February 14th 2022
Hello again,
How are you? I hope you are all well.
This week has been sending me a bit, I’m not going to lie. I’ve been watching the news out of New Zealand and seeing that people have decided to emulate the “freedom convoy” that happened in a Canada to protest mask and vaccine mandates.
Now, I’m all for people expressing their views and beliefs and having their own opinions and that, like there is nothing wrong with people standing for what they believe in. What I’m not a fan of is when people don’t do their research to support their ideas. Like, as an English teacher, I try to teach students critical thinking skills and one of the most basic things is to come up with an idea and then support the idea using some sort of evidence. What I’m seeing online is a lot of people that just say stuff without backing it up or using some sort of anecdotal evidence to support themselves which is not a very strong form of evidence when the story is from Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend, ya know?
Anyway, as you can probably tell, I have been thinking about this a lot and thinking about the idea of freedom and what freedom is and that’s where this weeks poem comes from. I used Thirteen ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens as inspiration for this and reached out to people on Instagram to find out what they thought freedom was. There were some beautiful ideas that came out of it and I hope that I managed to do them some kind of justice. I’m open to doing this style again if there is a topic for it so if you have any ideas then chuck them in the comments and I’ll give them a jam.
I also posted the rest of my shoe designs up in the art section. I might revisit that project later but for now I think I’m really happy with how it turned out. Let me know which one is your favorite and if you would rock any of them in real life.
I know there is a lot this week but I appreciate you for reading this far. I’ll be back next week with something else.
Stay safe, look out for each other and I’ll see you here next week.
Rexolotl
