Volatility and Brand Alchemy

Everything changes; everything is on fire. Nothing is the same as it was; everything is the same as it shall be.

In the mist of experience, it’s all changing—still, standards flow, and patterning emerges. While everything is in flux, everything goes as it has from the past—yet, now, the speed of the wind of change are accelerating. It is flitting, fleeting, faster. Especially in today’s political climate.

In the work that we all do—there are things that we are doing now that our parents, and their parents did. In a manner of similitude. And the work that we do—each of us, could be seen as a transformative gesture—we start with the seed of an idea, and through our work, we progress, transit, shift to refinement and purification of the intention, the creative impulse to making beauty, improvement, betterment. The work that we do makes more sense. And could be more “sensate,” as well—the “feelingness.”

An idea—made to light, made to create, to contribute, to build commerce; in meeting with a young technologist, still the unbridled “mine is the newest and coolest idea” reminded me of my childhood, looking into the glistening eyes of another passionate—so-called, an impassioned person.

Passion, like fire, is explosive and volatile. But fire is a beautiful thing—it lifts, spins, curls and uncurls; fire consumes wholly, then changes the entire molecular character of its recipient.

Bright, shining people are like that—once they are alight, in the framing of passion, they are committed, they are no longer the same, and are changed likely forever. Like mist, smoke, perfume—sense(s) in transition.

Volatile is an old word.
In the 1300s, in older forms of English, volatiles meant “birds, butterflies, and other winged creatures.” According to scholar, Douglas Harper, the word in the 1590s was to reflect that which is “fine or light,” also “evaporating rapidly” (c.1600), from Medieval French — volatile, from the Latin volatilis “fleeting, transitory, flying,” from the stem of volare “to fly,” of unknown origin. There’s the sense of “readily changing, fickle” which is first recorded in the 1640s.

In watching the fire of change, and meditating on it — contemplate focus (the center of the house, the hearth, the place of flame)—it has the meaning of a warming radiation outwards, as well as inwards. That movement is ever changing—inbound, outbound, radiating and vibrating; and they change in the shifting light.

Just like powered ideas—spark, ignite, roar in a blaze or silently extinguish. Still, forever they are changed. Anything that is on fire is in a state of change. And these days, it would seem that everything is on fire—a flammable state of transmogrified transitioning.

If one considers the allegories of alchemy—the spiritual chemistry of change and transformation, and the fire of inspiration and invention—an incendiary evolution, the world is an alembic in time. And perhaps the leaden elements will become gold. As we all know, change is the only permanent thing.

t i m
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BUILDING BRANDS
THAT ARE LOVED

A woman in my office said:
“everyone thinks you’re a attention deficit syndrome person.”

I’m fascinated by people that say things like that.

I always look back at them—watch out for their own evidences—all the more closely.

I’d referenced a retort which was: people that sense I’m not paying attention to them might have a question about what I am focused on. And, really, what they are saying—to me. To the volatility—sprung like fire—it will be about the story told; who’s telling it, how’s it told (compellingly,) what’s it feel like,
and does the listener care?
I care
what I am listening to.

And there’s another side,
speaking of “retorts” and alchemy.

Science History Institute, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In fact, the idea of distillation, the alchemical refinement, [perhaps in the distilling of ideas—to the perfected, transformative reduction of base elements to purer “expressions”] and, in the alembic—and alchemical tool—known to the ancient Greeks as the ambix, is a detail of the retort’s configuration. It goes back.