sunlight passing through the plastic pattern of my cup
gravity pulls the juice line flat and light bounces up to my eye
giving me a glimpse of summertime in a field back home

The present is eternal. Divisions of time exist only in abstraction; the past and the future are creations of the mind and do not exist independent of experience.

Time comes from the PIE root di-mon-. Di, from da, meaning to divide, or cut up.^[source] This concept of chopping up serves as a metaphor for the experience of change, the experience of passing through time. Time does not pass, we pass through it. In the words of De Broglie...

In space-time, everything which for each of us constitutes the past, the present, and the future is given en bloc . . . Each observer, as his time passes, discovers, so to speak, new slices of space-time which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality the ensemble of events constituting space-time exist prior to his knowledge of them.

(Capra 1975, 172)

We like to divide time up into three groups. Past, Present, and Future. But where are the boundaries between these? Does "now" last for one second? A nanosecond? If you cannot say how long 'now' lasts, then you cannot say where the past and future begin. Thus the illusory nature are revealed by this. They are nothing but constructs of the mind, of the intellect.

All that exists is the eternal now.

Wow. I never really thought about how much really comes from the Sun.
Shane and I made a fire in the backyard tonight, and began, consequentially, talking about fire, ways to make it, what it is, how the first people made it, and so on. Shane brought up the method of rubbing two sticks together and creating fire by friction.
The way I understand this to work is, the energy comes from the Sun to you and all the plants and animals you eat, which your body represents with adenosine triphosphate, which binds to myosin in your muscle fibers, causing interaction with the actin, and causing muscle contraction. This energy takes the form of the moving sticks. Based on the energy that you put into moving your hands and the amount of stress you put on the sticks, an amount of friction exists that absorbs a corresponding amount of energy from the motion of the sticks. When enough energy is in one place, the hydrocarbons in the wood react with the oxygen in the air, and fire if born. From the friction. From the movement. From the muscle contraction. From the ATP. From your food. From the Sun.

It's beautiful, really, how continuous everything is, especially processes like these. There's no distinct lines between each step, they're all kind of happening all at once, we just experience them in such a way that we put them in this 'cause and effect' type arrangement.

This is a drawing I did for an exhibition at the Wexner Center called Interventions, a response to a class offered to high school students by Ohio State called Art and Environment. Here is a photoset of the exhibition from the Wexner Center's Flickr page.

We were asked to write artist statements to go along with our pieces, and here's what I shat out.
Heh.

The purpose of this is to expose the unity in all things, and to blur the lines and distinctions created by our minds. We have an organizing, categorizing mind that draws lines and discriminates different objects that are somehow separate, and independent from everything else. However, this world of disconnected, discrete objects does not reflect the true nature of reality. Indeed, all ‘objects’ are connected and interrelated, and none can exist independently of one another. Their distinctive qualities depend on their contrast against other objects. Thus, the objects have all been drawn as a network, or a web, where everything is, in some way, connected to everything else.

There are two categories of objects on the page. First, there are ‘artificial’ objects, things created by the hands of man, made in factories, with tools and machines. There are also ‘natural’ objects, things that exist independent of humans, and that can be found in nature just by going outside. The point of combining these two categories into one network is to blur the line between natural and artificial, and to ask the question, ‘Why are man's actions, and the results of those actions, unnatural?’ I find that silicon structures and lithium-ion batteries are just as beautiful and natural as lignin in wood structures and chloroplasts performing photosynthesis.

The objects in this picture were all drawn at different times, from different angles, in different lighting. This represents the infinity of perspectives from which we can view the world, and the relativity of reality. Your truth, your reality depends on the lens through which you view the Universe. The point of drawing all the objects at different times from different perspectives demonstrates the fact that we are always changing, as is our perspective. Nothing is absolute.

I see the morning light,
I see the morning light,
And it ain't because I'm an early riser,
I didn't go to sleep last night

-Bob Dylan