intelligent friends, some of whom I do not even know, ALL over the world. I can even stay in touch with people from high school. I can stay in touch with people who know what memes and mash-ups are and who have dialogues with me. Short and sweet, and we sing in each other's choirs - but is that sooo very bad ?!

The problem is where the Curation of facebook clashes with the work that actually needs to be done - the very "discipline" of life. The putting one foot in front of the other in order to accomplish something other than a running commentary on the latest greatest controversies.

Truly - there are few things I truly care about that are soo very important. I love life, and I love all of the beauty that it contains. I love finding new ways to find and highlight that beauty.  I do feel that I owe this to the many who have passed before me and who are coming after me. All those whose bitter-sweet endings I have shared: Mimi, Carl, Bryan, Carol, . . . And, those who have so recently arrived on the planet and stand to inherit all that beauty and destruction. Those who are standing on the bones and ashes of a raped and pillaged earth and her creatures, especially the sentient ones, . . .

The older that I get the more that I talk in ellipses - there is so much to say and so many words to say it, it feels beyond my ken to get it out. But, I do want to indicate that it is there. A friend once told me  about elision - those sounds / words / things that are omitted by naming other things. The thought has since forever fascinated me. Every time I choose to focus on the one, I ignore the many.

I think often of my engagement in anti-War ventures - and then the statement of the Saint "don't invite me to an anti-War rally / invite me to the Peace march." Yes, yes, yes. Pope Francis has written an encyclical on the state of the Planet and the horrible relationship to capitalism or why to focus on the poor. Well, yes, duhhhh. But, too often I am distracted from focusing on the poor, from doing the next right thing.

I struggle and wrestle and believe I am personally responsible for denouncing the fascistic candidates, the Re-thug-li-cans who would demand and wrest even more of our national treasure, our global resources and throw them in to the maw of this elitist empirical inferno prison-military-industrial complex.

But, there I go again - where do I look - Dante's pit or the hope of a brighter future. Or, as Dennis Mumby threw at me recently from Gramsci: "the pessimism of the intellect, but the optimism of the will !"