late blooms

Of all the things I could have told
Of all the things I heard
From all the words that I inhaled
No place left to unfold

The words, night air, were sweet and warm
I breathed in song well known
And time (to tell) and room (to tell) and endless skies (to tell and then)…

My lungs filled far too full to burst
I could barely speak a word
My heart stole whispers from my lungs
And the murmurs from my tongue.

The space, dry spell, was fine and well
I took it in my stride
But stride, (it crumbled), and time (it stumbled), and endless endless …   (sigh).

Too much air to breathe
Too many words to speak
The murmurs shred with claws.

I held, and bled, and finally confessed
my lungs are too weak for such pause.

I Am Here

For hundreds of years, you humans have whispered, wondered, contemplated, searched for, and invented my existence. Your words – and especially the fear behind them – have finally convinced me to cross that invisible barrier between shadow and reality. Here I am.

Your tales have told of long, enormous tentacles that lurk, unseen, beneath the surface of that dark lake in Scotland, the Loch Ness. Careless individuals on the shore have gone missing, their only visible crime that they allowed themselves to get too close to my waters during a midnight walk. Boats and small ships have also inexplicably been taken down into the dark and murky waters.

But the truth is that your humanity has been feeding me – bit by bit and little by little, until I had no choice but to surface. And I don’t even have tentacles… no – no little arms thrashing around making noise – that is not my shape, that is not my way.

I see your world, and I see you, from beneath your own reflection. I look up at you, and see you playing across my surface – your actions so alien to my own. I see you contrasted against the sunlight, small figures floating this way, shouting that way, so consumed with your activity that it often makes me ache. You do not have any concept of the stillness, the darkness, the deepness, the lochness of the place wherein I reside.

For my shape is that of the mountains submerged beneath me, and my body is as liquid as the black waters you see reflected in the moonlight. My language is not as finely tuned as your own, I cannot speak as you speak, converse as you do. Rather I sense your interactions as water senses movement. Wind walks on water, and leaves its prints visible across the surface. What you humans are not aware of is that your own speech is of the wind, and turns back into the wind – your words, spilling and tumbling, raising and lowering, warm and cold are simply another form of wind – which I, a creature of your own collective speech – rise up to meet as my polar opposite siamese twin. I need your speech just as your speech needs me – I am its reflection, its unsaid, its silences, its awkward starts and misspoken words.

And yes, I am deadly – for you insist on looking upon me as upon a demon. An alien with no relation to your world. For your blindness, for your deafness, for your inability to grasp the very power of your own words, you suffer. I make you suffer. For that is my place, that is my essence, and that is the Goral for which your heart and mind unknowingly cry out.

The Creation of Reality

The Creation of Reality: an attempt to think out how breathing effects emotion

As I sit and listen to my heart beat, I notice how easy it is to tune it out.

Also, I notice how easy it is to listen in.

I wonder, how does breathing work with this?

When I listen to my breathing, I hear my heart better. And I can slow it down.

But I really have to get behind this beating. I have to hold it, and hold it. And maybe it’s stronger than I think. It might be better to just hear it as if it was slower. I’ll listen for a slow beat behind the fast beat.

I hear, that instead of hearing 4 beats as 4 beats, I can hear them as parts of one larger beat. And to delineate the larger beat, I can use my breathing. I’ll breathe one time for every 4 beats. There, a pattern, and it sounds different.

It seems as though I can almost  ‘lassoo’ my heartbeats with a breath, and reign them in.

And, as my heart slows down just a bit, I suddenly take a big breath, and straighten out a bit.

I think about how my posture changes, and it feels different to sit.

And I’m reminded of how Maturana and Varela think of the organism as different layers of matter – from atoms to particles to cells to organs, etc. all the way up to biology and then to thinking processes.

And perhaps our posture is related as well. Simply another level of our body-organism.

And if our posture is related to our breathing, then it could also be related to our feeling of wellbeing in the world. The more in tune we are with our breathing and heartbeat, the more intact we are with the world. As we adjust our posture, we adjust our grasp on the world.

Of course, reality is still constantly shifting. There will always be new situations, different input, thoughts arise, emotions disturb, tensions tense. These input affect us on a basic physiological level, setting off the need to urgently recalibrate the system. Then – stop – see what’s going on with the heart and breathing, and calm again.

How do these aspects inform our bodily gestures?

In what way are our gestures related to our breathing? And on the other hand – in what way are our gestures related to our perceptions and beliefs of the world around us?

Afterall, we all understand the language of a “slump”, or how we “stand tall”. We “bow our heads” and “shoulder up”.
Is this category of expression not one of the basic elements of the written emotional grammar?

“We respond to gestures with an extreme alertness and, one might almost say, in accordance with an elaborate and secret code that is written nowhere, known by none, and understood by all.”

This above quote is from E. Sapir, the cultural scholar, from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. (The hypothesis being, in short, that language shapes our thought, so speakers of different languages will have different thought proceses).

While the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has long been proven an elaborate overstatement, it’s still interesting to think about how language and thought might be related. (As a side-note: Psychology of Linguistics might learn a thing or two from Cultural Studies).

Which brings me back to Creation and Reality.

So which is it? Creation of Reality or Reality of Creation?

Between Distraction and Meaning

I allowed myself to venture out a little further than usual on my proverbial branch for my talk at Beit-Berl’s New Media colloquium last week. The wonderfully bright and entertaining Emily Lutzker organized the evening around the subject of Continuous Partial Attention (CPA).

At first, I felt that I really did not have much to contribute to this subject. But as I started thinking about it – I considered how different it is to interact with people who obviously have the CPA switch turned ON, and how commonplace attention problems really, really are. Suddenly, everyone I spoke to shared personal anecdotes about their own ADD diagnosis or their difficulties with attention, or lack thereof. Both their own, and people they work with.

Obviously, something is going on.

As Emily so succinctly put it – I found myself looking to ‘diagnose’ the culture of distraction. What is the root cause of this restlessness? With such a diagnostic approach to the subject, it’s not surprising that I was led back to my psychological perspective, and in particular, my interest in trauma. The following speech notes is the result.

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Between Distraction and Meaning –
What is the meaning of attention in fragmented virtualities?

“Become one with the interface”.
Neo, Matrix Reloaded

Linda Stone explains CPA as an urge to ‘feel alive through being connected’. The individual scans his environment in a constant state of ‘ON’, open and looking for connections. In other words, on a basic level, this is a healthy urge, though perhaps one that is pushed to an extreme by the functionality and availability of social media devices. Stone, of course, acknowledges the importance to balance the tendency of constantly being only partially attentive to any given context by providing stronger and more focused attention both in interpersonal situations and in larger contexts such as work places.

I’d like to try to look at the tension between the anxious scanning of the interpersonal and technological environment and the search for a sense of connection in a larger cultural and philosophical perspective.

One of the places this is seen is in a new field of ‘Attention Economy’, a proposed new form of economy emerging, based on the currency of attention. Michael Goldhaber, in attempting to elucidate some of the cultural trends that have contributed to this new form of currency, notes a connection between individuals today who are dealing with existential questions of meaning while also being immersed in social connections. The fundamentally human need for attention from other humans serves as a drive to quench the thirst for meaning through creating, performing, selling and generating attention.

Where fragmentation of attention is a dynamic that works from “the inside out”, a complementary process of multi-faceted and fragmenting identity is taking place from the “outside-in”. Identity is central to issues of social interaction as well as to more existential issues such as the way in which one finds or constructs a meaningful life for one’s self. Taking up the concept of ‘attention’ as a personal resource that directs the self, we can see that the sense of identity is closely related to the emergence of self through being and action.

In socially mediated and multi-faceted environments (social networks, interpersonal communication platforms, multi-player games, and so forth), questions of how to present one’s self are immediate, demanding and difficult to navigate. Every interaction is accompanied by numerous new questions that have no standard or accepted answers. These questions are particularly difficult in environments that have ‘collapsed social/situational contexts’ [1] with blurred boundaries between different personal circles. Which persona or aspect of my self should be presented as the most dominant? How to manage which information to share, and how to present it? How can I maintain contacts with different circles of acquaintances when each one is related to a different facet of your life? Questions such as these highlight the ‘outside-in’ dynamic of the interpersonal aspect of attention.

The inside-out dynamic provides an additional perspective with which to understand this phenomenon. Postmodernism has provided the grounding and the tools with which an almost complete deconstruction of the ‘self’ was achieved. The ’subject’ has been pronounced dead – whether in the form of the author, the subject, the ego, or self-identity. More generally,  the very concept of one, stable construct of ‘Self’ is no longer viable. However, as Calvin Schrag has demonstrated, these questions may simply have changed their formulation rather than passing completely from the world. Specifically, he notes that the question of self has been re-defined, from ‘What is the self’, to ‘Who is the self’. The ‘story of the self after post-modernism’ is a project that seeks to understand who the self is in each of the myriad contexts it speaks, acts and interacts.

Robert J. Lifton’s theory of Symbolic Immortality is relevant here. His major work, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life [2] presents a beautifully coherent and profound theory addressing a the spectrum of existential psychology. For the purpose of this essay, I’ll limit discussion of his theory to the concept of psychological symbolism. Lifton proposes that all of human action is represented and mediated via a constant stream of symbolic images. He elaborates this on a basis of biological theory that demonstrates that organisms first represent their actions in some form of pre-planned, abstract manner before physically acting them out .

If we apply this concept in the phenomenological context of embodied being, we can clearly see how the attentional resource of any particular individual is integrally related to his particular embodied being in a given space at a given time. What “I want right now” is a function of “who I am” and “where I want to go”.

P.J. Bracken raises a connection between the rising phenomenon of trauma and PTSD, and places it in a wider socio-cultural context, suggesting that it is essentially linked to post-modernity as it is embodied in our culture’s institutes…In particular, he raises an important question that has far-reaching ramifications: he challenges the widely held position that PTSD has always existed, but has only recently become recognized, defined and named as a result of growing support from wider social and political contexts.

If trauma in fact has a history, this has important implications on the actual ontological essence of the self. This points to the possibility of an evolutionary development of the ‘self’ – where the post-modern formations of ‘self’ are not more true than any of the previous concepts of self. Instead, these re-constructions of the self as a ‘Who’ engaged in multi-faceted forms of discourse, action and community would seem to be part of a larger historical pattern witnessed in forms of culture, society, politics and technology.

Specifically, we can point to a co-evolution between representational technologies and forms of the self. In today’s world of digital and social media, this issue is particularly complex, considering the ways in which the corporate, political and mass media/ entertainment spheres are involved in creating and manipulating the representational technologies offered to individuals.

The difficulties and challenges of managing online identity are being fruitfully explored, and these are important and even urgent issues. However, I would like to also draw focus to the form of creation and manipulation of multi-faceted identity in ways that are closer to home. In the interactions between older and younger generations, teachers and students, parents and children, employers and employees.

Carlos Shtrenger, a psychoanalyst and writer on the subject of the changing concepts of individuality, self and creativity in the information age suggests that there are unique challenges facing the X- and Y- generations (and beyond). Specifically, he notes that the phenomenon of the digital communication technologies has played a complementary role in the changes from the previous generations to this one. Where the 50-60’s generations were wholly engaged in a whole-out rebellion against the traditional values, their children have nothing left to really rebel against. Without cause for rebellion, these generations are in fact disconnected from their parents’ generation. There are few links and fewer common languages.

He demonstrates how the symbolic order of societal authority is being replaced by a horizontal cultural context wherein an individual’s peers and colleagues serve as the important context for his developing individual. This supports a kind of Deleuzian rhizomatic structure of the self wherein what is important are the horizontal connections between the one unit and the other units. However, this also brings up new existential challenges – with the practically endless possibilities for creating and designing one’s self identity, the self experiences a great deal of angst in situating itself in a place that can be experienced as ‘authentic’ and grounded.

Specifically, the much younger generations today have far less difficulty in navigating fluid social situations. They are becoming proficient communicators, collaborators and socializers and networkers. Utilizing the digital forms of representation, they are able to keep engaged in any form and scope of social mesh they desire. The new forms of challenges resulting from these increasingly represented interrelationships are relevant to all generations and to increasingly more and more cultural institutions.

I’d like to suggest that the main challenge thrown up by the hyper-sociality of the younger generations for the older generations – be they parents, educators, employers or social and cultural leaders – are in understanding and clearly defining the ways in which underlying goals, values and ideologies translate into collective spaces and transactions.

In other words, we need to learn and precisely understand the relationship between intransient values and material spaces, as embodied for example in computer games, information systems, social media as well as cultural organizations and spaces. We must continue to develop our inter-generational communicative abilities – to bridge common languages fueled by values and by vision. It is not enough to learn the trends of youth and how to ‘talk to them in their language’, we must also have something to say. However this message needs to be translated into architectural, generative forms that open a multi-faceted space for a wide variety of individual expression to take place.

This is suggestive of the urgent need to understand precisely how digital interfaces structure and function in the socio-cultural as semiotic spaces, as borders with meaning. We need to develop new tools – conceptual and technological – to enable us to perceive as fully as possible the complex dialectic between the technological borders and the social context. We need to insistently ask whether technology can be naïve. And what happens when the ‘message of the medium’ is neglected by the economic and cultural bodies responsible for designing and delivering the technology, who appeal instead to a superficial model of ‘listening to their audience’ by appealing to measures of popularity and ratings.

The desire for connectivity is not only human, it is the dialectic shadow of the post-traumatic, post-modern, fragmented situation. It is going to become more and more urgently sought after by younger generations. Will this lead to greater addiction to MMORPG’s and constant superficial social activity such as in the phenomenon of continuous partial attention? Or will previous generations rise to the challenge?

This challenge, as I see it, is to provide high-level, dynamic tools for meaning and spaces that allow newer generations to interact – with the space and with each other – in such a way that their own understanding and meaning will come to the fore rather than any encapsulated form of ‘held wisdom’.

—

Related References & Links:

[1] danah boyd discusses this and other characteristics of social networks in her concise and articulate MA thesis: FACETED ID/ENTITY: Managing representation in an online world. [Online: http://www.danah.org/papers/CSCW2004Workshop.pdf]

[2] Lifton, R.J. (1979) The Broken Connection: On death and the continuity of life. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Upgrade! TA –

Ariel Malka (of chronotext.org) and I managed to organize our first Upgrade meeting which took place on 09.09.2007. Happily, it all came off without a hitch! ‘Minshar’ art school was gracious enough to sponsor/host us again, and we managed to fill their middle-sized lecture room to the brim.

The topic was Second Life, and we were lucky to have both Miri Segal (artist) and Maya Hoffner (SL designer) to come and speak.

One of the things that Ariel and I wanted to try out was to develop a format that would encourage a discussion with the audience that would try to go a little deeper than the usual questions about which programs were used and technical details. In retrospect, this is a difficult and ambitious task. We had two _very_ different points of view on the same subject – and for a while, it looked like it might be too wide a difference to really achieve any kind of coherent discussion. However, the audience was great – and a few incisive questions towards the end brought up some new points – new ways of considering the interaction between SL and RL.

Still, it’s obviously going to be a learning process regarding how to organize and direct these events. A fascinating one as well, to be sure.

I’m attaching here a scan of the Timeout Tel-Aviv article (in Hebrew – 1MB) that did a great job of publicizing the event, but unfortunately got some of the details wrong.

So – for the record, I’d like to note that Mushon Zer-Aviv was the creative and capable push that got Upgrade Israel off the ground and running in Israel. And the incredible sala-manca who organized the Upgrade meetings for two years in both Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv, keeping the standards of quality high. They effectively developed the basis to enable us to now have two branches of Upgrade! – in Jerusalem and in Tel-Aviv. And more to the point, we now have a larger field of possibilities for local and inter-city new media activities and collaborations.

I’ll be sure to update on future Upgrade meetings – can’t wait! :)

\\mesh\\ – a blog appetizer

There are those that say that without intention there is no movement. So, I’d like to briefly outline my intent for this blog, where I’m coming from, and where I’m aiming to go…

After quite a bit of deliberation, I’ve decided to focus on my public and academic activities – writings, lectures, conferences, and relevant musings. Living and working in Israel, I’d like to open my academic interests and work to communication with other media researchers out there – so hopefully this will be a good platform to do so.
This does mean that some of the links and content will necessarily be in Hebrew (such as presentations and speech notes given here in Israel) – but hopefully with labeling and translations where possible, it won’t be too confusing.

To get started, I want to articulate my position towards digital technology in general, and give a brief overview of where I’m thinking of going with this in my studies. This is still a relatively informal and personal take on the subject, so this isn’t supposed to present any “new” or formalized concepts or ideas – but rather to simply clarify the impetus behind what I’ll be working on in the next few years.

So, my ““technological ideology”” focuses on 3 main aspects:
First of all, I fully believe that technology is at essence part of our humanity. Carl Sagan presented a fascinating discussion in his book “Dragons of Eden” suggesting that the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is a mythical portrayal of the evolution of human intelligence. Our human intelligence is first and foremost a symbolizing intelligence – but this capacity is both fueled and directed at our activity in the world around us. Tools, and their modern counterpart, technology, are concrete realizations of our symbolic comprehension of the world around us. They bridge between our existing reality and what we want to enable – our envisioned reality.

Secondly, I believe that technology is at essence part of our divinity and evolutionary drive (or ‘creativity’ ‘actualized self’, ‘transcendent unconscious’, essential core – or whatever terminology you’re more comfortable with). I discovered Teilhard de Chardin a number of years ago. His depth of perception into the inner workings of our natural world, and their integral connection with spiritual dimensions are a constant inspiration, and I’m deeply evolutionary in my approach to technology.

And finally, I view digital technology, specifically, to be inherently about connection, communication and synthesis.

Putting all of this together, I view digital technology to be a fundamental turning point in our humanity. On one hand, we are at a lowpoint. Words such as meaning, value, understanding, compassion and vision have been inflated and devalued, and cynicism, marketability, sophism and social leveraging have quickly risen to take their place. As well, our modern world has never been so… well, modern. Every aspect of our life is, or soon will be, commoditized and technologized.

Communication, information – in short – Digital Technologies – are essentially different from industrial technologies. They create connections, bridges, standard and accessible languages enabling (though not necessarily actualizing) different viewpoints to come into dialogue with each other, new formats of communication, new ontologies of information making possible wholly new concepts of interaction between cognition and data, appearance and content, identity and sociality.

I see this movement of ‘coming together’ occuring in every single area of society and self – ‘within’ as well as ‘without’ the sphere of digital communications. As I mentioned above, I believe these digital technologies are enabling new forms and new concepts – but they are enabling them also because human cognition is undergoing a similar shift. In essence, technology and human cognition/consciousness are in a co-evolutionary movement. One enables and is enabled by the other.

Therefore, I believe that in investigating technology and media, we cannot find answers by focusing on technology – there are much larger questions at work. Like many others, I am drawn to understanding in greater detail the changes that digital representation and manipulation are bringing in forms of aesthetic perception, cognitive abilities, social nuances, communicative possibilites, and their implications on questions of human identity, meaning, and being.

However, obviously, the second side of this equation is that the further enmeshed we become, the more exposed we are to manipulation, deceit and control. Widespread enslavement to the consumerist ideology is a cherished ideal and strongly promoted. Therefore, I feel that one of the most urgent and critical issues that we are facing is to understand in what ways technology creates us, and in what ways we create technology.

Whenever we create a technological object, product service or environment, it does not stop there. Technology, unlike tools, is not self-contained. They interact with many other aspects of the environment – and the good technologies, the strong technologies, the technologies that survive, are also technologies that have a great deal of impact on all of those other aspects: political, economical, cognitive, social, psychological, and beyond…

There are many corners of investigation that I feel drawn to. At present, though, I can focus this on digital representation of information – i.e., Human-Computer Interface.

I believe this is presently an undervalued topic of theoretical, cultural and even philosophical study. As the point of contact for the largest number of machines and humans, this has enormous import regarding future developments of technology and humanity.

Continuous innovations in forms of input/output (multi-input touch screens, augmented reality visors and navigation by peripheral vision, tangible computing and haptic interfaces, to name some of the latest trends), ever-developing changes in communication platforms (chats, forums, wikis, blogs, social networks) as well as the enormous advances occurring in graphic rendering, navigation and artificial intelligence in games point to how wildly diverse and difficult to contain this field is.

On the other hand, developments in teaching methods, articulations of digital literacy, aesthetic explorations of the new interactive forms and new cultural phenomena – technological or real world – all point to complementary changes taking place in our flesh and blood thinking and feeling devices.

Towards writing my dissertation proposal, the question for me right now is – what aspect of interface to tackle, and in context of which human field of thought/emotion/experience? I think that part of my dilemma is in how to maintain contact between the larger ideas and the smaller details. Specifically, keeping touch with the place/function of technology in evolution of human consciousness while also delving deeply enough into the specifics of human-computer interaction to be interesting and relevant on that level as well.

At present, I’m looking at two different directions, which I’ll post as academic papers over the next few months. The first is to attempt to look at and articulate the aesthetic moment within interactive works (artistic or gaming), a moment that at best engages multiple aspects of human experience. Specifically, I’ll be using the theory of “Sensitive Spaces” (Sue Cataldi) based largely on Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the Flesh, to look at the points of turning, the moments of change, that can take place in these interactive spaces.

Secondly, I’d like to further develop a thesis I presented at the Israeli Society of History and Philosophy of Science conference. In an admittedly somewhat presumptuous attempt – I’d like to propose a theoretical synthesis between narratological and ludological structures.

This all sounds pretty vague at present – this is mainly to develop an appetite. Hopefully this will also light a few neurons in kindred brains. Of course, I’ll write about these ideas from different points of view as I continue to develop them; and finally will post the final papers.

Cheers!

Turning of the Leaves

“Janus is the Roman god of gates and doors (ianua), beginnings and endings, and hence represented with a double-faced head, each looking in opposite directions. He was worshipped at the beginning of the harvest time, planting, marriage, birth, and other types of beginnings…” – Encyclopedia Mythica

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Autumn has always been a particularly significant time for me. That my birthday coincides with the always anticipated beginning of the new school year made it a kind of personal new year for me. The reflective nature of the Jewish high holidays, from Rosh haShanah (New Year) until Yom Kippur (Day of Attonement) intensifies this feeling of the ‘turning of the leaves’.

So, this seems an appropriate time to finally set up my blog, and pay tribute to the natural tides that inspired the myth of Janus. Trying to find a descriptive recap of the last year, I’d say that overall it whet my appetite, and I’m way hungry for more…

Academics – STS @ BIU:
This was the big one – after my first year of study, I can say that BIU’s STS program (Science, Technology and Society) is turning out to be everything I had hoped.

I’ve seen how people make the place, and the fact that this program has drawn so many inquisitive, intelligent, creative and warm people is a tribute to the head of the program – Dr. Noah Efron, and his engaging and thoughtful approach to research, academia, and what creating a stimulating learning environment can be.

Secondly, I’ve been able to reconnect with my love for philosophy and theory, and while it feels as though I’ve climbed up a hill in only in order to better see the enormous mountain range, I’ve also found a few really interesting leads into those mountains.

Conferences – Speech speech!
2007 brought with it some more academic speech opportunities, and I thoroughly enjoyed them! It really is a great opportunity to share fruits of work already complete, as well as to formulate and communicate heretofore incoherent thoughts.

Art it is – The Upgrade TA
This summer brought a number of treats, one of which was opportunity knocking a second time in the form of The Upgrade TA.

This deserves its own post, but suffice it to say for now that it has reminded me how much I enjoy the people involved with Upgrade – and in particular, Ariel Malka. And in general it’s a good excuse to get nosey about what’s happening in the new media/interactive art scene (since I’ve been distracted with other things). Not that you really need an excuse, but I enjoy having a platform to channel the ideas that spring up after meeting all of the intriguing and talented people out there.

== == == == == == ==

So, I’m using this reflective time to gather myself up for the challenges in the upcoming year. One of which is a lot more writing – academic, popular and creative. Focusing the subject of my dissertation will be one of the more critical tasks – I expect I’ll be spitting blood on that one quite a bit on this blog. Be forewarned :) Keeping Upgrade moving and developing, realizing some of the ideas that Ariel and I have been brainstorming.

And there’s a lot more brewing and stewing. I’m excited, a little scared, but mostly feeling a strong and welcome directive energy to become very focused with my time and activities.

Time is a truly double-faced character.
It occurred to me that Rosh haShanah is first, and faces forward towards the new year. And then comes Yom Kippur, facing backwards.
First, we are reminded that all things, up to the angels in the heavens, are recreated anew, each day and each year. And then pushed to cut the emotional cords that tie us to the inner demons of fear, doubt and confusion from the past. We’ve already been given a new slate, now it’s our turn to pick up the pen, take a deep breath, and give bright new form to our thoughts dreams and desires.

Wishing all clear sight and focused strength,
for a happy, sweet and successful year of personal and collective growth and betterment.