Being poor is not a moral issue............

The light turned red. I stopped the car.

-What do you think the stats are for juries

actually getting their verdicts ''right'', I asked

my son.

-Perhaps 70/30 % of the time, but who can

really tell? Maybe it's more 60/40%?

-How can we even know if someone

is guilty or innocent unless there is

irrefutable evidence like ''hand in the

cookie jar'' kind of facts/proof?

I mean, as humans is it even possible for

us to not be subjective?

Doesn't life experiences and memories colour

and influence our thinking even if they do

so subconsciously? I asked.

-Probably, not to mention that even before

the jury gets to hear a case, the prosecution

has chosen and decided with the courts permission,

what information they are going to present to the jury

and what they are not, Jesse answered and

then continued; but in my view, money speaks

the loudest and above all.

''Rich, is its own country'', he said and when

he said those words, somehow, they ''electrified'' 

all of my braincells as well as simultaneously 

bombarded me with

 how incredibly profound his statement was.

Like a tiny snowball rolling down a hill

collecting more and more snow and

growing exponentially, I am finding

that ''Rich, is its own country'' can

be an answer to so many questions.

*

These are two out of many graphite paintings that I made

for an exhibition that unfortunately never eventuated

called ''I rather be a candle than curse the Darkness''.

The Darkness is one of those words that can mean

different things for different people.

I have known people who have fought back their

''darkness'' all of their lives.  I have cried, consoled

and struggled with some of them because I too know

 the darkness. 

But,

I also know that I rather light a candle

than curse the darkness.

Personally, I have an issue with the bombardment

of positivity that we are all supposed to experience

and share with others.

In my experience feelings pushed down as one

''thing'' often pop up as another worse thing.

There may be times when putting

 on a ''positivity band-aid'' as in; time heals all,

don't worry, be happy, let it go, there's plenty

more fish in the sea, etc. etc. etc. may be

helpful, but when somebody

is experiencing heartache/loss/etc. usually that 

tends to make things worse for the sufferer rather

than console him/her/they/them in my experience.

Poverty, which is in my view one of the worst

kind of violence that millions experience

somewhere every minute of the day,

is often treated/viewed as an issue of the will

rather than luck.

Often the thinking goes something like:

I'm rich because I work hard so I deserve

my riches. (a moral judgement)

You're poor because you don't work

hard enough so you deserve to be poor.

Poor people are often indiscriminately harshly 

judged as lazy, unwilling to work, don't try hard

enough, sponges, dole bludgers, etc. etc.

but here's the thing:

''Poverty is like a punishment for a crime

you didn't commit.''

(Eli Khamarov)

Poverty is not an accident. It is made by us

and it can also be removed by us.

''Joy is a friend, and pain and sadness

is a teacher.''

(Citizen Z)

*

Poverty is not just a lack of funds, it is

also the worry and concern that comes

with the uncertainty that a lack of

funds brings with it.

Every un-expected break-down of an

appliance can be catastrophic for

someone barely keeping the bills at bay.

New school books, clothing, backpacks,

sports clothes, lunch money etc. etc. etc.

depends on keeping a very austere budget.

 This I know because

this has been my battle for most

of my life.

Some will say and have said to me, that

choosing to be an artist(a hobby) what did I expect???

Since leaving home at 17 I have been

short of funds, but I have never been poor because

 ART has always enriched my life.

''Empathy is a far cry, life is never the issue.

While next-door-neighbour cries of hunger,

Netflix wets more tissues.''

(Abhijit Naskar)

about the top image: pastels on paper with a real stick

laying across it, edited in Elements

''He who asks a question(why) is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a (why)question remains a fool forever.''

''People going through a hard time need

consolation more than they need an

explanation.''

(Harold S. Kushner)

Though most of us may go through our most intense

''why?'' phase during our pre-school age, usually

we ''grow out of it''.

But is that really a good thing?

If we grow out of asking why then how will

we keep growing and developing a deeper

understanding of what being a human is?

Asking ''why?'' is in my view paramount to and 

the beginning

of how we make sense of who we are, what we are 

doing here and for what purpose.

Some have suggested that more than anything

else mankind fear uncertainty. I have read this

many times but where does this statement

come from and is it true as in; is it a fact?

Deep diving the statement it seems to me that

rather than being a ''certainty/fact'' 

the first mention of the statement comes from

 ''The Epic of Gilgamesh'' c. 2100 BCE.

Quote: ''There is no permanence - .................

From the very beginning, nothing has been

certain.''

According to those in the know, asking ''why'' is

an internal human driving force that for survival

and flourishing purposes, the human

 needs to know and understand the cause and effect

of things happening.

(If I do xyz what happens then?)

Take coffee for instance.........how many humans

had to go through ''taste testing'' with dire results

before they discovered exactly what a coffee bean

looked like and what had to be done to it in order

to make a delicious cup of coffee?

Asking ''why?'' is probably one of the most

important questions(if not THE)us humans have 

ever come up with.

How so? Because it urges us to look for answers,

 reasons and solutions to quandaries we face.

 Mankind learned early on that survival

very much depended on knowing things

such as living things has a life span.

I sometimes ponder all the humans who 

have died while in the pursuit of finding out

what they can consume and what they can't

if they want to survive.

Though we may not be able to say that we know

for a fact(empirical)that all things living 

will eventually reach its expiry date,

 experience however strongly suggest that it does.

Which brings me to the subject for this post:

Loss and how hard we find to deal with.

When I was told that my best friend

had driven off the road, up a tree

and subsequently instantly died,

my first words were: WHY?!!!!!!

A few years later my then best

friend died of a heart attack at 43 years

old........again: WHY?!!!!!

In the turbulence and absolute crushing

heartache that followed each loss, I realized

that I had to find a way to cope, to accept

that none of us are getting out of this

we call Life......... alive.

I stopped with the ''WHY's'' and decided

to focus on kindness and consolation.

The position of having been the ''best friend''

seemed to somehow be comforting for the

wives and kids my friends left behind, so

I decided that I was going to become

the best possible consoler that I could be 

....... for them.

Day and or night, for as long as they needed me.

I found my own consolation in: music,

reading, writing, painting, photography,

walking, running, swimming, cycling,

thinking, but more than anything else.....

Challenging my thinking and developing my

critical thinking and self-reflection skills.

And it began with......you're right! asking:

WHY?

Why do I think this way?

Why am I feeling this way?

Which lead to asking myself:

Are there other ways of thinking about this?

Other ways of feeling about this, other words

 to describe/define this?

Maybe instead of trying to solve/fix this,

are there other possible ways of

interpreting this situation?

[Thus begun a serious devouring of innumerable

(and still counting) books and hours of research 

into Philosophy, Psychology and everything

to do with the mind and consciousness.]

''He who asks a question(why) is a fool for

five minutes; he who does not ask

a (why)question remains a fool

forever.''

(Chinese proverb with my additions)

about the image: ink on paper title: Dried flowers

Can an AI lay eggs?................

All my life I have been told that I am ''different''.

Not knowing exactly what different means since

it seem to vary a lot from individual to individual,

I've concluded that it's one of those ambiguous

words.

Different can mean:

dissimilar, unlike, unalike, diverse, varied,

separate, divergent, distinct, uncommon, etc. etc. etc.

It can also mean: not like most, not like others,

strange, foreign, unusual, etc. etc.etc.

Already as a very small child I knew that

there was something different(in this case meaning

=wrong)not okay with me.

My first six years of school were not easy

as I was bullied constantly for being ''different'',

as in not ''normal''. There were beatings, my books 

and other school materials broken or destroyed.

My bike was always tampered with; the chain broken,

the tires flattened or the seat removed to

 somewhere unknown.

So, more often than not, I had to ''walk'' my

bike and myself the 5 kilometers home.

A walk which consisted mostly of a dense forest

which for an eight year old little human

can be really scary during the autumn and winter

months during which the dark(evening) sets in at 

three o'clock in the afternoon.

It was during one of those long walks home

that I first realized just how rich and musical

the sounds of the forest was.

*

I am not a twitcher so I don't know birds

by their names, but I am a musician so I know

them by their songs.

Every season has provided me with different singers.

Some of them familiar to me and some of them

for me to get to know.

Sometimes the occasional bird of prey 

would let me know that it was around.

Its haunting screech suddenly filling

the air like a soprano who just reached too far.

But always, always cheering me up and

making my walk home shorter and more

delightful; those chittering, twittering,

 flittering and magnificently azure blue 

tiny little wrens. 

I am worried about the future for our

feathered friends. We, the people, have figured out 

how to melt the ice caps, to cut down earths ''lungs'',

to poison rivers and creeks, to overuse fertile soil

until it is fertile no more, and how to weaponize microbes

to kill everything alive and now..............

and now we want to set a ''something'' loose on

our planet that we know is capable of ''freeing''

itself from its makers. Really? 

We didn't learn from Hiroshima to think first?

Although mankind is a striving, driving and

endlessly inventive entity(as in biological living thing),

may I be so bold as to suggest that mankind is

also a ruthless steamroller kind of thing

which in its pursuit of riches and power

is apparently oblivious to that

once it has acquired all it desires,

there's no Living Planet left.

''Only when the last tree has died

and the last river been poisoned

and the last fish been caught

will we realize we cannot

eat money.''

(Cree Native American Prophecy)

''Let us not run hastily into a future without

first making sure that we will find light there.''

(Citizen Z)

about the image: top Ink on paper ...Title: Robochicks?

middle: Acrylic and eyeline pencils on large canvas

Title: What are we teaching our children?

Bottom: Digital photo

Title: Without light, what is there?

Time is a word.........but what IS IT really?

A long time ago when time was mere numbers on

a something, now, ''time'' for me is not only numbers on

a something or for a something,

 but also a something that is making it

abundantly clear to me that time is 

not a matter, a something, an ''it''.

Although, what ''it'' is, time is a word/term

that we have come up with in order to

make life slightly more ordered and 

 predictable methinks.

Once we figured out how to measure

time with clocks, then eventually

as our cultures kept progressing,

clock time more and more became the

central societal hub around which

mankind has organized itself.

Time is a construct, something mankind has

invented so say those in the know.

It is the measurement of a progression of

events(something?)moving from then

through now to a new then, methinks.

Time, the actual sense of it

happening/taking place is not something 

we can feel, see, taste or touch.

Time perception is a subjective experience

and how we sense or experience it depends

on our individual understanding of it.

When we are having fun, we often say 

words to the effect of ''time flies when

you're having fun.''

But when we are worried about a child

not coming home on time or a spouse

not answering his/her/their phone

late at night, my personal experience

is that it feels like time is exponentially

slowing down.

Emotional states bend our perception

of time by altering our bodily

signals such as hunger, pain,

heart rate and anxiousness.

Clocks measure uniform time.

Us, not so much.

We experience time subjectively

and flowingly rather than

uniformly.

We are malleable creatures.

Actually, we are malleable and emotional

creatures which means that though

we may hope to be level headed

and rational beings most of

the time, a lot of the time

we lose track of time due

to the fact that we are

thinking, feeling and

caring human

beings.

(You may disagree with some of the stuff

I've written here, so please remember that 

these are just my musings although

always supported by a lot of research first.)

about the image: acrylic on small-ish canvas.

Title: The Boy with the Golden Heart.

(aka. my son)

I've written a number of songs inspired

by my son. If you would like to

listen click on this:

This track is called ''For my Son''

Just walk away, they say.................easier said than done

                                                                               

Just walk away, they say.

Don't stay, they say.

Why don't you just leave, they say.

It takes two to Tango, so if you stay

though you know you should leave,

then you're culpable, so they say.

Only a fool would stay, they say.

Don't be an idiot, walk away, they say.

Who are ''they'' who say these things?

There's a line in a Craig David song

that at the time when the song

 ''I'm walking away'' was in the charts

really stuck with me.

''I'm walking away from the troubles in

my life,

I'm walking away to find a better day.''

At that time I was working in a not only

very badly paid but also bad for me job.

I was lifting far too much heavy stuff

and the treatment by most of my co-

workers there was shocking.

Every day for over three years I tried to

find a way to walk away.

When the doctor told me that I had to 

leave or I would have to be carried away

on a stretcher, I finally walked away.

So, here's the thing in my view.

Walking away is only step 1.

There are so many more steps to come after

 the first one.

If there is danger and children involved

 in not walking away, as with domestic 

abuse situations, a lot of planning and

money is often needed in order to leave.

So before Step 1. there is usually a bunch 

of other steps to be taken.

In my experience for most of us there

is no such thing as ''just''.

(I have ''walked away'' so many times that

I don't actually want to remember exactly

how many any more.)

Walking away is often a very costly affair;

emotionally, physically, monetary, loss of

friends, relatives, jobs, etc. etc. etc.

especially if children are involved.

One of the worst days in my life (so far) was 

sitting alone in court with sweaty hands

holding on to my divorce papers 

while I could hardly breathe from fear

that my heart was going to just stop.

There was no just walking away from

15 years of marrige and a teenage son

no matter the dysfunction of the relationship.

There are millions of people on this globe

that would love to be able to just walk away

from the situations they are currently experiencing.

Some try to walk away only to be faced

with ''walls'' of bias, prejudice, hard-headedness,

intolerance, -isms of different varieties, etc. etc. etc.

Some try and are met with guns and hostility.

Fences are erected, walls are built, angry people

all dressed up and wearing face masks blocks

the entrance from anyone trying to walk away.

Bombs of a myriad of varieties are dropped

on people from even attempting to ''walk away''.

In an era that views itself as technologically

well versed, savvy even, may I ask what 

makes us think we're so smart when we

are excited about creating a machine that eventually

is going to get rid of us because in an era

of machines only, there will be no need for

biological creatures that can be rid of by 

a mere nasty subatomic particle.

Some people make fun and belittle others

who are sincerely trying; ''walking away to

find a better day'' to overcome addictions,

become better parents, find help to become

better humans, to overcome dangerous and destructive

behaviours, etc. etc. etc. or as the particularly obnoxious

person may say; become all kumbaya.

Kumbaya actually means something worthwhile;

peace, unity and togetherness.

However, more often than not it is used sarcastically

as a meme for naiveté, and for the purpose of creating

political and social discourse.

Elon Musk said; ''that the fundamental weakness

of Western civilization is empathy.''

Since then (2025), he has modified that;

Empathy is okay as long as it is

rationally thought through.

I disagree with him. I view empathy as one

of mankind's most valuable attributes.

''Empathy is choosing to see ourselves in another

despite our differences.

It is recognizing that the same humanity - the

same desire for meaning, fulfilment and security

- exists in each of us, even if it's expressed

uniquely.''

(Vivek Murthy)

about the image: white charcoal on black cardboard

Sometimes a gentle touch speaks volumes................................

The phone rang.

 Herbie Hancock, barely out of music school,

answered.

-Hello?

-It's Miles, a husky and soft voice answered.

Herbie laughed and said: -Yeah, man, sure you are!

-You're the young piano player that's been

gigging around, yeah?

-Well, yeah. You're really Miles? Miles Davis?

-I like your touch man. Can you make

rehearsal tomorrow? I've got some new stuff

I wanna try out. 

Herbie made a mental note of where and when

but before he could thank Miles for asking him

to join the band, Miles had hang up.

As in a daze Herbie put the receiver back

in its cradle.

''You have a nice touch'' Miles had said 

and repeating those words to himself

he could feel himself 

smiling all the way from deep inside

to the outside of his being.

(This is just my interpretation of a story I've been told.)

Strangely as it may perhaps seem, touch is a very

important and highly individual aspect of being

a professional pianist.

Touch, come to think of it, I have come to realize

as discussions and news about AI pops up

here, there and everywhere may perhaps be

 fundamentally more important for us humans than 

we have given it credit for.

Touch, those in the know say is of vital importance

to us and belong among those of our most basic

needs. But as we seem determined to rush ''headless''

once again(atom bomb) towards a technology

that could potentially end up exterminating us, (rogue AI)

........ it may behoove us to just spend a little more time

 donning our black thinking caps/hats (= potentially negative

 outcomes) just in case our excitement of how

brilliant and technologically ingenious we are

manages to blind us.

In 1965, Harlow's Monkey Experiments strongly

suggested that touch is a primal need that applies

to both humans and monkeys.

Experiments/research have also been carried out that

show that the absence of touch more often than not 

lead to poor physical as well as mental health.

(Unless a person suffers with an illness which

includes touching as problematic.)

Touch comes in different ''flavours'' methinks.

For instance: a touch can be light, heavy, warm,

cold, on purpose, accidental, nice, creepy,

loving, bullying, etc. etc. etc.

People who grow up in environments in which

touching of any kind is not encouraged or done, 

may I suggest often tend to find touching or being

touched by others uncomfortable at times.

And vice versa....some of us are happy to

hug and touch others, to high fiving and 

bump fists.

Science says that touching(the nice kind)

 regulates our nervous systems,

brings down our stress levels and helps us

to build/form/create deep and meaningful 

emotional connections.

Basically, perhaps one may say that though

words are very important for us in order to be able

to connect and create social bonds with each other,

so are physical actions such as handshakes,

high fives and sincere hugs.

We may even become so pre-occupied with

words that we underestimate just how

necessary and comforting a light touch

on a shoulder or hand can be for

someone who may need a little sign

of validation and appreciation.

How we touch each other physically

is in my view a fundamental choice

anchored in personal boundaries, respect,

consent and mindfulness of the other person's

cultural aspects/traditions. 

''Sometimes a gentle touch

speaks volumes.''

(Citizen Z)

''After all, touch is the first language

we speak.''

(Stephen Gaskin)

about the image: ink on paper

What I feel is sadness but what I do is pretend that all is okay...............

What I want to do is scream,

but I don't.

What I want to do is cry,

but I don't.

What I want to do is run away,

but I don't.

What I want to do is tell you

how much your words hurt me,

but I don't.

What I feel is sadness,

but what I do

is pretend that all is okay.

What I feel is anger,

but what I do

is pretend that I'm okay.

What I feel is confusion,

but what I do 

is pretend that that's okay.

Why is it that to be openly sad

 is by others so often deemed ''bad''?

Why are we often judged as being ''weak''

when of our pain we openly speak?

Why are we told to subdue our cries

when hurt brings tears to our eyes?

(Citizen Z)

For a number of days I have had severe pain

in my neck and shoulders. Mind you, I always

have pain there(bursitis) but for some reason that I'm 

oblivious of, it has now reached new heights.(levels)

I have methods of dealing with it, but none so far

has worked. 

What's needed is a remedial massage. 

By the time I'm sitting in a chair at the massage

 place, the pain has spread and is now pounding

away in my lower and upper jaw bones.

I'm feeling quite nauseous but is lucky enough 

to be fitted in for a treatment immediately.

A designated massage therapist arrives and softly 

asks me how much pressure I want her to use.

''A lot,'' I answer.  It hurts like heck but I know 

that it will get better and eventually the pain 

will subside. Which it does.

Walking to the car, some thoughts wafts through

my consciousness; -I just don't get all the excitement

over AIs. We are flawed, this is true, but science

proved a long time ago that being touched by other

human beings is paramount for our very existence.

Thank goodness for human massage therapists.

''There are five traits that AI genuinely can not

replicate: empathy, presence, judgement, 

creativity and hope.''

(Shorts on AI limitations)

about the image: pen and ink on water colour paper