December 28:
"It's almost there," has been my painting mantra for the last month. I repeatedly imagined being a mere 3 to 6 hours away from completion of the 30" x 40" canvas, only to find after another 13 hour day or all-nighter that I've logged something closer to an additional 60 hours wedged in and around the requisite holiday preparations/activities... and then I saw it: Creative proximity is spirallic in nature, the linear distance to be traveled to the next turning is far greater than the visible gap between them. Just gotta keep putting one foot--or brush stroke--in front of the other...

December 30
Did you hear that? The pop and fizz of cheap champagne punctuates completion of a painting that has evolved out of a vision received during a meditation in Alex and Allyson Grey’s visionary art workshop 3 and a half years ago. I wasn’t too surprised by the female tree being at the time; the third breast, on the other hand, pressed a quizzical wrinkle into my forehead that persisted until, in the course of drawing it, I got the full download.

This image expresses the wisdom of a book that had a profound impact on my thinking, “The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World is a nonfiction social sciences and sociology book by sociologist Paul H. Ray and psychologist Sherry Ruth Anderson,[1] first published in 2000.[2] The authors introduced the term ‘Cultural Creatives’ to describe a large segment in Western society that has recently developed beyond the standard paradigm of modernists or progressives versus traditionalists or conservatives.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cultural_Creatives .  (Asheville Magazine has an excellent article, Cultural Creatives Q & A: http://newfrontier.com/asheville/cultural-creative-faq.htm)

The idea echoed here is that beyond the either/or push and pull of polarized beliefs-- whether the political schism between conservatives and liberals, or the warring philosophies of religion and science, lies a third possibility: Mutual respect. Cooperation. Unity.

The flexible and expansive cultural creative mindset embraces paradox. It acknowledges the necessary balance achieved through seeming contradiction as left AND right, above AND below, light AND dark transcend the rigid dogma and limitations of EITHER/OR judgments and nourish an alternative paradigm that preserves worthy traditional values, while allowing human rights and planetary quality of life to evolve for the greatest good of all.

The idea is not new. Taoism expresses the dualistic nature of physical reality in the symbol of opposing and mutually defining yin and yang, receptive and assertive life forces unified in the classic taijitu symbol, here embedded in a mandala over the heart. After all, as Antoine de Saint-Exupery said, "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

The title announced itself after our trip to Bali in the spring. Damai is the Indonesian word for peace. The Damai Divina expresses the divine peace possible when we view the contrast that makes not only equilibrium, but growth, possible through the eyes of love that acknowledge the value of every perspective on the infinite spectrum of creative possibility.

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This was a learning piece (the biggest lesson I learned was not to dry the canvas outside subject to grit and flying insects of a Texas summer *Sigh* but I was too far in to abandon the project when I saw my error...), and one that owes a debt of gratitude to my instructors in the mischtechnik, Amanda Sage, Laurence Caruana,  and Maura Holden, and to Timea Tallon and Daniel Mirante who introduced me to the properties of various pigments (saving me a great deal of drying time as my deadline loomed). I’m thankful also to my fellow artists whose painting continuously inspires me to keep reaching higher and deeper.

Namaste.

Notes from the  Alex Grey Art Intensive July 25, 2009

Twentyseven years ago my father-in-law walked thru my studio for the first time. After peering critically at the intuitive drawings accumulating on the drafting board he sniffed and pronounced that I would (might!) be a good artist once I outgrew this “cosmic stage.” My cheeks burned with the stinging dismissal of my nascent creativity. Even then I knew my trajectory was set to grow deeper into, rather than away from my creative source, but his message was clear: “Good” art depicted the safe, predictable world of objective reality, traditional subjects, rendered in traditional ways... i.e. not the rainbow hues and metamorphic forms that issued from the invisible fountain of my mystical inspiration.

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The life drawing models, wrapped in simple sarongs wait quietly on the pile of floor pillows on the sidelines until Alex has finished leading us thru a visualization of the warm red energy that connects the human body to the earth thru the root chakra at the base of the spine. Slipping out of their modest coverings the young women--one girl relaxed and easy in her skin, the other doe-eyed with arms folded under her breasts, both lovely, but different from each other and the sterile textbook guidelines for the average/normal human (height =seven and a half heads, width= three heads across the shoulder, pupils approx halfway between hairline and chin, etc.)-- walk naked across the polished floor to take their positions, exposing their tender skin to the eyes of 60 strangers, artists armed with pencils and paint for ferreting out the nuances of spirit that animate the flesh.

I think how much courage it takes for someone to risk revealing their flaws and imperfections--except that I don’t see them as flawed or imperfect. Different from each other, from me, from everyone else in the room, yes, but in no way deficient.

Seven times the process repeats as one of the great visionaries of our time leads the occupants of the room in visualizing then rendering the interface between material and non-material realities, one chakra at a time.

We applaud our thanks to the models when the exercise is over. Then the artists lay their studies on the floor where artists and models alike can see them and we wander quietly among them murmuring our admiration and appreciation, conferring in small groups about our experiences and insights. This is not a critique, but an opportunity to see how diverse the interpretations of the subtle energies, transmitted thru posture and gesture, are, a chance to give and receive inspiration...

In this place where models baring their bodies is followed by artists baring their souls, I realize, that the real risk for everyone is to allow anyone to see our BEAUTY. We are so vulnerable when we expose what is most precious in us to unbelievers and elitists. Here, where the treasure buried in our heart of hearts, the luminous pearls of our souls are made visible, the greatest gift we give one another is trust.

I get behind the wheel for the two hour drive home from Austin well after nightfall. It would probably be more sensible to sleep on a couch on these late nights, but a nice caffeine buzz and the siren song of the infinitely receding horizon calls me into the darkness at the edge of the visible world. Beyond the city lights, the world shrinks to the variable arc of headlights on an undulating ribbon of asphalt. Bound by brilliant white bands of paint at the pavement’s edge, the vivid gold center stripe snakes into distance, the safety reflectors flashing like scales on a dragon’s spine.

Tunnel vision induces trance with its zen simplicity. The dashboard dials glow softly, suspended in velvety black shadow that has swallowed the emerald hued oak savannas, farms and ranches of the daylight drive. Now mere grey ghosts, grass, trees, and rock, flicker grainy black and white at the edges of the windshield. Consumed in small nocturnal bites, this road becomes all roads, all possibilities, past, present and future compressed in the universal song of a freedom-seeking body in motion.

Listening to Jack Keroac’s “On the Road” I dwell in dual realities: Keroac’s American west of the late 1940s and mine at the turn of the new millenium. Our times twine in the mesmerizing line of telegraphic dots and dashes painted on the pavement that leads us deeper into the mindscape of memory, metaphor and imagination. Keroac grooved to “mad jazz” on the radio while I pump customized playlists of lusty rock  or dance and electronica thru my ipod when the fatigue of long days and late nights threatens to pull me under.

With normal senses contracted into a small bubble of pulsing, rhythmic sound, my hands and foot instinctively control my trajectory thru space with minor, mostly unconscious adjustments in arc and pressure to steering wheel and accelerator. The incessant vibration of the engine mingles with provocative bass and drum to awaken subtle sensations in my nether regions and I become aware of sanguine shifts in internal pressure as centrifugal force pushes the cells beneath my skin this way then that on the broad sweeping turns. My body has become an auto-erotic vessel riding the wheels that trace the curves and contours of the land like a lovers hand ...

Alert again, I can switch to a downtempo mix. The seductive boom and plaintive opening notes of Maroon 5’s sensual “Secret” pierce me like an arrow, lodging in a hidden compartment of unspeakable longing that sometimes breaks open on the open road, flooding my bloodstream with strange deepwater dwellers, all hungry eyes and mouths surging toward the surface, bursting thru the smooth facade of a life replete with satisfaction to stir unexpected ardor for something more...

Fragments of lyrics catch in my breast, flotsam in the flood of rising emotion:
“Our road is long, your hold is strong ... I know I don't know you, but I want you so bad... I’m driving fast now, Don’t think I know how to go slow ... Cool these engines, calm these jets, I ask you how hot can it get, and as you wipe off beads of sweat, slowly you say, ‘I’m not there yet... ‘ “I know I don’t know you, but I want you so bad.”

The sudden visceral ache for a nameless something beyond the visible horizon-is as palpable as the hunger for any flesh and blood lover. But what moon beckons this burgeoning tide of yearning?

K. D. Lang croons in Constant Craving, “Maybe some great magnet pulls all souls toward truth.”

Is the truth waiting beyond the reach of my night vision as K. D. suggests, “Life itself”: Do our hearts beat desire at the bidding of Life’s passion to know itself, to discover thru its pleasures its intrinsic wisdom, a deeper, more vibrant, lyrical and intricate ordering of consciousness and flesh than we can begin to comprehend?

Life seduces us with silver tongued promises whispered on dark, winding roads, tantalizes our imagination with possibilities--fresh vistas, new lights, unmet friends and lovers, heretofore inconceivable inspirations--waiting beyond the next alluring curve-. Mysterious attractors coax us to become conscious progenitors of meaning, thus increasing life’s lush and lusty measure--whether an idea, a child, a song, a painting, a home, a relationship, or a journey. Creativity begins with the spark of desire to move beyond familiar horizons, a more or less erotic rush into the unknown in hopes of giving form to the heretofore formless...

A hazard sign warns that deer are prone to leaping into the highway ahead. Others advise of concealed entrances, construction and hard turns. Who knows what other dangers threaten objects hurtling thru the inky darkness at 70 mph? But still the engine purrs--or is that me?--and I follow yet another broken line that stitches the north and east of my past to the south and west of my present.

Despite the knots and breaks in the thread, wanderlust, that irrepressible need to penetrate the mystery, reach higher, dive deeper, whether inward or outward, in darkness or light, remains needle sharp, mobilized by nothing less than radical trust--trust in the mortal vehicle that carries me, trust in the unseen laws that govern my trajectory, and trust in the intuitive intelligence that guides both wheel and driver toward fulfillment despite the obstacles hidden in the shadows of time and distance. How else can you explain the ecstasy of blind flight into the inscrutable future?

“You create your own reality,” my father said as he handed me the book. There was a twinkle in his eye and his grin revealed the slender gap between his front teeth. Taking the soft cover in both hands I opened the pages, enjoying the soft zipping sound as they fanned open under my thumbnail in that breezy front to back perusal that is the bibliophile’s first curious sniff of a new animal. And this was a strange one, indeed. Jane Roberts’s book pushed aside the heavy curtains of my assumptions about human nature, creativity and consciousness, and shredded the filmy veils belief had cast over my perception, affirming the instinct burrowed deep in my soul that there is more to life than meets a cynical eye.

You create your own reality.  Those five words crystalized the unformed questions that had been swirling inside me with radioactive intensity since I discovered that there was more than one answer to be found regarding  the parameters and substance of reality, depending on whether I looked to science, religion or daytime television for illumination; and even then there were schisms and contradictions to be found within each as individuals and institutions scrabbled--sometimes violently-- for the monopoly on a singular, exclusive, and Absolute Truth. One ring to rule them all.

What if my assumptions about reality are wrong? What IS reality? Why doesn’t everyone agree about what is and is not real? How can I tell the difference? What if we don’t live in a chess game manipulated by God and Satan, or a mechanistic straight line either-or world of cause and effect, real or unreal, but a spherical world of divine consciousness discovering itself, a world of infinitely expanding AND? What would-- should!-- I do differently if I truly have the power to shape my experience of reality?  The questions lingered in the crowded foyer of my mind like guests who wouldn’t leave as I pored over the pages of Roberts's books and others found on the trail through a multidimensional myndscape far richer, more mysterious, exuberant, and creative than mainstream culture had led me to believe possible.

The questions followed me to college. They distracted me from academics, and picked fights with my childhood religion. They picked up hitchhikers (What is good? What is evil? What is beauty? What is truth?) But it was What do I want? and Where are my desires designed to lead me? that seemed most radical to a compulsive people-pleaser. What if what feels good TO me is actually good FOR me; what if desire is actually a navigational tool leading me to fulfillment of my life’s sacred purpose? Those questions blew up the skirt of my morality and dared me to listen to murmurings originating east of my solar logic, and west of my lunar intuition--yes, right there in the immovable center that goes everywhere I go, fully cognizant of my deepest desires, dreams and intentions to embody love, to create beauty. That voice slowly usurped my trust in schizophrenic external authorities with a steady, sensual and soulful new brand of reason.

The growing cadre of questions accompanied me on barefoot walks along the Outer Banks of North Carolina. (They like the ocean. It makes it easier for them to hear themselves think.) What if? and How about _________? prompted me to pick up my neglected rapidograph pen and draw the circles and trees that would boost the signals from my imagination where new realities gestated. Relentless and playful, the questions tiptoed through my dreams and periodically pulled my body out from under my mind lest I foster any illusions that my consciousness was nothing more than an electrochemical storm behind my eyes.

I felt the questions peering over my shoulder as I read passages from the ancient Taoist text, the I Ching, which proclaimed in a voice intimate with the secrets of season and cycle stashed in the underwear drawer of the natural world, “The social responsibility of the artist is to reunite people with their reality through the rhythms, symbols and patterns that have long inspired mankind.” What exactly does that mean? I asked them and the questions, grinning with crackpot zen master glee, laughed, pointing back to the crazy notion that started it all: You create your own reality, leaving me to decipher which rhythms, symbols, and patterns could best illustrate the possibility that we are not merely pinballs in a soulless machine, but co-creators of subtle psychological constructs, electromagnetic fields that attract and organize matter and the events therein in meaningful ways.

You create your own reality. Sleeping in that philosophical acorn was, in E. E. Cummings’s words, the “deepest secret nobody knows” (or at least it was... Hello world wide web!). Most of us operate on the assumption that Seeing is believing, unaware of how much of our reality is bankrolled by the flip side of that coin: Believing is seeing. This, in contemporary psychology, is known as confirmation bias, “the tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias )

Discounting or ignoring altogether information that contradicts our carefully cultivated world view, we often mistake opinion for fact, our beliefs about reality for reality itself, the finger for the moon to which it points. Have we ever been more keenly aware of the lack of consensus regarding the “truth,” ever seen more extremist points of view, the ability of people to ignore “facts” in order to find/fabricate proof that theirs is the “right” version of reality than in the 2012 elections? Emotions are sticky, the stronger the emotion, the stickier it is, prone to accumulating whatever evidence will validate it, until, like a snowman rolled from the lawn, with bits of grass and leaf caught in the ice crystals, it has acquired enough mass to be observed, or at least its effect on us and our behavior-- until it melts away under a more compelling sun.

Despite widespread agreement about the objective physical characteristics of the reality we share, the assumption that those who do not assign the same subjective values to reality-- a word, a behavior, an object or event-- as we do (for no better or worse reason than because they are biologically bound to perceive everything through their own brains programmed with different genetic codes, grown in different climates, exposed to different stimuli),  are stupid, lying or mentally ill, undeserving of the respect at the foundation of all human rights, has caused incalculable human suffering.   

All subjective realities, judgments, fears and joys are equal in their fidelity to the mind that conceives and experiences them; harvests differ according to the intentions sown, the attention they receive. We may lament the ignorance or moral breakdown of all of Them or we might consider that an expanding global population means there are a lot more nuts and raisins to fold into the cake batter of planetary co-creation. We’ll go crazy if we take our differences personally. Surely we can come up with better ways of resolving conflicts between world views than trying to drown out the opposition with hateful rhetoric or devoting trillions of tax dollars to incarcerating or bombing Them and their families and neighborhoods.

What if we were less concerned about the veracity of other people’s beliefs and more concerned about how our OWN beliefs enhance or undermine personal and collective freedom, agency, and fulfillment?

My persistent curiosity about what Terence McKenna called the “wiring beneath the board,” is, borrowing from Cummings again, “the root of the root and the bud of the bud” that has yielded a lifetime of wondrous strange artistic fruit fertilized by the likes of Kahlil Gibran, Richard Bach, Alan Watts, Carl Jung, Tom Robbins, Jamie Sams, Jose Arguelles, Esther Hicks, Joseph Chilton Pierce, and Alex Grey. My studio bulges with sketches, drawings, paintings and assemblages, a visionary cornucopia harvested from the possibility that my life, with its myriad twists and turns, good and bad choices may itself be the ultimate work of art... and that other lives may be works of art as well, created  to appeal to the taste (Chocolate vanilla or mango?) of those artful reality generators also grappling with: Who am I? Why am I here? How can I minimize pain and optimize joy?  What is love? How much freedom do I require? How do I negotiate boundaries where my desires clash with others? What, I ask myself over and over, IS possible--really?

You create your own reality.  Are we all, then, artists riffin’ off themes of mortality, love, lust and death? Freestying, making it up as we go along?

I enjoy a natural rapport with many of the answers I’ve found in my explorations of the psyche, the truths self-evidenced within the strange looping mechanism of reality creation. Still, questions provide livelier company than self-satisfied answers. Sure, I comfort myself with the peace and creative satisfaction to be found in my own confirmation bias, watching my intentions and carefully cultivated expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies, a lush, made-to-order landscape of sensations, relationships, objects and events, a world challenged, enriched and expanded by thoughts and intentions not my own. I try, however, not to be too self-righteous or attached to a self-referential version of reality that at every moment appears to contradict the realities millions of others have fashioned from different assumptions, beliefs and preferences (strawberry, banana, rocky road...) Who, after all, can claim supremacy in a sensory soup in which billions of realities brush shoulders, bumping, rubbing and polishing each other like rocks in a riverbed?  

My view of reality creation parallels my view of art making: Harming none, do as you will. There is no “wrong” art. Art, like myth, expresses unquantifiable yet universal truths in styles unique to the era and personalities therein. Impressionism, expressionism, fauvism, realism, surrealism, romanticism, minimalism are all legitimate expressions of the spectrum of human experience, as are decorative, figurative, abstract, pop, pornographic, rococo, gothic, psychedelic, comic, sacred, secular, digital, street, protest, outsider and countless other art styles and life styles, all are snapshots of private psyches responding to and reformulating our shared social and material reality.

Sometimes my questions wander off to poke and prod other grey matter, but they always come back to keep me humble, mentally and emotionally flexible. Secure in the knowledge I may be dead wrong in my subjective assignations of cause and effect, good and evil, and the purpose of life, I’m no longer willing to quibble and quarrel with the utterly convinced or supremely self-righteous. It’s not my job to correct, convert or fix anyone.

You create your own reality. Singular you, plural you, we’re all in this together, cells in the body of something beyond the comprehension of our narrow, one point perspective. Call it Humanity, God or Gaia, the liver cell is as precious as one residing in a hamstring, a hand, an eye... I am but one of billions of beings rendering consciousness in living color and surround sound, demonstrating moment to moment, through word, thought, and deed, changing answers to the question, What reality merits creation NOW?

And so I return to my studio, to the room and tasks necessitated by my desire to keep a channel open to the realm of creative possibilities, between what is and what could be. Gazing into the velvet darkness that envelops the questions burning at my core, I coax answers-- metaphorical, ethereal and paradoxical-- out of hiding and into the fleeting garb of paper, pencil, or paint, materializing a myndscape thrumming with wonder, illuminated by beauty. I create art for the simple and profound pleasure of What?, Why?, How? and What if? answered, dissolved and reconstituted, renewed, expanded and enhanced... I create this reality, one breath, one intention, one choice at a time.