I can tell it’s a new year. I feel it in the air I breathe, I sense it in my every step, and notice that my very thought processes have shifted. I don’t know how it is with anyone else, or if there is something dramatic afoot in the cosmos. I do know how it is with me, and something is different. If you knew me and knew all the events and changes in my life in 2009 you might well say that something HAD to be different . . . After all, you can’t just keep breaking bones, losing income, relationships, work, studio . . . etc. It has to stop somewhere right? Come on, life can’t just keep going from bad to worse and then on to more . . . What about balance?
The spring does follow the winter, babies are born into a world where the old are dying, the moon waxes after it wanes . . . Life is on the move, it’s regenerative, it goes on. Ian Malcolm from “Jurassic Park” said while discovering that the dinosaurs were breeding, “Life finds a way.” Endings and beginnings are as old as life itself, an end comes to troubling times as well as to joy. I think that’s the way it is. I think there is an intelligent order to things in the evolving universe of which we’re a part. There is balance threaded in and out of chaos and order, and back to chaos once again . . . A dance of sorts, grand and microscopic in scale. The question before all of us is something like . . . How do I fit in to this dance? What’s my part?
“Your work is to discover your work, and then with all your heart, give yourself to it.” Buddha
Right now I’m kind of thankful for the empty hole 2009 created in my life. Picture the desolation of a crater left behind in the wake of the massive destruction of a meteorite crashing into the surface of the earth. That’s where I am. I’m sitting in the middle of it, and all around me is a lot of quiet created by all the things, people and activities that are no longer a part of my experience. I’m beginning to see the gift in this . . . I have space, life space. At the moment I’m not rushing, exerting, planning, following through, delivering . . . my mind is more quiet, and I like it.
What is becoming clearer in the quiet I am enjoying is simply this--I’m not jumping up to fill in space, take on anything that comes my way to get going again. On the contrary. I’m liking the interval, the quiet margin in between the necessary activity of the daily stuff to stay alive. I am becoming content with non-doing and sinking deeper into being. We are such a doing people, I know this well. Our merit and worth is centered on what we DO. It’s like we’re a nation with our foot stuck on the gas pedal, we even vacation like do-addicts.
Having all this space to get comfortable with less doing and more being space allowed me to resurface an intention for balance in my life. I want to DO my work well on this earth and that implies being, knowing what my work really is. I can DO a lot of different things . . . What is my work according to the Buddha standard? In light of this question I have exhumed a process that I had begun years ago upon reading a very friendly and insightful book, Setting Your Genius Free. I’ve taken the book off the shelf. I want to see where I have come and how I lived in the intervening years since the initial illumination gained from that process of discovering my ‘genius.’
“You have a unique and special gift to give the universe. My shorthand way of referring to your gift is to call it your genius . . . ancient Greeks and Romans believed genus was a spirit born at the same time as the person to whom it was attached. They believed the genius was carried by a person throughout that person’s life and was a source of both direction and protection: a guiding star and guardian angel all wrapped in one package. Ancient Romans celebrated birthdays as the birth of a genius, not of a person . . . Make no mistake, you have a genius. Your genius is your natural power. It holds the potential to create joy and success or frustration and failure when used without awareness and choice. Like any power, you will use it best if you understand it well.” Dick Richards
I’m just not interested in messing around with this space where I find myself. It would be like having a long cleansing bath and then jumping into the dirt. Whatever I pick up will be in alignment with purpose and meaning . . . My work emanating from my genius. I look at this like a treasure hunt in a lovely forest where there are lots of grassy knolls to plunk down on and drink in the fresh air that brushes across my face for no other purpose whatever, save breathing in the moment . . .
That’s what this artist is thinking about today . . .
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