Monday, November 12, 2012

What's really great

Trees that sit on rocks.

Leaves with traces of tiny feet.

Lakes that breathe.

Dinosaurs with hair of dust.

Clouds who hug the Earth.

Snails who concur fungal mountains.

This. But mostly what's behind.

When the ocean and the sky are indistinguishable from one another. 

When the heavens smile.

and when I can experience them.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Waaaaaatts?

I'm reading this great book called "The Wisdom of Insecurity" by Alan Watts. He says some great things.

"Consequently our age is one of frustration, anxiety, agitation, and addiction to 'dope.' Somehow we must grab what we can while we can, and drown out the realization that the whole thing is futile and meaningless. This 'dope' we call our high standard of living, a violent and complex stimulation of the senses, which makes them progressively less sensitive and thus in need of yet more violent stimulation. We crave distraction-a panorama of sights, sounds, thrills, and titillations into which as much as possible must be crowded in the shortest possible time.
To keep up this 'standard' most of us are willing to put up with lives that consist largely in doing jobs that are a bore, earning the means to seek relief from the tedium by intervals of hectic and expensive pleasure. These intervals are supposed to be the real living, the real purpose served by the necessary evil of work.  Or we imagine that the justification of such work is the rearing of a family to go on doing the same kind of thing, in order to rear another family...and so ad infinitum."

He wrote this in 1951. 

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Saturday, May 12, 2012

So I'm working on putting my portfolio together and I found a lot of my work from high school. I was so tortured by myself.
Also, eventually all of my more recent work will be found at www.jamiebourgeois.com. woop. I got a website ya'll



 









Sunday, April 22, 2012

So,

I think I just threw up a little.
in  a bad way.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Dinosaurs and Buddhism and a mantis.


"Don't confuse the moon with the finger."



Massospondylus

Devils Flower Mantis


no words.


Monday, April 16, 2012

Tastes Like Chicken

       "Ishmael," a novel by Daniel Quinn, questions the most fundamental preconceptions we have about humanity. It is a story in which the reader is completely wrung dry of this idea that the world belongs to man, instead we are brought to the realization that man actually belongs to the world. Throughout the novel, the story is told through a dialogue between a teacher, a gorilla named Ishmael, and his pupil, a middle aged man who wanted to save the world when he was in his twenties but lost hope. It is the perfect set up for a book of this kind. Because Ishmael is a gorilla, he isn't affected by human preconceptions and is able to give an outsiders point of view. The middle age man is us, the reader. When we read the story we take his place, we are being asked the questions and we are forced to dig deep to find the answers. The beginning of the journey starts with Ishmael's explanation of how he gained this insight of humanity. He explains his journey from the jungle to the zoo to the menagerie to the gazebo. It immediately provokes the question of self, what defines what an entity is; a name, a location or is it all in the mind of the preceptor? He expresses his confusion of the human perception of him, a gorilla, and wonders what makes humans so different, what makes them not animals. Ishmael then tells us that we have been disillusioned. As a "civilized" people we are born with this knowledge that as humans we are entitled to living such as we are, no matter how destructive, because we are man and we are better than everything else on this planet. Ishmael states that we are "captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels [us] to go on destroying the world in order to live." He calls this system Mother Culture. Ishmael then asks the question of how things became to be this way, what is the story of man. Through the journey to find this answer we are first introduced to the natural law that every living organism must follow. Every organism has a right to live, eat, and flourish, which means that every animal is susceptible to being eaten and depleted, this system of consume and be consumed keeps populations in check. Humans tend to believe that we do not apply to the latter part of this law. Instead of sharing with the other inhabitants of this earth, we are selfish and take more than we need by hording and mass murder, and instead of working with the earth, we work against it and try to restrain and control the uncontrollable. But, the world could not function as a one species world. This planet needs other species to flourish in order to support any life at all. Diversification is important, yet humans are so driven to order, simplify, stupefy, and control everything; no change no surprises. This is detrimental, yet most are blind to it.

      On this journey, we also realize an irrational fact in our perception of the evolutionary time line; that it ends with man, as if to insist that man was the final product of this long development. Yet in reality, everything around us is constantly evolving, except for possibly humans. Ishmael points out that when the perception is the world belongs to humans, there is no evolutionary advancement, yet when the perception changes to humans belong to the world, there will be evolutionary advancement. This advancement would happen in a case where we are actually living within the system and not trapped in our man-made cage apart from it. By pulling ourselves out of the system, and placing ourselves within this cage of believing that the world is made for us, we have gotten rid of most of the forces of population control, which yields a higher population, an over population. And with this, means there must be an increase of food production, which means more land usage. This land is developed and diversity which once lived there is killed. If this keeps happening at the rate it is, the diversity of this planet will be null and void. Without diversity, without the cooperation of different organisms, there is no life. It's like the chickens we raise for food consumption. These chickens are kept in dark overpopulated cages. Because they aren't actually participating in the world, everything is so regulated, and breeding happens so rapidly, each generation has less and less diversity. This decrease in diversity produces dumb unhealthy chickens. Do we want to become chickens, we apparently already taste like them.

      But humans aren't chickens, and we aren't dumb. We are also not born with sin, and are not inherently bad creatures prone to do bad things. Believing in these things is just a fallacy, a cop out, it's an easy way to dismiss our mistakes and gives us an excuse for not having to fix them. And if we go on living as though the world belongs to man, trying to control its changes, its evolution, we are not only going to cease evolving, we are going to cease existing, we are going to go extinct. And with this bit of information, it is not okay to simply dismiss it as if nothing can be done because we believe that mankind is inherently greedy and will just mess things up no matter what; it isn't true and it can't be true if we want to survive. These concepts and perceptions lie within our minds which we project into the world to make up our reality, if these concepts change in our minds, then the reality will change as well. At the end of the middle aged man's lesson, Ishmael urges him to go out and change people's minds, to inform them on what he had just been informed. You see people are inventive, we are handy, and we are smart, if the perceptions of man in relation to the world can be changed, then we can use these traits to break out of our cage and to live fully, within the system, and thrive.

Monday, March 26, 2012

Oceans of Land

The desert.

Is stunning, it's mystifying, its completely baffling and inspiring...but I don't think I could ever live there. Not enough green. I found myself most elated when we drove through areas of trees and snow.

The snow.

That's another thing. I think I love it.

But really, the desert. my mind melted to mush. Everything is so VAST, so patterned, so intricate, so simple, so colorful, so beautiful. so breatheable yet breath robbing. such a contradiction.

We are only a small part of a larger whole. Tiny ants.Tinier than elephants.

Just massive rocks hangin out.
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What a tree, believe it or not, this was one of my happiest moments of the week.
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True story.
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What the crap cloud shadow.  cloud. shadow. cloud shadow. ah.
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 Just a hole in the ground. no biggie.
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The beautiful Colorado River that I will someday kayak in. 

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Ofcourse there were some great trees in Zion.

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Bulbous
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SPACE ON A ROCKPhotobucket
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Snail.
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snowmen ya'll.
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we have to appreciate, because we are so minute in the grand scheme of things.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

pictures.

I'm leaving tomorrow for a 10 day desert adventure in the New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada area. We're going to see great wodnerlands like Monument Valley, Lake Powell, the Grand Canyon, Zion, and other breathtaking landscapes.

But, I was thinking. When I see these places, I know I'm going to be blown away. I know I'm going to  just loose it, throw up excitement. But, I already sort of know what to expect. I've seen pictures of what I'll soon see in reality. So, what about those eyes who've seen these sites with no precursor. Who stumbled upon these wonders blindly, or only heard about them from words. How amazing, completely, that must be. To have no expectations what so ever. Have we hindered the wholeness and grand potential of our experiences with imagery?

To experience something NEW and FULLY having NO prior knowledge of what it is.
That's something to want.

Though, I know I'm going to ruin it for whoever reads this too. Because I'm going to go picture crazy.


This also reminds me of a revelation I had when I got back from Wyoming two summers ago. I was watching The Last Samurai with my roommates. In the opening scene there are these pans of foggy mountains and it dawned on me that that place is REAL. It's real. It's not just some crazy grand place.. I mean it is, but it also really exists. We see so many images of ridiculous landscapes that we start to get numb to them. We don't even realize the splendor in them. They're just postcard images. Which is another thing.... I've heard people look out at the world and say "It's like a post card" It's so crazy that our references come from man made FIRST and nature SECOND when it should be the other way around. Shouldn't it?

questions.

Fragmented, atlest I think that's the title.

So, I write poems now. I also bought new hiking boots. But mostly this post is about this poem. It is this poem.

Fragmented


Every thing is placed,
resting upon another,
Both forces
pushing.

A book to a shelf.
A shelf to a book.
To the pages, to the shelf, to the floor,
 to the air, to your eyes reading the ink of
the pages
to the book
to the shelf. 

All forced to a halt--
Frozen against one another,
boundried,
never fully touching.

Yet,
Every thing can be broken down,
into smaller and lesser increments.
Not solid,
although they appear to be
impervious.

A hand flipping, grasping the tangible pages.
Pages of particles of a once tree
are molecules, are atoms
are electrons, protons, and neutrons
are broken down forever further.

Yet, our reality does not allow
this to be explored
easily.

I place my foot
atop the cold smooth wood of
the floor
pushes vertically against my warm tired foot.

Every thing is placed,
resting upon another.
My foot, the floor
lie side by side,
like angry lovers.
No permeation.
Forces fighting.
Forever a defense.
A Balance?

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

happenings

google.

I'm researching things for a competition and I keep finding THE BEST things that have nothing to do with what I'm researching. I'm very compelled to share...so here they are:

Hundreds of spiders housing in a single tree in Pakistan after the floods.



Auroville: a "universal city" in India.

The Bone Eating Snot Flower: (this is the best. it feeds on whale carcasses.) AND it says that the males are dwarfs that live INSIDE THE plumes of the female. A single female can host hundreds of males. CRAAZZYYY






Wednesday, January 18, 2012

fast?

what's wrong with life taking time?
why so much expediency?