Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Beijing 1989: Were We Ever Enough To Deserve Life

It has been one year of very wet Martial Law
with sudden winter snowfalls and spring rains.
Most of my artist friends do not paint their usual colourful landscapes -
instead they apply Self-control to paint black ink on paper,
lined groups of single characters, 
ancient words that heal new wounds.
The clouds and rains are a solemn reminder to me,
that these are times that strain through change,
and so I search for memories of sunnier times.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Marcel Proust said,
“… a cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer’s leap,
never turn out to be as high as we hoped …”

It is an artist’s prerogative to change his or her time.
Artists share their discoveries
and artists explore the unexplored potential in humanity,
by creating art to bring forth the point of dance with evolution.
Artists are by definition passion ignited, ready to consume, 
exercising their power through displays of physical and emotional prowess.

Our world is a fire that burns bright in our hearts,
fueling our passion, feeding our inspiration,
lighting our ambition to create our today and tomorrow.
Flames of inspiration lick our internal life,
renewing us with ambition to channel passionate presence,
revealing inspiration to creatively accept life in the present.

At the end of the twentieth century, I thought, I heard,
“Art does not cover, it reveals – under the cover of art,
one can work for anything under every kind of cover.”

Accepting releases us
from the shell encasing our heart and soul,
and all shells eventually release
to exit the ghost of the life no longer present.
The dead past, life stilled, a still life, a life still held tightly in place
by fear of the ghosts in our shell singing soft songs inside our head,
whispering to us secret beliefs of who we once were.
Secrets of what we presently believe to be our limitations –
who we can and cannot be, what we can and cannot have.
Ghosts whisper were we ever enough to deserve life.


~~ Other People's Fingerprints ~~
During the Zhou Dynasty, Laozi (Li Er 李耳)wrote,
"Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes.
Don't resist them - that only creates sorrow.
Let reality be reality.
Let things flow naturally
forward in whatever way they like."

During the Zhou Dynasty, Laozi (Li Er 李耳)wrote,
"A leader is best
when people barely know he exists,
when his work is done,
his aimed fulfilled,
they will say;
We did it ourselves."

Sometime after 1877, Lloyd C. Douglas said;
“If a man harbors any sort of fear,
it percolates through all his thinking,
damages his personality, makes him a landlord to a ghost.”




Beijing, China 1990