Escaping the noise

The importance of creativity in turbulent times.

There is a draw on my attention it’s not hard to place the source…it’s in my pocket…in my bag…in my hand…in my ear. It wasn’t always there, I remember a time before it, when things were quieter. A time when I wasn’t micro-dosed with dopamine hits, a time if I was on the bus or train…I was on the bus or train, tuned into my environment, people around me, the scenery…not virtually transporting myself to another place or to someone else’s life…I sat with my own thoughts, rather than the words of others channeling directly into my ears, for better or worse I experienced the journey…I didn’t escape it.

I wonder truly, where will it all lead…where are we being led?…willingly…helplessly?…unknowingly? What have my children been fed through their curated feeds…what did I miss…how did I fail? How were we failed.

As parents we held the line as long as we could when the kids were young, weathered the judgements of others as we refused our young ones access to the tech that seeped into households, innocently, unthreateningly, under the guise of learning new skills…we were apparently holding them back.

Eventually high-school said they needed an iPad…fear mongering said they needed a phone…we set boundaries…but were they enough?

My first experience of a friend on a smartphone was in a cafe, an early adopter in our sleepy New Zealand town, “she couldn’t stop looking at her phone,” it felt rude, intrusive, “I’m not getting one!”…and for a long time I didn’t. But like running from zombies eventually they catch you and bite.

Out of rhythm

A defibrillator, often called an Automated External Defibrillator (AED), is a device used to restore a normal heartbeat in someone experiencing cardiac arrest. It works by delivering an electric shock to the heart, which can reset the chaotic electrical rhythm and allow the heart to restart beating normally.

AI overview….👀

I know we’re not going back, there’s a lot of good stuff that has come, but does it balance? Electric shocks hit us through documentaries, dramas, horrifying news stories, interviews with industry whistle blowers etc…but they seemingly fail in their attempts to defibrillate the “chaotic electrical rhythm” we are living in and restart all our hearts to “beating normally.” …. a fitting metaphor for what seems needed!

My gut is churning uncomfortably again with the rapid, unboundaried, unfolding of AI, popping up on my phone uninvited…it’s entertaining, it’s time and money saving and once again all too tempting. My eighteen year old son popped his head into the living room, to find me business planning with ChatGPT… “this is nuts,” I declared, “it’s like having a personal assistant, who knows exactly what I want!”.… “This is how we all die.” he sighed with his quiet humour, before he disappeared back through the open door.

“It’s not just the online safety of our young people that concerns me, but the increasing blurring of what’s real, what’s true and the hacking of our minds. As Yuval Noah Harari wrote in 2018 “To hack a human being is to get to know that person better than they know themselves. And based on that, to increasingly manipulate you," but there’s always an upside right; "The whole thing is that it's not just dystopian. It's also utopian. I mean, this kind of data can also enable us to create the best health care system in history," Harari says. "The question is what else is being done with that data? And who supervises it? Who regulates it?”

In his 2024 article for the Guardian the title reads; “never summon powers you cannot control.”

During the day things feel less menacing, but my instincts as I mull these things in the darkness of night is to “run!” to unplug and head for the woods… the hills…the wilderness…the middle of the ocean!

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

from The Peace of Wild Things And Other Poems

It was about this time last year on our family sailing adventure, that we were waiting for a weather window to leave Menorca and sail nine days across the Mediterranean Sea to Greece…a lot of days for me, one I always have to mentally prepare myself for. But as the horrors from across the water filled my feed, images of unspeakable suffering seared into my minds eye that left me melted with despair, the departure from land couldn’t come soon enough for me, as a means to escape the world for a while, to be out of contact and heal my aching heart. In the long days of slow that followed I came back to the world of animal experience as I watched turtles surface, birds swoop and myself yield to the elements that controlled us. Tuned into my environment, I re-found the beauty of the world, as Wendell Berry writes in the poem above; “I come into the peace of wild things, who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

…for a time…

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This image was used in Amie Mcnee’s TEDx talk; The case for making art in a world that’s on fire, I’ve seen the image popping up on a few artist’s Instagram stories and resonated.

In her talk, Amie acknowledges that art can seem like a frivolous pursuit when we are faced each day with the suffering of the world and global issues, that it can cause you to feel like making art isn’t important, and I do feel like that sometimes…ok, more than sometimes. Mcnee advocates for the importance of being creative in whatever form, that it can offer purpose, connection and sanctuary in a world that feels increasingly tumultuous. She encourages that creating art is important not just on a personal level but in the ways it can nourish and build community, offer meaning and therapeutic benefits that can help mental well-being.

Disconnecting from technology and reconnecting, to nature and each other by coming together in community, feels more important than ever. When so much seems set to drive us apart; physically, personally and from our natural habitat…we must resist…and perhaps create!

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A doorway to new beginnings?

I am feeling increasingly called to find a way to give something through my creativity, maybe to facilitate others finding their way back to their innate creativity or through connecting and creating offer some therapeutic benefit? Maybe I could provide, even in a small way, sanctuary and community, a space in nature to disconnect from the noise of the human world and reconnect to the inner landscape where peace can be found.

I fear I may not be up for the task, but I’m pushing through those feelings anyway and trusting that a way will appear.

Creative sanctuary?

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It feels like an act of resistance today to disconnect from technology and reconnect to nature, to put down your phone wander into the woods and sit with nature, with our true nature and to rest in the beauty of wild things.

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As always…thank you for reading this artist’s musings.