Monthly Archives: February 2020

Art. Why?

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Art. Why?

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Posted on February 29, 2020
I have come to realize I have a relationship with art and with cultural events that is central to my sense of well being. As I do in all relationships, I step back and analyze the dynamic with a curious mind.
 
What I seek from art is a transformation of self. I stand before a painter that was looking at his concept reality in 1400 and I feel as if I have stepped into his very mind. This was the world he inhabited; these were the beauties of mundanity that surrounded him. What appears on the canvas are the objects limiting and expanding his very sense of his own humanity. And it deepens my understanding of what it means to be mortal beyond the boundaries of my own culture, current normative habits and constructs.
 
When I watch a choreography that is precise, unexpected and paced just beyond my ability to aperceive it, I feel more flexible. My understanding and ability to behold the eternity of the performance is being challenged. It wakes me up. I find myself holding my breath.
 
To hear poetry or a film script that is just beyond my capacity to follow the words, puts me in a state of alertness. I am panting after the patter, forced to keep up, to keep alert.
 
When I see a play and the acting, directing and intelligence of writing is so beautifully beyond that which I knew previously, it can shred my sense of confining comfort. The tightly locked up ideas of who I am are released. I am forced to the identity of the characters. I am that person. I inhabit that kind of grief. That particular rage is within me. I will have unanticipated tears flow. The sense of deep humanity and the fragility of living a life sweeps over me.
 
Perhaps, I am shocked or horrified or taken like a captive ripped out of my own repetitions of understanding. Good art over-takes who I am in normal life and drags me to a hilltop where I now have a greater purview of the entire landscape of being born into a body. This moment in front of a painting, or dissolving in music, or listening to an actor channel the narrative of slavery destroys me.
 
All that I have known is exploded and the intensity of something so much greater than myself floods through me.
 
I fall in love with the created piece of art. I fall in love with the artist who can hold and transform that electricity. It is such an act of bravery to grab the wire and allow the self to be used to transmit energy. I fall in love with the earth, my body, the shared humanity of all of us.
 
For me, great art is about connecting to passion. It is about allowing the small self to be reformulated through an experience. I am renewed. I understand now: To be human is an act of incalculable courage. An artist taught me that.

reconstructing self

 

My Role Models

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Throughout my life, I have sought out books about, watched movies about a particular type of individual. He or she runs the seas of chaotic times with a true compass. No wind or waves or threat of kraken beast turns him or her away from the ultimate destination.

I selected programs about the detective who won’t take a bribe and continues the investigation no matter what the personal cost. I followed the life stories of those women born in a time of female inequality and suppression who lead a movement, spoke out in public, wrote copious treatises about human justice, who suffered indignities in order to maintain their diginity of purpose. Many women were arrested and force-fed in order to garner the right to vote. The pacifist who goes to jail rather than picking up a gun is in my eyes the most courageous of beings.

In my college dorm, I met a quaker girl whose uncle spent the entire Viet Nam war breaking rocks in a hard labor camp in Alabama because he did not believe war was a solution for any human problem. He was not considered heroic by his community. He was considered to be one who lived in his truth.

People that I so greatly admire cannot be forced off of their path of choosing to do that which is ultimately the act of greatest compassion. These people could and can not be convinced that their own sense of humanity is mistaken in the face of a current necessity to suppress others.

They are told to abandon their internal values during the playing out of whatever is the currently unfolding drama narrative.

“The cruel act is only for now. The jailing or oppressing of innocent people is just this one time,” they are told.

A role model’s strength is in the firm grounding in knowing who they are as they move through the world. They believe the vision of their values of equality and human justice without needing validation.

And what they all shared as they invented the impossible new technology, or spearheaded the movement to change the ten commandments of oppression, or stood alone holding a sign until others joined them was and is a strong sense of self. They did not check to see if someone else was with them, if others were dancing to the same tune, if their actions would allow them to be included in the folded arms of the tribal circle.

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Innately, people are kind. There are a plethora of studies that show what happens to social groups under great duress. When a threat is overwhelming enough, people will sacrifice themselves for others. Acts of great courage taken in the name of  compassion are recorded.

Sociological studies show again and again that when there is a clear understanding that all will suffer if a few do not intercede, that is when the quiet heroes appear.

My neighbour said, “What we need now is a shared value.”

I said, “We have a shared value. All human beings want to protect their loved ones, their children.”

When we can understand that protecting those we love, means protecting everyone who is human, then the temptation to drop our own internal values will have no effect upon us. We cannot be frightened out of our humanity; bribed out of the truth; threatened out of championing the weak.When we can understand that protecting those we love, means protecting everyone who is human, then the temptation to drop our own internal values will have no effect upon us. We cannot be frightened out of our humanity; bribed out of the truth; threatened out of championing the weak. When we can understand that protecting those we love, means protecting everyone who is human, then the temptation to drop our own internal values will have no effect upon us. We cannot be frightened out of our humanity; bribed out of the truth; threatened out of championing the weak. When we can understand that protecting those we love, means protecting everyone who is human, then the temptation to drop our own internal values will have no effect upon us. We cannot be frightened out of our humanity; bribed out of the truth; threatened out of championing the weak.

Perhaps what we are seeing now as chaos on the earth is just an intensifying of the lesson so that we finally internalize it.

But always, throughout human history, a few strong, grounded individuals have chosen to act based on kindness. These people are my heroes. They teach me that there is a place for ferocity in the name of love.

Self Ass sessment.

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illusion of stillness

Some days are stones. Some days are boulders.

February has had me practising being retired. No guests are in my house. No eight hours of cleaning direct my day. No readings at local psychic fairs written into my calendar. No yard work insists I landscape today.

I turned it off; shut it down; went into exploring the deep quiet of not knowing.

“What are you doing?” People ask me that. “What are you doing?” I interrogate myself. As I awaken in the morning I ask, “What will you achieve today?”

At night, I lay so comfortably relaxed in my perfection of bedness and look back through the day. “What happened today?” I ask myself.

But then I lose interest. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. That narrative has run aground as firmly as a tugboat headed straight for shore.

Is drifting through the day a good or a bad thing? I keep interrogating myself mercilessly but I get no answer out of me. I am a witness neither for the defence nor for the prosecution.

I take out my tape measure pull it flat between my two hands, one held high and one held low. “Did you grow? Did you diminish? Here. Let me take your measure.”

I am not gorging on fat, sobbing into the crook of my elbow, cutting out pictures of crows pecking out eyes to paste on my vision board. No. It isn’t that bad. Nor is it that good.

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I travel to other landscapes I cannot even describe because I have no waking experience of them.

When I see posts on facebook, I think, “Thank God that isn’t me.” I don’t want the drink, the food, the harsh sunshine, the sand in my pants. I don’t want the crowd of grinning people around me. I wish the others well but for now I seek my house, the magnificent bouquets I guy for myself, the satisfying one on one coffee times with old, dear friends.

I honour this time. Something is changing and I have no idea what it is.

I am unmoored…floating. The water is calm or slightly ruffled.

Releasing the need to work, I spend my morning learning and teaching. But it is disembodied, my connection with others. Social Media is like a hazmat suit. I can post from behind the protection of the computer screen.

I practice Win Hof with breath and cold water. One day I listened to Eminem as I plunged myself into the artic electricity. It was perfect.

“What next?” I keep untangling the wrapping roots of weed thoughts from my ground. I am. I am so focused on not being focused. For once in my lifetime. I hear that as a romantic song in my head.

For once in my lifetime. For once unafraid, I can go where life leads me.

I am resting in wait to know where the path will appear. I am content in this retreat. I breathe deeply into the silence. I am right here.

Change, Change, Change

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I can think of only a handful of times (cupped hand not flat ) that I have welcomed in change. Move a few letters around and you have the sound… chains. We like our chains. We lick our wounds. We proudly wear our hair shirts and find comfort in our unnecessary bravery. This is ME! We tell ourselves that. We sing ourselves to sleep with the lullaby of past stories. We reinstall the soft ware of suffering.

It is familiar and we recognized the scarred face of battle and survival. “Yes. I am tough. I am a veteran of so many wars, you would not believe it. Let me recite it for you.”

And then we think as the survivors of multiple wars, people wish for nothing more than to sit with us beneath the full moon in deep darkness. We will build a fire and recount the long, drawn out narrative of every single injury we have experienced. The picture of children gathered around a maimed elder fills us with purpose.

The great addiction is that embracing the beast of pain is familiar. We know how it bites, how to watch carefully so it doesn’t remove an arm, a leg, a cheek. It is my pet. Come to mama, pain.

Change comes into all lives, always. And it is in watching how our bodies, our minds, our adrenal glands react to it that we learn so much about self.

Skilled athletes know how to manage the body in mid-air, diving off of a cliff, plunging into the water, flipping head over heels. They show us that the success is through training and then abandonment to the moment.
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Our lives are full of one event after another. We may contract into the smallest of the tensed up toddler selves when we see what we are called upon to actually experience.

“NO.” This is what the voice inside the body says without mindfulness. “No. I don’t want to grow. No. I don’t want to risk being myself. No. I want to hold onto the tangled net of old rags that is my past as if it is a comfort stuffy… don’t make me let go.”

The work as any athlete or skilled person will tell you is to train yourself beyond the initial reaction. Muscle memory, repetition, mindfulness, being in the moment needs to be deeper than consciousness.

And as the athlete spins over and over high above a ski hill, he submits to each second of the experience. He trusts his body. She trusts her training. They trust the air and gravity. They trust the self that is beyond self. They trust the universe.

As we stand at the doorway of change, we can walk through with confidence if we have trained ourselves to see ingrained habits. We can instantly see fear, see the urge to drag a shadowy overlay of some past story to lay upon and muddy the current experience. Or we can know that the hundreds of times we have seen a “narrative” from the past and simply released it is now a magic power.

Now is new. This now has no past story attached to it. Throw yourself out the door, off the cliff, into the moment. Because change is as natural to us as the next breath. We begin again. Always.