Art is a progressive disease.

It starts somewhere, usually with a desire to do something different.  That is the definition of creativity, to think different, to do different.  Creativity is not so much playing the guitar or drawing a picture as it is to do something totally different, perhaps reading a book to an elderly person in a retirement home, or volunteering to wash the church bus, when you normally wouldn't think to do that.  I admit, that in that sense, I have much creativity to be desired, yet it needs to somewhere.

​Music arose from boredom and the need to do something different.

Sure music is creative, yet to begin making music where there was no desire in the beginning is this creative depression I humorously call a progressive design. And photography started with a desire to overcome depression, to get outside and to do something different.  From fear of slowly dying a sedentary life of ill health, I picked up a camera and went outside.  My world, or rather my perception of it changed as I started to see the world through the lens.  I noticed things and began to understand things that without creativity I would never have learned.

Latin for A new beginning Venit Vivere is Solo composer progressive rock instrumental with Rybird on guitar and bass, and drum arrangement from Drumwerks pre-recorded drums. See more about Skorzion here: https://www.rybird.com/skorzion.html Join Skorzion on Deviantart here: https://www.deviantart.com/skorzion A Rawker from Shreveport. Video 3d art by Rybird of Rybird music https://www.rybird.com/ A Skorzion/Rybird Music​ Production

Where to go from there?  I need to put my hands on that.  And I did, with pastel chalk, pencils and paper, then brush and paint and just kept going.  Until I ran out of money.  Ah,  now the real challenge. To create from little or nothing  Less tools, less material, equates ultimately into more creativity.
And when will the process become complete and mature?
Art will never mature.
Rybird

​I wanted to make my own guitar but not have the experience or wood working tools, so I chose a kit. I picked a Muslady headless guitar kit from Ebay.  

Below are the basic steps to assemble, finish and adjust what I call The Naturalist,  or Hobo guitar for it's grunge yet natural look.

It plays surprisingly well and once adjusted and some adaptations made it is now my favorite guitar to play.

The guitar came in this box which was perfect to work in as a catch for the dyes and stains.  It was surprisingly smooth and needed very little if any sanding.  Being adventurous in creativity I wanted to use existing materials as much as possible and chose a blue pond dye.  Later this caused some difficulty as even though it dries out, it is reactivated with water.  

I realized that to prevent the blue from bleeding through to my hands and clothes, I would have to cover it. I chose a green wiping stain because I wanted a teal color.  The color ultimately became exactly what I wanted. I was surprised and happy.
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For the clear finish I used plain shellac and a brush and because of weather conditions,  very hot and also windy, the finish had an interesting wavy texture to it. At first I was thinking it was ruined and horrible to not have smooth shiny finish, but  I accepted it and decided it gave it character,  After that dried, I assembled it and put strings and it played, But there were some problems, or adjustments that needed to be made.

Almost all the problems centered on the bridge. It is an Overlord of Music, zinc cast and machined tremolo and tuning bridge that is a copy or spin-off of a Steinberger.  The height was too low and is probably because the neck socket needed to be routed out deeper to align correctly.  But instead I raised the bridge by using some washers underneath.  Another issue was the movement of the bridge when using tremolo requires the cavity be sanded out on corners to make room fro travel.  The other issue was for the tremolo to be tuned, the strings had to be exactly right size.  I had 10's on it and it was great for a while.  I put 09's on it and not tune and then 11's and then it tuned great drop D, a full step down.  You can lock the tremolo and make it fixed bridge and solve all this, too.  Overall  the problems were challenging for a beginner like myself, but I was able to overcome them with some ingenuity. 

For the jacket, I hand sewn some black cotton that I stained brown with bleach and softened with fabric softener.  Then used leather cord to finish. For the head part of the headless neck I used  natural feathers and leather twine to attach to give it a "naturalist" look.  I used black ink also to stain the fretboard naturally.  Shown with old treated strings for looks only.  The guitar plays fantastic.  For less than 200 dollars including materials to finish and varnish and strings,  I feel it came out well.

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​If you would like to hear some of the music I created with this guitar visit Skorzion page here.

Tags:  DIY guitar build,  finished guitar kit, hobo guitar, naturalist guitar, electric guitar kit, guitar project, grunge custom guitar, custom guitar, making of, how to, behind the scenes, rock music

Guitar shredding! This is a new hobby and adventure in music for me.  Shredding on the guitar is great fun.  Before I got this Jackson Dinky, famous for 80's rock, lead guitar playing and shredding, I had never played any kind of lead on guitar. It was always acoustic or rhythm.  The first time was only a few weeks ago and my fingers couldn't even coordinate between the pick and fretting.  I had to start out slow, but there came a point where I broke through.  That is, I just let loose and forgot about technical precision and started thrashing about.   I am still very rough just a few days later, but getting the hang of it.   Video "and audio" below.

First I needed something to shred to.  I wanted to have my own style of playing, so I needed my own music. For shredding  electric lead, progressive rock music is perfect for me. I created a song using  bass guitar, which I duplicated the track to make rich harmony bass, and played rhythm guitar. I set these tracks to some drum loops that I spliced and arranged into a pattern suitable for this jamming, as I like to call it.  I call the basic tune with no lead guitar, Dragonflies and Night Skies.   Dragonflies and Night Skies audio below.

​There are so many beautiful things that its impossible to say what the top ten things would be. Everyone has a slightly different way they perceive beauty. Our own beliefs shape how we see beauty. 
I spent some time musing about all the beautiful things and decided to list some that are surely some of the most beautiful things I have seen or experienced.  And it is only a very few as there is infinite beauty in the universe.

1. Becoming human. Our journey from the heavens includes becoming mortal. To become a human is to feel pain and love, happiness and joy, sadness and worry and all the emotions. But mostly it is becoming mortal that is the big part and thus the beginning of the list of most beautiful things in the universe.

2. Conception. Conception is the union of two souls to become one and for a human one of the most magical and mysterious of all events and thus most beautiful.

3. Birth of a child. For anyone that has witnessed childbirth, or as a mother experienced it, this is easy to see. It is the transformation into the real world, the first breath of air and the beginning of hunger, and independence.

4. A baby crying. It is the innocence and suffering of a baby that calls for beauty. For one that witnesses a baby crying it brings out the deepest compassion and desire to comfort. To see that the baby had its whole life ahead and all the experiences ahead of it, is a beautiful thing indeed. A baby laughing is beautiful, and a well known beauty, yet the crying is also as it gives one a chance to ponder deep into the power of pain and the glory of life.

5. The Earth. The earth itself is glorious beauty with all the elements to create and sustain life. From the beautiful clouds and weather to the mountains, stream and oceans, the plants and the animals, the earth is alive and most beautiful.

6. A Smile. As Shivangi Thakur said on Quora, "Beauty of smile lies in the purity of heart. Your smile is the mirror or reflection of your heart. It doesn't depend on the external goodness , it somehow connected to your inner charm. If you can make happy a crying kid with your smile then indeed your smile is beautiful. If you can take away all the tension of your beloved ones just because of your smiling face you possess that beauty. Smile is contagious, keep smiling , spread happiness :)"

7. Shadows. Without shadows we could not see anything but light. Nothing would be discernible. Thus light, darkness and shadows , along with reflections, all work in harmony as a great beauty of the universe. The sun, stars and moon are all beautiful, yet even stars require darkness, ‘shadows” to see.

8. A Tree. Not just a tree, but all trees. The benefits of trees are so great , it warrants many entire blogs on just why trees are so awesome. “Trees are the most beautiful creation of nature. blog by Rajshree Mathur Ghosh https://www.speakingtree.in/blog/trees-are-the-most-beautiful-creation-of-nature Just one of the reasons he lists is, " So wonderfully giving is their nature. And they give so generously without any grudge or bias. Everything about the Tree is for others. There is so much generosity in the life of a Tree. Only giving is their True nature."

9. Falling in Love. Perhaps arguable from a psychological standpoint, but falling in love is a transformation into a new plane. It is to tap, involuntary as if some power greater than ourselves, an otherwise unknown world of feeling. It has it’s own power and consciousness, is mysterious and intangible yet real to anyone in love or has fallen in love. With this being said, Love itself, should top any list of most beautiful things as I believe the universe was born, if not from love, then the desire for love.

10. Death. Death is not the end. Death is the way back home. We came to experience humanity, the joys and pains, the mortality of being a human and now we must experience the fruition of this mortality. Death is the doorway to return and our experience as a human has been fulfilled.

​continued below nature slideshow.

Of course there are many other beautiful things and if I wrote this list a week ago, or was to write it a year from now. the list would have some things changes, for the laughter of a child, the singing of a bird, a hug, a flower booming, there are so many experiences and things in the universe that would tie for any spot in the top ten. The stars, the rain, water, light, fire, a wedding, and so many more things are beautiful. It’s all beautiful. It would be easier to list the things that are not beautiful and many of those would be also be beautiful if beholden in the right light. 
​Rybird 2018

Primal earth conditions became suited for creating organic material spontaneously.
In the system of physics and chemistry as it existed, there became stable structures, and unstable ones, but at one point a replicator arose in this system, and grew to dominate. These became cellular organisms that, at first glance, seemed to be attempting to "survive", but have really were just been the most efficient replicator from a series of ancestors.
Then  a tipping point' or critical mass of sorts was reached where the primitive self replicators begin to survive. And through the process somewhere, consciousness sprang up as a more successful method to continue replicating and surviving. And upon becoming more complex organisms emotions and thought became the tools for survival. These complex feelings mixed with millions of years of instinct drive humans to question death. Then we try to answer the fundamental question "Who am I?" by engaging in the world, by growing, learning, through experiencing the world in some way or another. We have a readiness' for death as we project forward attempting to answer this question.
 Derived and condensed from Why does life strive to live?
at https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/drfu1/why_does_life_strive_to_live/ 
“At the fundamental level everything is energy, mass is just condensed energy, and we know from quantum physics all energy in the universe and in existence is interconnected. Everything influences everything else at the quantum level. This energy is God stuff. It is consciousness. Energy can also never be created or destroyed only transformed from one form into another. So in essence the energy has always been there forever and ever and will always be there forever and ever; it is infinite, it is God.  The universe behaves like ONE gigantic organism. With every part, equally as important as every other part. No Thing in the universe likewise could possibly be more superior fundamentally than any other thing. The whole being is greater than the sum of its parts. Ultimately everything in the universe is connected and influences everything else. It is impossible to differentiate one part of the whole from another part at the fundamental level because ultimately it is all made of the same stuff and acts and behaves like ONE. This encompasses All That Is.
So what’s the point you ask? The point and purpose of the universe is so that God could experience Itself and come to know Itself through creating within Itself.”
From The Universe as God at: http://www.gestaltreality.com/articles/the-universe-as-god/
continued below

Thus the illusion of separation is born. Ultimately there is no separation, but the illusion of separation at the superficial level serves a purpose. Without the illusion of separation without reference points you could not create, you could not experience! You would not know up from down, you would not know there, as oppose to here. The relative framework is setup perfectly to give rise to experience. Without it, it would be as if nothing existed. You could not compare yourself to anything and therefore you would not even know, you existed. Variety and diversity are extremely important because they help to differentiate one part of the whole from another. Time and space are also important so we can locate things relative to something else. In order for there to be even such a thing as ‘pleasure’ its polar opposite ‘pain’ must also exist and be experiential. Something can only exist with reference to its polar opposite. Everything in the universe appears in dualities. These are a fundamental need for existence and experience’s of the given nature.
 
What is the meaning of all this? Meaning is something that exists only temporarily in time. You can do something that will be meaningful to you today, but in a million years what does it mean?? Will anyone care, will you care? One thing is certain about the universe and that is change. NOTHING stays the same, and this gives rise to diversity. The universe even at the most basic energetic level is teeming with motion. There is no stasis and ultimately therefore you can never attach meaning to any one thing eternally. To attach meaning to any moment in time eternally you would have to freeze the entire universe and all of existence. You would have to stop life! And then it would be as if nothing existed.
Now there is no meaning yet there is purpose and the purpose of All That Is, is to experience and create. It’s a self discovery process on all levels of existence. You have been given free-will to create and experience life(God) in what ever way you choose. People often get caught up in a search for the meaning of life and try to artificially impose some sort of eternal meaning on something. It always fails. The point is to create and experience and the process of evolution allows you to learn more and more, and to create and experience with more variety and diversity. This is the true wonder of life. Adapted from From The Universe as God at: http://www.gestaltreality.com/articles/the-universe-as-god/
Rybird November 27 2017

Originally The Color of Sex.
Male house finches (Carpodacus mexicanus) have carotenoid-based ornamental plumage coloration. In previous research it was shown that for a single population of house finches in a single year, males that paired were on average redder in plumage coloration than males that did not pair, and males with redder plumage tended to nest earlier than males with less red plumage.
One of the most widespread ornamental traits among birds is carotenoid-based red, orange, and yellow plumage coloration. Carotenoid pigments cannot be synthesized de novo by birds or by any vertebrates; they must be ingested. Because carotenoid pigments must be derived from food, expression of carotenoid pigmentation is dependent on access to sufficient amounts of foods that provide the right type of carotenoid pigments. The physiological condition of a bird at the time of molt, independent of parasitic infection, has also been invoked as a factor in the efficiency with which ingested carotenoids might be used to pigment feathers.
Models of sexual selection predict that condition-dependent ornamental traits such as carotenoid-based plumage coloration should be of particular interest to females when they choose a mate.
In both laboratory and field experiments, female house finches have been shown to prefer mates with redder and more intensely pigmented plumage.
One result of female preference for redder males is that the mean redness of paired male house finches is greater than the mean redness of unpaired males, among male house finches that pair, redder males tend to initiate nesting earlier (i.e., their mates lay eggs earlier) than less red males.


Rybird deductive corollary, Good food and hygiene offers better choices of a mate, thus better sex. We already knew that, but they had to prove it.
Previous condensed from: http://beheco.oxfordjournals.org/content/10/1/48.full

Life does not begin, nor does it end. Life just is. It continues just like a forest that loses a tree, the spirit and life of the forest is there. Just like a lawn is a single organism of grass all interconnected, the universe itself is alive and one. The universe is one and many lives, it is a compound life and as such has a compound soul.
When a tree bears a fruit, which is seed that leaves the tree and enters the ground, then it sprouts into a new tree, the life force never ends and never begins. Humans and conception is like the tree and the fruit and human death is like the death of a tree in the forest, the tree has returned to the ground to decay to dirt, to enter a new seed as nutrients and become life again. At no point is the tree actually completely dead. It appears dead to the unknowing, yet is still part of the living universe and still alive.

Awareness, feelings, consciousness and even soul are all subjective and only relevant to the individual parts "beings" of the universe that they pertain to at that moment. That is to say, these virtues or attributes, energies or forces come and go and are from the Universe as a whole.  Life in the long run, the big picture, is not fixed to any particular set of atoms that make up an autonomous  living being.  Life is transformable yet constant within this sphere "universe" of one overall life force.

To carry this further,.... continued below..

Continued from above..... "as in saying another way, the steak someone eats will be transformed from the animal it once was into many other forms, some of it which will enter the body of the one consuming it and thus parts will become part of the person, or animal, consuming it and become as alive as part of that consuming creature.
To say that life begins at conception or birth is a difficult argument because the life is already existing before the events of sexual reproduction. Sexual reproduction is merely transformation of existing life. The process of death is the same, yet appears to be one of interruption, it is not. The Universe does not care about time, it cares about process. The process of life continues.

Rybird November 10, 2017

Ah, the autumn breeze, it reminds me of the fair, the rides, the wonderful food smells, and the livestock, then the museum like exhibits, and never will I forget the games. “Everyone a winner!”, the carnival workers would shout. The carnival always beckoned me, as if it was my destiny.  Short-lived was the fascination of the huge generators on trucks, with the monstrous cables I could barely step over.   I would step over them with a slight apprehension, wondering what power they must possess to make all these carousels go round and round.

Quickly my attention was brought to the flashing lights, the newness of the loud dance type music being played, with “Faster! Faster!” being shouted over large PA speakers.  The excitement tingled my insides as I would double check my tickets I was clenching. Then strapped in, round and round I would go, the world spinning around me, hearing the somewhat calming screams of others enjoying the ride.

Too soon the ride was over, myself a tad dizzy, would trample through the noisy crowd to the next ride. Beginning to hunger for the delicious state fair corn dog, I would recount my tickets to be sure I had enough for the glass house in which I couldn't wait to get lost. Then sitting down to eat my cotton candy, I smiled, knowing there a piece of heaven on earth. Rybird

So I wrote a poem for all girls!. :

What lurks in the shadows of the flowers in the dark corners from the dancing candlelight? Hearts desires peeking from behind soft petals anxious for the silence of lovers, they wait patiently to dance while two romancers get lost in their reflections of their eyes. These tiny desires dance and forget all about light and forget about darkness until they burst like careless whispers in the candle fire. The lovers blink and think and realize they are together freely with heart’s desires and the shadows dance to their romance.
Rybird October 2017
#poetry #flowers #romance

Bonus Poem:
To each other.

The blood of a flower, like no other
the sun warms the heart, as a lover
making it's cheeks pink, with a blush
a rose is a rose are roses to each other
a flower is a rose to a flower to each other
they all come from the earth, their mother....Rybird

 "I have a great big hole in my heart"  someone told me before.   I also have had this big hole and found a solution.
The hole is filled by having a relationship with a power greater than yourself, as in God or higher power, and being of maximum service to God and others. EVERYTHING else is just circumstance. Circumstances do not dictate our spiritual well being,or this hole that needs to be filled, but being of service to others will make circumstances irrelevant, and in most cases better. But regardless, life happens, like a ship at sea, there are storms, loved ones die, or leave, sickness comes, life happens,
But when we are at least on the road to recovery from self, then our journey can have some joy, but more importantly patience, love and tolerance, along with humility. Is this easy?, No, but it is simple. and willingness and honesty are the key ingredients. This is my experience and it has worked for me and many others. Simply by practicing rigorous honesty, "being true to thyself" the path will be made. Rybird

Shaman Nalis is master of the cardinal virtues. He explains they only come by  the way of the spirit and experience.  He says find someone who has what you want and have them share their experience with you. And what you learn from your own experience share with those willing to learn.  When growing along these lines, these virtues just appear with no direct or additional effort on our own. He continues, I cannot tell you what these virtues are, for the words will have no meaning, until virtue has been attained.