“The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.”

- Chuck Palahniuk

A Song I’m Loving:

Unreachable — John Frusciante

Hello!

Does anyone else feel like they’re living the movie Groundhog Day?

This pandemic has pinned me in a socially isolated loop lately — living at my parent’s house, working on a laptop most the day, and walking in a big circle with my brother through the hot summer afternoon of Phoenix (we were born here and weirdly love the heat).

Like most everyone else, coronavirus has also thrown a monkey wrench into my plans. With the aviation industry floundering and no room for newly minted commercial pilots to work, I’ve decided to pause my flight training for a while. This was a far from easy decision to make, but it just doesn’t make sense to spend my way into a deep hole of debt if there’s no way to fly out of it. I’m sure things will come back in time, but until then, I’ve shifted the focus from relentless studying of the systems for flying airplanes without being able to see out the window to growing a real estate photography business and taking a more direct route toward full-time creative wizardry.

Our company, Desert Lens, has been doing surprisingly well lately. We connected with some busy, high-end clients, and most of my ventures beyond a five mile radius from home the past few weeks have been to photograph empty mansions and million dollar apartments. I’m fumbling my way through building my first WordPress based website to handle more robust, complicated payment and booking systems. I also just bought this technologically stunning drone to add an aerial aspect to my real estate photography abilities. I intend to use it as a new medium to combine written words with as well. It’s been a bizarre time of simultaneous sameness and change, repetition and learning.

The most nourishing aspect of this great weirdness has been finally finding the time and headspace to write something worthwhile this month. For years, I’ve been quietly fascinated with how symbols, meaning, and myth work behind the scenes of society and ourselves. I took a deep dive into how symbols function in advertising, movies, and the human mind. I think it a particularly powerful, eye-opening read that I’m real happy to be sending your way.

I’m on a little philosophical kick with symbols right now. Do you deliberately use certain symbols in your daily life? If so, I’d love to hear about them.

Til next month!

With love & stoke,

Ethan

This Month’s Articles:

The Unsung Power of Symbols (& How to Use Them in Your Own Life)

Symbols matter more than you think.

In a column titled, The Story of a Thing, a New York Times Reporter asked a few dozens famous creatives, “what’s your most prized possession?” While the answers varied widely, from a factory table where women sewed flowers onto hats in the 1960s, to a picture of Harriet Tubman, to a fifteen-year-old tea bag, each object was not prized for its usefulness or economic value, but for its meaning. Everyone’s most prized possession was a symbol — an object highly charged with meaning.

Symbols are a curious, human thing. How is it that a fifteen-year-old tea bag could be someone’s most prized possession?

Read On >

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