Month: October 2005

The other day in The Chrysalis, we covered off a topic Dari like to call Breaking The Silence. It’s a very
personal thing but ultimately the message is this: As you grow up and learn and absorb you take in cues
either directly from things like verbal teachings or more indirectly from things like social observations.
These cues tell you what you can and cannot talk about. Of course everyone has their own person things that
they “can’t” talk about. However, if you ever want to be a creative individual you can’t stop. It might never
go away completely, after all psychological conditioning isn’t something that goes away completely, but what
you can do, is recognize it so that you can move past it. Creative people can’t have a border around their
creativity just like wild animals with fences aren’t wild anymore.

For me, while we were going through the exercise I was reminded of a story about “The King of Togo Togo” (
I’m still trying to find a copy somewhere ). At first glance it’s a wonderful harmless story. The idea is
that everything is alive, even grass is a good one, and one I truly relate to. But when looking at it in
context of this, it makes you think. I know I have topics that I just don’t talk about. I won’t talk about. I
don’t share, and I keep locked away deep inside. Is this lesson that “each blade of grass whispered to the
other” teaching that there is no real place of solitude and one can confide in? Does it teach that rather
then venting, one should just never speak? Did the story actually have an impact on me so much that my
SIlence is a verbal one?

Of course, all these questions can’t all be answered in one blog post, but they are things to wonder. I
really do wonder the implication the lessons of “silence” had on me. The funnier thing is most of them I
sought out myself. But I guess now is the time I need to really evaluate the lessons I’ve learned and do a
good spring cleaning on them, so that I can completely Break the Silence.

A quote come up from last nights creative class. I thought I would share

I am Protennoia the Thought that dwells in the Light
She who exists before the All
I move in every creature
I am the invisible One within the All
I am perseption and Knoledge, uttering a Voice by means of Thought
I am the real Voice.
Trimorphic Protennoia

(Triple-formed Primal Thought)

You know when you wake up and your eyes just don’t want to open? Not for sake of muscle power, but because of
the crusties? Well that was this morning. The best solution was to go back to bed.

Regardless of state of mind I decided to drudge through and work anyway. Now to the point….I love
ant. We are using it at work for building and I’m getting the swing and liking it.
The bestis it’s xml/xslt parsing. I’m working on a clients site with numerous pictures. Now, sure you still
need the time to chug through and resize and name them. But once you’re all complete you can hook up a few little xml config files and parse them through an xslt and voila, pages a plenty!

<target name="xml" description="xml compiler">
    <xslt basedir="${basedir}/etc" destdir="${basedir}/web"
      style="${basedir}/etc/page.xsl">
      <mapper type="glob" from="*.xml" to="*.html"/>
      <outputproperty name="method" value="xml"/>
      <outputproperty name="standalone" value="yes"/>
      <outputproperty name="encoding" value="iso8859_1"/>
      <outputproperty name="indent" value="no"/>
    </xslt>
</target>

Finally got a chance to watch The Machinist last night.
It’s been on my to watch list for some time. Man that movie is messed, but still very beautiful and intriguing to watch.