Salman Ansari
@salmanscribbles
embracing my inner polymath — writing, drawing, coding, playing
Salman Ansari
@salmanscribbles
embracing my inner polymath — writing, drawing, coding, playing
Work on becoming more attuned to all your senses such that you can notice minute differences between things. Study all the little differences between similar things, and why you like one better than the other. The world wants you numb. Being a student of nuance is an act of rebellion.
-Kepano
We could lament that the price we have paid for our so-called progress in the century and half since Muir has been a loss of perspective blinding us to this essential kinship with the rest of nature. But that would be a thoroughly ahistorical lament. We humans have always had a troubled relationship with this awareness — from the pre-Copernican days, when we hailed ourselves as the center of the universe, to the campaign launched against Darwin for demonstrating our evolutionary consanguinity to every single creature on this beautiful planet.
Still, something deep inside us — something elemental, beyond the ego and its conscious reasonings — vibrates with an irrepressible sense of our belonging to and with nature
In design, AI inspires me no more than elevator music or a business presentation. However, it often shows me what I do not want. When I ask Chat-GPT how I could better phrase something, I almost always get the most uninteresting, boring, often meaningless answer. As an author that writes to say something meaningful, get upset about this, and in resisting the emptiness of the generated response, I uncover what I previously could not articulate. I do not want to demonize AI, but it works well as a devil’s advocate.
When writing for children: Write up, not down. Don’t dumb it down. They love a challenge.
A decade after Maya Angelou channeled the selfsame polarity of human nature in her staggering space-bound poem “A Brave and Startling Truth,” Griffiths writes:
There are two sides: the agents of waste and the lovers of the wild. Either for life or against it. And each of us has to choose.
and
Reclaiming our wildness emerges as an act of courage and resistance amid the conspicuous consumption by which late-stage capitalism drugs us into mistaking having for being, anesthetizing the urgency of our mortality — that wellspring of everything beautiful and enduring we make. What Griffiths offers is a wakeup call from this near-living, a spell against apathy, against air con and asphalt, against our self-expatriation from our own nature