Archive for the ‘Observations’ Category
Form, Formlessness, and Life
This afternoon, after a short time, I closed my eyes while sitting in the hanging chair suspended from the eave of my house. My sleepy sleep deep mind rocked back and forth like a babe in a basinet and I could feel each rise and each dip so supremely deep that I might have been rocked to sleep, if even for a moment. Eventually tho I rose again and put the book back – Shambhala: Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chogyam Trungpa – in which was spoken of and I read of the act of recognizing and indentifying oneself through countless reference points – now I am doing this, now I am thinking this – and then the act of forgetting, losing oneself in that. And then, if we encase ourselves in a sea of I’s – how terribly lonely it gets! Because we have separated ourselves from everything at that point. Good food for thought and meditation. I find myself meditating on these things while making dinner, petting the kitty, working on whatever my work may be, while walking down the street, into a store, driving my car. I find myself considering – form is formlessness but formlessness is also form.
I read somewhere someone once – we’ll say a monk or a lama – saying that, while form as formlessness/emptiness is relatively easy to understand – the reverse, that formlessness becomes form, is sometimes much more difficult to fully realize. We can intellectualize these things – we often intellectualize- we know this or that – but until we have the direct experience of it, it’s sort of a useless tool. It’s like having a hammer and knowing completely and thoroughly how it works but til we use it – til we actually lift it and heft it’s weight and feel it’s balance and swing it do we see how one might use it. Until then, it does us no good what so ever. the same goes for various concepts of form, compassion, wisdom, awareness. It feels that the more i understand the nature of emptiness, the calmer I am, the more loving, the more compassionate, and the less prone to whims of this or that. I’ve gotten better at it for sure over the years. but still… I get into arguments. I hold back. I do this or that. To be the warrior is to be exposed, to be raw, and to know that nothing – nothing what so ever – can hurt you because there is nothing, ever, that can be hurt that is you. Or me. Or anything. And so we are simply 100% honest – with others and, most importantly, with ourselves.
Relative Freedoms
As a kid growing up in the 80′s there was this beast, interspersed between grammar school doldrums and the Transformers, that simmered half a world away and it was called Communism. It threatened to nuke us all if we didn’t nuke it first. Ronald Reagan gave speeches. We hid under our desks or out in the halls to prepare for possible nuclear war. (Like that’d ever help….) This vague threat loomed in every movie we watched and every cartoon – always as some vaguely caricatured Russian or German speaking in terms of “Comrade” and wearing a hat with earflaps because we all knew it was cold in communist Russia and the Commies had to keep their ears warm.
Like a shot in the dark, in 1990,and just before we all sank into the national teen angst of grunge rock, there – plastered across our TV screens – the Berlin Wall, that one barrier between Us and Them, fell. Or, rather, it was knocked out with pick-axes and shovels and bare hands; the result of diplomacy, politics, and changing tides. From the comfort of my living room, at the age of 14, images of people celebrating a newfound sense of freedom flickered across the television screen. This was momentous for them and, for us, a new vague sense emerged: that something had changed and we were all a little more free and could breathe a bit more peacefully knowing that not so many nuclear warheads were trained on us. I’d grown up wanting my MTV just because that’s what MTV told me I wanted. They grew up wanting their MTV because they couldn’t even turn it on when their parents weren’t home. They weren’t allowed it at all. Now they could scream it out loud if they wanted to. Now they had the freedom to voice their opinions and excel at their dreams, should they choose to. With that freedom of choice, we have far more than we realize.
What most of the world’s citizens desire is this basic sense of freedom: to say what they want, when they want, to dream out loud, to buy the jeans they want to buy (should economic freedoms allow), to listen to the music they want to listen to, and enjoy their lives without a sense of threat. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (without anyone defining what “happiness” ought to be).
20 years later, a new vague threat has emerged (as they do: our minds are always busy creating external threats that mirror our own iniquities). The general populace has been swept up with the Middle East fear. For some, the fear of a black president with a progressive bent is directly related to the Middle East fear. They are afraid he’s Muslim, he’ll kill us all, he’ll impose nasty laws, whatever... But the Middle East: many of these are countries who have lived under 30 or 40 year dictators or some kind of royalty rule that has simply passed from father to son for generations or maybe there’ve been elections but they are so fraught with corruption that they are more like puppet theater than even our own US version of the electoral puppet theater. These are people who have never had a say in government and there are multitudinous restrictions on their freedoms. That said, it’s no surprise that, after a while, the disenchantment and anger comes to a head. While this isn’t the first time that tensions amongst populaces in the Middle East have reached a boiling point, the populace is better educated (many of these countries offer free university schooling), has tools like Facebook and Twitter and, amongst the younger crowds at the very least, are more tolerant of each others differences and stand united in a desire for freedom for everyone and not just a select religion or sect.
The point I’m trying to make here is: it is an innate desire in people t0 desire freedom. They want, at least, to have a sense of general freedom. The uprisings in the news – the bloodiest of which, thus far, is in Libya – are the result of years of oppression that echo the burst of freedom that spread across Hungary, Poland, Germany, and, finally, Russia back in the early 90′s. (Interestingly, Iran and China, while standing with the rest of the world in condemning Kadafi, are quickly squelching the budding fires of dissent that are fomenting in their own countries.) Ultimately, the shift in the Middle East is turning out to be much bloodier and violent than the Eastern European turn 20 years ago but the point is that tides shift and here, again, is a shifting tide.
Here in the good ol’ United States people rant against the government. People rant against health care while taking their Medicaid prescriptions. They rant against environmental laws while savoring their clean air and national parks. They rant against taxes while enjoying their smooth, well-engineered highways. They rant against the fairly elected president. Recently, in Georgia, an elderly man asked his congressman during a Town Hall style meeting “Who is Going to Shoot Obama?”. The congressman, while flustered, moved right along. This elderly man, who is likely on Medicaid, didn’t like Obama’s healthcare program. I’m all for a small government but, unfortunately, humans, while inherently good, can also be inherently greedy and selfish (because they have this belief in the solidity of the Ego). Many of our laws help keep people in check: don’t kill people, don’t steal, don’t dump toxins in the river, etc. Other laws: anti-abortion legislation, the immigration laws of Arizona, etc – these sorts of things impinge upon people’s basic freedoms. Some laws suck and there is power to change them. The thing is: we have the power to do this, however much we cry that we don’t, and we often take for granted, without a shred of gratitude, the beautiful freedoms that we do have.
Some laws are fought down. Some win. We have a history of winning and losing and winning and losing. We have a history of being able to go say what we want, shop at well-stocked grocery stores, fill up our gas tanks, and know that, for the most part, no one will shoot at us or bomb us. No tanks will suddenly come rumbling through our streets. No measles outbreak will tear down our neighbors. The conditions of our lives support the pursuit of our happiness far greater than many because of that basic sense of freedom and basic lack of fear. Far more of the fears that we live with are self-created: economic fears, fear of death, fear of not being loved.
While it’s true that all fear is in the mind and it’s possible to experience mental freedom regardless of whichever regime is in power: it still sucks to be shot at for what you believe whilst living under the eye of a politico who has been in power for 40 some-odd years. It sucks to not be able to follow your dreams, should you choose to. That’s the freedom people desire: the freedom to choose to follow dreams. Many people in the so-called Free World drift away from those dreams but that is their choice. The conditions for realizing the dreams are there: there are ways to start businesses, go to college, travel, be self-propelled, make it happen. It is simply the freedom to choose that most people desire.
I would rather live with working through the little dictator in my head that keeps me from following my dreams than have to live under the thumb of the big dictator ruling my country. I would rather live with working through the basic mental fears – the ones seeded by death and love and desire – than the fear of being shot for disagreeing with my government. Some might call this the middle path: too much intensity and it’s tough to just get down to the basics inside of ourselves. Too much comfort and we never have the impetus to do the inner work.
We are very blessed to have the basic freedoms we’ve been granted. Never shun someone just for wanting those basic freedoms. Maybe you had the freedom to choose what jeans you wore today. You had a hundred different stores you could have gone to and you settled on the pair you are are wearing. Don’t shun someone for not also wanting that freedom. We all know that all sorts of trouble ride on the back of that freedom of choice. Once people have the freedom to sit on the couch with a twelve pack of shitty beer and eat twenty McDonald’s hamburgers, while watching monster trucks crush small cars – well, some will choose that path. Others will grow their food in their gardens. Others will go to school and learn to think. Others will protest injustices. Others will make music. Or paint paintings. Or dance. Or work together to create a better, healthier world. And while we still have to put up a fight sometimes to maintain the right to do any of these things, no one is stopping us from doing so and, as we’ve seen: we win far more than we lose.
I truly hope that all the people pushing for this sense of freedom, for freedoms of election, free speech, freedom of movement, the freedom of choice, can have those dreams realized and live more comfortable lives that allow for deeper growth and higher rewards. All beings want to be happy, free, and awake, and it is the tendency of the human spirit to move towards this light, regardless of oppression. While our own 200-year old democracy has become, in some ways, rather bloated, I look forward to seeing what a fresh start, half a world away, might blossom into.
Many blessings, comrades.back
Altar
Sardines in an artichoke and baby portabella-laden red sauce, simmering upon the stove turned into a dinner of rich worth with greetings from the depths and counterpoints. The gradations of reds that twisted in and out of the dappled oil bits of artichoke mushroom roasted red pepper layered over slices of golden polenta all sank into my mouth and over my tongue in a daring dance of making-my-eyes-roll-into-the-back-of-my-head yumminess. That was a beginning.
Sometime around 11pm the next day, after love, laughter, light, and dark, I went to bed.
Upon the altar, a wood shelf of relatively classic lines sticking out from the wall about five or six inches and not more than two feet wide, above my desk, this wide oak drafting table from which I look upon my world and see, mostly, when I look up, a wall not three feet from my face with this altar, is a large amethyst chunk, given to me by a dear friend. It sparkles in purple mathematical crystalline reflection. The friend who gave it to me, as a birthday gift I think, tends to traverse the same purple wavelengths that one might imagine the amethyst travels and when I think of her, it’s not hard to imagine amethyst. Around the half inch thick piece of calcite the amethyst sits upon, are a handful of double terminated quartz crystals, given to me at the wedding of two other friends. To either side of these are two small figures.
On the left is the Buddha. This Buddha, carved from some dark wood, is the Thai Theravada-style buddha with long narrow arms and a thin face in calm repose, watching the breath, symbolizes the calm and graceful unfolding slowly from within doing the same dance he has always done. This buddha was given to me by another dear friend. This person lives in the land from whence this buddha came, exploring just what it means to be truly happy. True happiness is not an easy thing to come by and, at the same time, is the easiest thing in the world. This friend, he seems to be doing a fine job of it.
To the other side of the amethyst, almost equidistance as the Buddha, is Sparkles Brown, a small figure made from sparkly fimo. He is about three and a half inches high, has creamy white sparkly pants, gold sparkly shoes that match his gold sparkly hat in the shape of a small morning glory perched delicately upon his head and, upon his brown shirt, a gold star. His two gold dots of eyes and one thin golden smile look at me with the kind of simple happiness and love that is devoid all the stories as to why we love. He too was given to me by a dear friend. This dear friend made him for me just before she left to visit a friend of her own with whom she shares a deep connection. This friend who gave me Sparkles Brown also happens to be my wife.
Moving out to either side of the altar: crystals, gifts of stones from the universe and friends, a scorpion suspended in acrylic, a half geode found on the shore of a lake in Kentucky while canoeing, three thin golden snail shells in descending size from pet aquarium snails, shells with noteworthy lines found on a sea shore, other bits of sacred detritus, and, finally, two small framed photos, flanking the altar.
On the one side, the right side where Sparkles Brown keeps watch, is a small easel, a very small easel, upon which is a little glass frame and in the little glass frame is a picture of me at, maybe, age 2. I am a chubby little boy sitting on a swing set and the picture has that yellowed slightly faded look of the mid 1970′s. I am sitting there in my diaper, laughing and squinting, eyes half-closed in the daytime sun: half closed because my smile is so large. The smile would come and go and come again, as smiles do, but I’ve never quite stopped squinting.
On the left side of the altar is another picture – this one framed vertically and there I am again, squinting, holding my wife from behind her with my hands wrapped onto her belly, smiling and bright eyed and the two of us tan and in sleeveless white satins and silks, bejeweled, on our wedding day, happy, blissed, exhausted.
All of these things represent bits and pieces of who I am, and of some of the gems of friends who come and go through my life.
In the center of the altar, resting on the double terminated quartzes, is a small skull of perhaps a mouse. It was found in some encrusted owl poop on the land of another beautiful friend. It was carefully cleaned and painted and placed here. We could all be snatched up, devoured, and pooped out at any given moment. The entire universe is consuming itself all the time, continuously dying and being reborn and growing and changing and dying again. How many of those lifetimes of moments do we relive the same pattern? How many do we shift direction all of a sudden, consciously choosing a new path?
Directly below the altar there are two more small pictures. On the left, underneath the wedding picture is a small, neatly cropped photo of my grandparents on my mothers side. I was always very close to them. They are very happy in the picture, retired and on a vacation in Spain, the same place Violet and I took our honeymoon. My grandfather, a jovially loving Italian who would have loved my wife, has passed away since then. My grandmother, 84, is as chipper and fastidious as she has ever been. This is a bit of where I have come from. They too are smiling wide. Their eyes squint in the Mediterranean sun.
On the right side is another picture, this one of my Dad and I. It is our birthday – his birthday is a day before my own, on Aug. 25. My birthday is the 26th. We are smiling as well. I think I was turning seventeen in that picture. In the picture I have a goatee, a baseball cap. I am wearing a white t-shirt with a small design I made of a person standing on the edge of a building, about to step off, his back to the viewer, maybe he’ll fall, maybe he’ll fly, who knows, and below it a caption reads “This time I was standing on the edge of the world”. It was always regarded as a bit of artsy daydreaming, never a consideration that I might consider jumping. My dad – his smile makes his eyes squint shut. Look, I come from a long line of squinters. Me, I am looking off to the left and, from where I sit right now, my eyes look a tad bloodshot but I wouldn’t be surprised – I had a lifestyle then of perpetual blanketing my mental landscape – always throwing another mattress upon the pea that was making me feel uncomfortable. And, at the same time, I was just doing my best to make sense of the unfolding life around me, chilling, living, teetering on the edge, waiting for my chance to take a leap and stretch my wings and soar with the occasional heart-wrenching plummet.
In between these two photos, taped in the middle, laminated, is a Chinese fortune from a cookie eaten who knows when.
It reads: “Among the lucky, you are the chosen one.”
Coupled with the grace, a dash of skill maybe, and fair bit of false starts, there has always been that “luck”, if that is what one wants to call it. When I look at this chain of a life that is laid out here – from my grandparents to the chunk of amethyst – I love it.
Late Night Painting I
I.
3:30 in the morning: one of my favorite times of the day. Or night as it were. Or morning, really. After painting for five or six hours, the lights get turned off and candles are lit. I can only paint for so long. There is not only a law of diminishing returns at this hour but my body begins to ache a bit and I feel I need to save some energy for later. I know, one would think hat” save the energy for later” bit would have come up a couple hours ago. Regardless, one should know one’s limits and be careful to not deplete too much of ones reserves. The ayurvedics and Chinese Medicine doctors and so on all feel I should have been in bed hours ago and my organs and meridians and such will all be out of whack. The creative muse isn’t one to listen to the advice of doctors. The creative muse knows only this: there is a ready and wiling participant and there are magical mysteries to explore. So we explore.
And so, to follow, we have a bit of late night writing time. Late night writing: the ritual is thus: first we put away our paints, wash our brushes brushes, meditate on the painting a bit and find the point we will pick up at next time. Where are we going with it? is it coming together? Does it make perfect sense? If it does then I am pleased with myself. Sometimes I don’t even look at the painting when I’m done. I just turn and walk away. When I look at it again there will be, instead, a sense of exploration. Oh, I might think, that’s interesting, what I did right here. Or, look at this: that was a terrible idea.
Then we pour a glass of wine and prepare some sort of snackishness which usually includes, more or less, some cheese (tonight there is an aged sheep’s milk gouda), a few crackers, some olives or capers, a few anchovies, a bit of sliced tomato, and whatever else might present itself as an option. Those aforementioned doctor-types would have a field day with this one too: one should not eat at 3:30 am, according to the wise. Then all the lights go off, candles on the Bundance™ table are lit and I settle down on to the Crouch™. This little late night idyll is like stepping into another work of art.
The candles illuminate the undersides of the flowers in the vase. Spring flowers picked from here and there and three roses brought by Radhika a few nights past to add some color to the meeting we were all having. The dark rich woods of the crouch and the subtle patterning of the cushions adds a warmth to the white walls and the chill late night air. Sometimes the zebra print side is flipped out tho. It would seem like that might change everything. But it doesn’t.
Outside, the wind whips at the palms and tramples over the rooftops and ducks in and out of drafts and cracks of my house causing the candles to flicker slightly. My laptop is opened and I allow myself some time to filter out a bit of what went through my mind while painting or at least reflect on what I’ve been creating. These words too are a part of that process. This centering and placing of myself. This noticing of the soft blue text on the dark screen (using a wonderful text program for Macs called WriteRoom) and the backlit keyboard juxtaposed to the warm golden candle glow that flickers and licks light against the underside of an orange calendula blossom. The sounds of the aquarium offer a bit of watery calm in the face of the chaotic sounds of the wind outside.
The center that I find in all this is very deep and whole and, at the same time, so clear as to seem empty of anything. It is a clear mirror to see myself in, in this post catharsis, in the after-the-illumination, in the charred remains of another lightening strike there is a calm that refrains from picking up the pieces for there are no pieces to pick up. We let go of pieces. It is better to look around and simply take note that there were pieces and seek to understand how they got there in the first place. We let go of a shell. Anoher shell and another shell and another shell.
We have a bite of cheese, a sip of wine, a nibble of anchovy.
We notice the sound of fluid in one ear and wonder if that is a sign of impending health disaster. We – all of us in here – the whole cabal, the whole committee – we make choices as a whole.
An Open Apology
As you may know I went to Art Basel Miami a month ago in December. While I was there I attended the Moksha Art Fair. It was a multi-faceted event and featured some really beautiful and powerful artwork. As I sat on the plane on the way home, a bit worn out from five days of, well, everything, I wrote a blog entry about it that was not entirely flattering and, I think, overly critical.
Ray Oracca, one of the organizers of the event, went out of his way to contact me and talk about some of what I had written. We had a long heart-warming conversation about art, communities, framing situations, etc. In the end, I could see where he was coming from and recognized the places I had misspoken.I sincerely apologize for any views I expressed that did not tell the whole truth, were tainted by my own lens, and, in the end, may have dissed an event that a lot of time, energy and love went into.
I don’t know a whole lot about the Moksha Family in Miami. Those people that I did meet, who were intrinsically involved, had warm hearts and a sparkle in their eyes. They were genuine in their openness and certainly working hard to create something beautiful. In the end, it seems to be a bit like my own Moontribe community – a disparate tribe hailing from many walks of life sharing a common love of art, music, dance, and fun. They are people who are working at being non-judgemental. They are allowing each other room for growth. They work at putting on events that bring people together in a communal space. They most treasure the open exchange of ideas and energy. In this way, we help each other with our spiritual evolution. They, we, all of us, working together on a common vision from a million different angles.
Thank you.
Mansions of the House
I’ve got to step up inside myself and stand there at my door sometimes; you know, not hang out deeper inside the mansions of my mind, thinking someone might find me back there, painting or daydreaming, biding my time, enjoying the view. Sometimes I’ve got to step up and be the doorman. Welcome! Welcome I say, politely, but with gusto, not over bearing but with just the right amount of exuberance tempered by tactfulness as a good host must be.
There is often, I think, a great hesitancy of inviting people in like that: what might they find there? How well do I, myself, the supposed master of my house, know this mansion? Did I leave the doors unlocked? Are there any demons hiding under a bed or behind a door with sheets over their heads? How might it show it’s face? In what glance or gaze or quirk of speech or passing phrase might it be evident in the course of the conversation between you and I?
I watch these things closely. Not because I’m afraid of what my hand might show, but because I, too, wonder: what might be in there still. What is the meaning behind that statement, what is the intention behind that phrase or point of reference or inference. I watch them because I am curious about what might be the underpinnings of my belief systems.
I remember when I first took ayahuasca and the shaman who was leading the journey, an older man, small and wrinkled and from Peru, said something like ‘let us explore the mansions of my father’s house.’ I always felt that phrase aptly poetic for the experience of the inner world and for the journey we were about to undertake into the fractalizing and sometimes very compartmentalized nature of our minds. There are no closets in these rooms inside, only more rooms, closets that open into foot ball fields, rooms within rooms ad infinitum. Within some are altars. Within others, the dirty laundry. I suppose it’s for us to examine for whom or what the altars are for and also, while we are at it, separate and clean the laundry.
There were times in our lives when we revered a way of being, paid homage to a trait of personality. There were other times when a reverence was laid at the feet of the holiest of holies. The holiest shifts in meaning, growing deeper, wider, broader and, sometimes, completely redefined. Old altars are forgotten, new ones constructed. By the same token, shrines to belief systems now defunct are not always torn down only because we have a hard time letting go. Instead, new belief systems get built and a room gets closed off, forgotten, unused, but still taking up space. Maybe house cleaning isn’t all that is in order. Every house could use a little remodeling.
So we stand at the doorway because inevitably we go out into the world – we discuss ourselves, what we do, from whence we hail and to where we are going, and we tell a story that treats us well as we attempt to elicit something from the viewer: a sense of pardon, a chain reaction of empathy to endearment to love. Because really, in the end, we only want ever to be loved, accepted for who we are and we wonder: am I the living room as much as the basement? Will this person understand?
‘Welcome,’ says the doorman. ‘Welcome to the mansions of my father’s house.’
His statement is a layer cake of meaning, a fine paella of statements mixed with nuanced spices.
Take heed, fair guest: my rooms are wide open. Let us explore together. You never know what you might find and, to be fair, neither do I. Together we explore and, in this house of mind and in the mansions of it’s rooms, let us hope we don’t lose ourselves and, if we do, let us hope that which we find is a greater treasure than that which we’ve lost.
In the exploratory stories, half way between the top floor and the deepest basement, in a storage closet that opens to forever, I’ve got a pile of sketchbooks that go back to the drawings I made as a lonely scared child. I keep them to remind myself of where I’ve been, where I’ve come from and where it’s all gone to. I did my best to dispose of the drivel. What’s left is enough of a cross section that it can let future historians have a sampling of where I’m from.
Here, in this attic, is a bottle, the first bottle and only bottle. It’s never been emptied. It’s always been half-full. I’ve done my best to finish it. I am in love with new beginnings.
This right here, this balloon, half-deflated, is quite significant, or rather, it was, at one time. Good thing the things of the mind are biodegradable!
How about this door? What might we find inside it’s corners….
Oops!
Where are we now? What, you say, you know this place?
O this is your old kitchen, from as a child, as a seven year old, scared from the bee outside and your mother was nowhere to be found and you felt it best to find her and when you did she was a disinterested mess? You know this place. This is your house. This is your mansion. It’s true, I’ve been to places like this myself. I think my own place like this was nothing like this. But you’re not the first, so let us navigate it together.
We arise, we fall. It’s like that. We traipse in and out of each other’s mental spaces. It’s just like that when two people open up to one another.
And in the nuances of our speech, in the subtleties of our movements, are written the understandings of our lifetimes. At times, there is nothing but joy and if you find me on the right day, I will have naught but love, dripping and dancing off of every note of my being. Find me on another day and it might be different. I might be a bit more like coal, for real. No one is to blame for that but me and the only reason I have is that I’m still turning that chunk of coal into a diamond. With enough concentration and patience, enough focus and mindfulness, it all turns into diamonds.
And one way or another, the dancing love, it remains. Why am I so convinced of that?
A little birdie told me.
And I listened.
Art Basel II: Moksha Art Fair I
The antithesis of “The Art Basel Art World” was the Moksha Art Fair, put on by a family of local lovers of “visionary” art and alternative lifestyles. Part art show, part warehouse party, part performance, and, for better or worse, a lot of craziness, it spanned Thursday through Sunday, with an all-night party planned for Saturday night.
Thursday evening, featured two panels of artists discussing their work – the process, intentions, etc. The first panel featured some of the “emerging” artists featured in the show: Amanda Sage, Andrew Jones, Nemo, Adam Scott Miller, and Shrine. The latter panel was older more established artists like Martina Hoffman, Robert Venosa, Alex and Allison Grey, Mark Henson, and some others I wasn’t familiar with.
The “emerging artists” panel seemed to have an interesting and positive take on what they felt their art was for, where they were going with it, etc. It was an interesting talk that nicely glossed over the world of psychedelia because, at this point, that kind of talk just seems redundant.
The latter “established artists” panel left me feeling somewhat disappointed. Asked about considering ones audience when creating their work, one answer was:
“Well, if they’ve taken psychedelics then they get it and if not… they usually don’t.” The artists didn’t seem to care much about the ones who don’t and felt that those who do get it required a key of some sort to understand. So much for helping the world to grow! But then, perhaps that was not the mission of said artist.
The truth is, and here is where my disappointment arose is that the entire panel seemed to devolve into a flag-raising, banner-wielding conundrum of ENTHEOGENS AND ART! LSD AND ART! to the sounds of a whoop or a cheer every now and again and, well, for me – that gets old.
Yes, yes, psychedelics are a doorway and a gateway and they can open one up to all sorts of interesting vistas and understandings. We know they are powerful, we know they are helpful but: tell us something different, please. The truth is: great art is not made by taking some drugs and grabbing some paint. Great art is made through patience, dedication, imagination, and vision. And all of that takes work.
I have always felt, and I may be wrong, that the work created by the “visionary” artists has some deep intentions around healing, spreading enlightenment, raising consciousness, etc. So I thought that the comment about work that almost requires the viewer to have had a psychedelic experience seemed selfish and self-indulgent. I considered my own artwork: should it require some kind of magic decoder ring in order to be understood? Sometimes the people who get it the most or who seem to be affected by it the most are the ones who’ve never seen anything like it before and now, in front of them, is this vision. And some little old lady reacts as if she’s waited her whole life to see it. It’s beautiful and affirming and rewarding. Some kid, fresh out of high school sees it and recognizes an element, an archetypal experience within it’s lines and colors.
True art, something truly beautiful, should require nothing more than the senses needed to experience it – and that is really just two eyes and some mode of transportation to be able to arrive in front of the piece. If it is good, then it will be received as such and will be able to stand on it’s own. Otherwise, we are merely (and rather self-indulgently) painting pictures along the walls of our own castles, letting in only those whom we see fit and are no better or worse than the rest of the “Art World”.
We can’t change the world by living in our own bubble and waiting for others to make it through a door or a veil we have constructed. If that is the case then we have fallen prey to the same sort of selfish elitism the plagues much of the art world. If I sound cynical, well, in some respects I really may be, but I am also hopeful. Incredibly so.
In conversations with the so called “younger” artists (a category that I certainly fall into as well) I found, through subsequent conversations, a similar feeling that the old cry of “Entheogens and Art” or drugs-will-change-the-way-you-think-just-look-at-me should be taken out back and given a proper burial and a new and broader understanding must be integrated.
This art, these visions, doesn’t just come from some psychedelic experience. It comes from an integrated and holistic approach to life. It comes from personal exploration and deep inner work. It comes from yoga and eating well. It comes from deep inner work, a consciously aware mind, and a desire to push ones edge a little further every day. It comes from living a well-lived life. Some people, with a good imagination, might just hit on something along the course of that path. With an adequate amount of talent, they might just create something beautiful. If they have the passion for it and the drive, they might just continue onwards, exploring, broadening, unveiling profound understandings of how the world works and, along the way, create more artwork that reflects that, bringing visions into this world that speak of that well-lived life.
This is not psychedelic art. It is not “visionary” art. However, It is certainly art with a vision, and it is certainly based on many types of experiences – from the sacred to the profane, from the profound to the mundane. And it is art based on a long long tradition of exploration and discovery. It continues the narrative begun by those unknown artists who created the paintings and hieroglyphs we find along the walls of caves and canyons. It grew and changed: through the hands of ancient sculptors, painters and writers. It was Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Bosch, el Greco, Blake, Monet, Picasso, Boccioni, Kandinsky, Dali, Magritte, Fuchs, Klarwein, and many others, on and on, into today.
What is this art we create? I am waiting for a cohesive name that doesn’t make me cringe each time I hear it. Visionary. As if we are the ones with vision and everyone else was just doodling. I’ll tell you one thing, this art is as substantive as anything that came before it. Another thing: It is as relevant as anything in the pages of Janson’s History of Art.
And, for the most part, it is highly nutritious. Eat up!
Experiencing Bliss
Today is the birthday of a friend, someone I’ve not seen in quite a long time but a friend none the less – someone who is very close to my heart. I have that little reminder that pops up on the side of my Facebook page to thank for that notification and I have her to thank for lifting a veil, for calling me out, for changing my life.
It was maybe six or seven years ago (how time flies!) when we first met and there was some chemistry there. So we had a thing and I had a thing for her. We spent a bunch of time together all of a sudden, just like that. I was in my usual (at that time) space-surfing-no-home-to-speak-of mode, painting, partying, traveling a bit here, traveling a bit there. She was a painter and pretty focused on a Tibetan Buddhist path. At that time, I think she was in school, I don’t remember exactly. Anyhow, this is all just auxiliary information. The point is: there was a spark, a fire, a reflection, and I respected her.
A conversation one evening went something like this:
“Michael, you smoke a lot of pot. You’re stoned quite a bit.”
This was certainly a fair, inarguable observation. In truth, I would hazard to guess that I’d been stoned for 300 days a year, at the very least, for the previous eight years. Illuminating when you add it up like that. I had, in any case, gotten high at least once a day for those three hundred days. Some of those days – in the midst of the painting binges for instance – were spent in such a haze that there was no in or out, high or low – it was just one long sustain and all I could do, or think of doing, was keep myself there. While I may have felt I was productive in my painting, in retrospect, I wasn’t productive in much else. While I may have been experiencing great highs, I certainly wasn’t integrating much.
“Yes, well… I may smoke a bit in the morning, take a hit or two…” But I knew it was a tough one to argue.
“Well, to be honest, it’s tough to hang out with you because there’s always this veil – this sort of space between you and I. In fact, it’s between you and the world. Really, it seems sort of selfish. You end up forcing everyone to get through this veil and you’re in there but it takes some work to find you. You’re not straight forward with life. You’ve got this veil to hide behind.”
Well, she said that in so many words.
“So, really, I like you a lot but I can’t really deal with the constant stoniness. So it’s either me or the pot. If you want to be with me, you’ve got to give that up.”
So I chose her. I’d like to imagine it was an easy choice but truthfully I don’t remember. I’m generally aware enough, even in the most egocentric times, at weighing choices like that – door number one is a path you know, a habit, a pattern. Door number two holds something new, different – an opportunity for growth, maybe new adventures, some light.
I chose door number two.
The short end of that story is:
Ultimately, it didn’t ‘work out’ between us. But we are where we are when we need to be there. And we came together for the lessons we had to share with each other. Giving up smoking pot broke through all kinds of things – suddenly life was REAL. In fact, it was so very real that I started drinking heavily because all kinds of emotions came up – sadness, depression, loneliness, attachment, wanting, craving, everything! – and they were quite hard to deal with because I’d never actually dealt with anything. I’d lived in my head and my daydreams for so long that screwing my head back onto my body was, in fact, rather disconcerting. I didn’t know how to handle it and I freaked out for a little while. It was sort of a heart wrenching/heart opening time. The drawing above, at the start of this post, was drawn during that time. It is called “The Heart Dance”.
For people who say there is no addiction in marijuana and no withdrawals… Sure maybe for the recreational smoker, this is absolutely true. But, as with object of addiction – whether it be alcohol, drugs, television or hamburgers – if a person finds that it helps to squelch the real emotions that they don’t want to deal with and it works, and it makes them feel good, they’ll keep going back for more. That’s addiction. Take the object of attachment away and everything it was being used to block rears it’s head. That’s when it turns out there are a lot of demons down there. Granted, marijuana likely helped me in many ways – it was a tool that I had at my disposal; a teacher in plant form. But, as with any teacher, as with the parable of using the boat to cross the river: once you’ve made it across the river, it’s best to abandon the boat. For all I know, I’d been lingering on that shoreline for far too long, hanging out with my boat.
So for a little while, all I seemed to be able to do was calm the demons while I learned how to deal with myself, knowing I’d get back to the darkness. So I worked with the tools I had, picking up new tools along the way. I worked on finding a center (and dealing with the urges and cravings that sought to pull me away from that) and figured, however consciously, that I’d get to the darkness. All good things in their own time!
Ultimately, when I got back to painting – by that time it was in Costa Rica – my work was so much more present. I was more efficient and my lines and approach crisper than it’d ever been. To top it all off, I was having these experiences that actually felt like they could be integrated into my being and I began to understand what “Being on the Path” really meant. I’d never realized what I was missing. I’d thought, for a long time had convinced myself, that I ought to be high in order to paint. I’m sure I’m not the first artist to fall prey to this belief. Now I found a deep reservoir of creativity, an endless and boundless spirit, and I found I had the skills to illuminate it. As I passed through these things, so did the emotions rise and fall, rise and fall.
Through that process, as demons have come and gone and challenges have been met, I’ve discovered more than I’ve ever dreamt. I’ve pushed myself and allowed myself to be pushed in ways I’d not imagined possible. And I’ve found something inside, something nameless, shapeless, wordless, some truth, that allows me to participate in this world, through my work and my interactions with others, in a way that is truly enlightening.
This friend helped lay some groundwork for all that came after. She is someone who helped me to step onto my path and be who I am – and admit to myself who I am – without just living a daydream of what I might be. So I say happy birthday to you, my friend. And thank you. May you live long. And prosper.
This one is dedicated to you.
May all beings experience bliss.
Being Who We Are
I had a conversation with a friend today about separating business from, well, business. She was working on redesigning her design portfolio (as a designer, for websites or otherwise, one is often considering and reconsidering the design of one’s own website). Be that as it may, her website was in need of a facelift and she was doing a fine job at it. She sent me a link to her new design site however and it was vastly different than her art site (she’s a painter as well). It didn’t add up for me and I mentioned that I liked the art site much more – it had such a nicer feel to it. And the design site, well, felt like it was a different person all together. Really, it felt forced.
She said she was felt that maybe the art site was too “psychedelic” for her general design clientele.
But that’s why people go to you, I said, because you’re an artist with a good eye. As long as your site has a clean, well-organized presentation, who cares what your life is like? I mean you’re an artist! A person may be looking for a graphic designer or a website designer and come upon your site and realize that your art is great and want a piece of that on their project. Not your art maybe, but your touch, your vision.
Well, I said that in so many words, anyhow.
The point is though: there is a voice in our heads that holds us back from fully stepping into who we ARE, from allowing us to OWN it. Instead, it compartmentalizes identities and then hides those identities from each other, lest they be like Voltron and unite to be this all powerful being. There is the business face. Maybe there’s the artist face. The mother face. The father face. The buddy-at-the-bar face. It’s tough, it seems, to just embrace all of these different aspects as one whole person and go out into the world like that. This is who I AM.
When I was 21 or so, I’d painted The Three Jewels and it was hanging in a cafe. I thought to myself: Oh, God, now everyone is going to know everything about me. After all, onto that canvas, I’d poured out all my insides in so much fractalized layered madness and exuberance. It was, admittedly, a pretty psychedelic painting. I figured that now everyone was going to know that I’d taken some psychedelics at some point in my life. Including my parents. Including the government. Including, well, everyone. Whoever “everyone” is.
Well, it turn out that my parents were content to turn a blind eye and, when it finally came up at some point or another, I didn’t care so much what they thought. As for the government, well, they could give a shit. As for everyone else: well, the people who think that’s a bad thing aren’t going to get it anyhow and both the people who think it’s a good thing and the people who don’t care – it’s obvious from the get go.
So life went on. I learned to own that piece of me. In doing so, I was able to hold my head a bit higher, walk a bit taller, straighter and not be afraid of standing out when I might stand out.
Later, I started to work with clients. I had clients. This was a new thing at one time. For the self-taught, self-educated computer geek it was pretty novel.
Anyhow, as time went by and I started to work on lots of different projects – websites, flyers, logos, commissioned art – I realized that I should show this stuff somewhere as a portfolio. So I created a website for it, separate from TenThousandVisions.com, my painting website. It was a nice website but nowhere near as nice as my personal site. I realized that I felt fractured like that. There was this one person over here who was busy being a “graphic designer” and this other person over there being a “painter”. And yet, both had a similar task before them: presenting information in an aesthetically pleasing and intuitive manner. Ultimately, the “resumé” of my paintings was, I felt, stronger than anything else I might show. The other stuff is there because I can. The paintings are there because I want to. In my humble opinion, hiring a graphic designer who has an endless creative urge to just create is going to bode better for your project than hiring someone who just creates because they get paid to do so. My two cents, anyhow.
I did realize however that sending my site to someone I’ve never met might throw them off. They might be like – whoa, look at this guys art… and then they might make a judgement. And decide they weren’t interested in hiring me.
And I realized that the person who makes that judgement isn’t someone I’m likely to want to work with. The person who says: this is cool, I want a touch of that on my project – that’s the person I want to work with. We already get each other from the beginning.
Mind you, I have all sorts of clients. Some are very professional to the point of being pretty straight. Others are, well, puppeteers or channelers or what have you. All of them end up feeling the same way: one person who is being who they are in life who is working with another person who is being who they are in life.
So it’s a leap of faith: stepping into who you are because it suits you best. And yet, it’s a leap that you know – if you don’t take it you might as well step aside. I don’t want to present a “business face” only to make a buck. I might as well put on a button up shirt and go sit in a cubicle somewhere if that’s the case. At that point, I’d just be fooling myself.
Listen, it’s best for everyone if you just step into that person who you want to be, who you are and own it. I mean really 100% fully and completely OWN it.
The Small Figures in My Work
Using my smallest brush I painted a small figure standing atop a flame, holding onto some sort of physical structure like an axis with 45 degree angles. The figure is checking out the view from up there, so to speak. It’s a pretty far out view but not a very big canvas. The very tiny person up there – really just a silhouette with perfect little curves – was painted with my tiniest brush: a #0 Kolinsky long handled brush, a lovely brush, really. I’m afraid I’ve almost worn it out.
As I placed the faintest of dashes to suggest a left hand, I thought about my habit of painting very tiny people into my paintings. I always paint them not in relation necessarily to the canvas itself but, instead, in relation to the smallest brush I have and in relation to the largest thing going on in the peice. I want them to be small. The painting, no matter the size, usually has similar sized small figures. They are always making the canvas seem huge because our eyes pick out the shape of the figure in it and relate then to that shape. It is sort of in the same way the we anthropomorphize all kinds of objects, placing emotions, etc, upon them. We see the shape of a person and we relate to that shape and then relate to the rest of the image in terms of that figure. With the paintings that have these tiny painted figures I want to create the greatest sense of space with them: a sense of grandeur and depth maybe; a sense of approaching the infinite and, really, being very small in that view.
The first painting I think I ever did like that is perhaps the oldest of all the paintings that I have a record of. The painting, titled Surrender, has a small figure atop a mountain, realizing he is a speck in comparison to the divine. There are all sorts of paintings that followed and not all of them have a main character, so to speak, but those that do often have a very small main character. Maybe it is me, experiencing a freckle on the little pinky toe of the divine. Compared to that pinky toe I am a speck but, in my enlarged versions anyhow, I am at least a quarter inch tall, an estimable height, perhaps, but, comparatively, a mere trifle in comparison to the forty eight inch tall painting.
I like it like that though. I wouldn’t paint the figure any bigger for two reasons. One is that I’d have to paint details on to the figure – a pair of pants maybe, some shoes. If I were to do that then Mind would have all the more reason to either relate or not relate to the figure. “O,” one’s mind might say, “I wouldn’t wear a red shirt, that is certainly not me.” or “My hair is long and that figure’s hair is short” or something like that. These statements are, generally, a little more subconscious than that but the point is – by choosing how we can’t relate to something, we give ourselves an exit from the experience. By making the figure tiny and with few, if any, distinguishable characteristics – their gender even – the character is all the more universal.
The second reason for the tiny figure is that a bigger figure would, I believe, have more dominance in the composition than the experience of whatever is going on. I’m not so interested in painting the expressions of the figure, gestures, etc, unless that is what the painting is about. The expressions and emotions of the figure are, likely, already captured (or attempted to be anyways) by the subject of the painting. That is what the piece is about, not the reaction of the figure. The reason the figure is in there is to give the main subject of the painting a bit of relativity.
Essentially, I want YOU to experience whatever the figure might be experiencing. Whether it is in the outstretched arms wide open big sky feeling of Standing on the Shoulders of Giants or the sense of casting off the weight of the world in Flowers for Atlas. The subtle gestures and forms of the figure in relation to the grander piece suggest an emotional, psychological or spiritual state of the figure and, thus, pass this on to the viewer.
We walk around all the times with our heads so big and full of ideas, however grand or however trivial, in a world that is, generally, built in direct proportion to our bodies and our senses of self. When we pull ourselves out of that world and experience something like a mountain ledge in the Tetons with some kind of epic view and a tower of a mountain behind us, or thunderheads and a sunset across the Great Plains or stand upon the rim of the Grand Canyon, we realize, we get a sense, of our true proportions – a speck – a mere punctuation mark in the grand book of the universe! I would say that I paint these small figures to remind myself of this as much as share the feeling or sense with others. We’ve all been there, at some point or another, and we get so wrapped up in “our worlds” that it’s good to be reminded of it sometimes.
