ALEXANDER HAYES

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Connecting With Place



Connecting with ‘place’ means living with one eye on the present moment and the other hovering around looking back and trying to avoid making new mistakes. It means that the world can be our ‘place’, that our birthplace never changes nor does the tie to moral culture restrict us to enacting, living out the expectation of others to conform to their own control structure. 

To be everywhere but to remain sane means we also have to be grounded in reality and through time we realize in this increasingly diverse array of networked electronic connections that we are also living amongst a virtual reality.

It was with that awareness of the construct of a digitized reality that formed the very same foundation for creative exploration that heavily influenced my creative output and ultimately what drove my career to be that of an educator. At the core to my short teaching career were actions to debunk the corrupt capitalism I saw driving those around me and then the allure of technology took over.

The problem with that style of capitalist living is we become dispatched to the present moment and we always seem to be everywhere at once yet never present to that given moment. If we let fear to guide our steps and we fail to act on our instinct or liyan we are simply letting the fear of the unknown push us back into the known pattern we have marginally lived through.