I never thought my equation would look like Copenhagen Fashion week + Ebola+ being-on-the-internet-in-my-underwear = clear sense of purpose in the world, but when the moment comes best to not think too much and just go with it.
Read MorePLOT TWIST: WILBy at TIFF#2014 aka Learning to flow
No matter how well you plan to go in your mind, reality often has a different story for you to inhabit. Granted there are those that plan so well that that type of variation is negligible but that isn't really what I live by - or rather, the way I live gets a whole different response. So when the show went up at the Gladstone during TIFF 2014 I had thought, based on the way Toronto spreads it's parties over the city - perfect time to raise some shopping consciousness in the artistic west end. Well, the city had a different plan. The designer Isabella Scott and I trucked into town and instead of staying at the hotel we took the consciousness of WILBy to the streets.
On the question of social media
I find this whole posting/blogging/insta-awesomeing/fb'ing thing harder than even I could have imagined. Not hard in the technical sense - I get it. Take the picture, write the words, upload - which makes the slowness I have within that realm even more profound. I like to know myself as an articulate person and so my resistance to having that articulation take any concrete sharable form is about something I don't want to see. It's as if the ease and pervasiveness of these tools are inviting me to see something that is hard within me. Maybe it's a self confidence thing - it feels easy to fall back into fear of success/fear of failure types of binaries but that feels super surface. I really admire those that can navigate within this digital realm and move people into spaces of deeper thought or action. To speak beyond your circle of people and reach out into the unknown and see who finds you. Maybe it's just frightening to be vulnerable in that way. To put on a blindfold and speak from your heart and not know what and who will find you. There is so much I learn when directly in contact with another. Visual cues and ones from my heart. This face, the one of electronic presentation feels like a dense mask. I guess I hope that now, as I work to inhabit it with greater frequency and openness, that I can do my truth justice by finding a way to represent the challenges through which I am working and not just a portrait of what is done.
On the question of productivity
I was recently sitting on the benches outside the New York public library trying to get this site up and running when a guy came up to me and offered me $20 to answer some questions about productivity. It was ironic, I would have stopped to talk to him without the $20 because under the question of production is the question of what are we trying to produce. I am totally motivated by human connection and understanding, not just of others, but of myself and place within it all - including relation to others. He asked me what made me feel productive and what tools I used to help achieve that. For me productivity - or rather - affirmative manifestations of the self are all a reflection of the health of the inner child or psyche. As I explained to him - making a site is pretty easy thanks to Square space. I have the capability to articulate, I have images, I have content but I also have a block that haunts me still. Overcoming that, facing that, that's a productive use of my time. After that the site appears. Things get easier. All of this "work" is a way to get closer to our higher self. That is the privilege of the privileged. To free ourselves from the necessity and compulsion and then help others who are trapped within the socio-economic bind. So I continue to try my hardest to get the site up and sell nothing - in order to create the practice of a type of citizenship that knows real value - the value of oneself.