Found work…
Read at your own risk… ;-)
While I generally, as a rule, write and publish without polish on this platform (seeking to express some raw authenticity), this piece pushes that envelope a bit.
Unpolished indeed.
I just came across this in the midst of some other work and thought it worth sharing, in the spirit of creative play.
I do hope you'll enjoy as far as you read. :-)
Kabir
…
What are we building here in the world together anyway?
Your life truly is your art, your living of it crafts that work.
Like Jackson Pollock, perhaps you are inviting us to see, and seeking yourself to discover, beauty in the chaos. Maybe, like Meher Baba, you are pointing towards the unfathomable beauty just beyond the veils of ignorance. As did Mother Teresa with her brush paint a view of caring for others, or like Gandhi, an aspiration towards justice, towards what do you orient?
In truth, like water from the spring, most of us are just rolling down the hill in response to gravity, friction, and the obstacles implicit in our environments. Undoubtedly, this trickle become stream become river become sea become cloud become rain expresses a moving and beautiful art, as do we like any ignorant animal flow as beauty into the world. Yet there is some precious moment…
Sri Aurobindo speaks to this moment thusly:
“The earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened thoughts and, as it seems, his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation, -- for it survives the longest periods of scepticism and returns after every banishment, -- is also the highest which his thought can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality. The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us their witness to this constant aspiration; today we see a humanity satiated but not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to its primeval longings. The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last, -- God, Light, Freedom, Immortality. “
It is this moment of aspiration, this preoccupation not just with the practical, but with the possible that opens a doorway to something exciting, something possible in our very nature.
Those drops of water flowing down the hillside, flow a little differently than dust through the cosmos, stone through the ages, or the living matter of the Sequoia as it stretches from the forest floor towards the heavens. And still with each new iteration of this flow, some new quality of beauty emerges…
The way the light of the stars dances playfully, glinting off the surface of those drops, so too does the light of the possible dance, glistening off the surface of what we often call the "human soul."
That light of the possible is that very precious moment when we realize the fleeting, frail, and profoundly creative opportunity that is our life at all.
In that moment arises the invitation… "What, dear soul, do you long to express?" To what are you called? To whom do you call and why? What strokes of living time do you play upon this cosmic gift?
In ignorance, bliss, striving, certainty, or enlightenment, each one of us crafts a work of art visible in some small way to the world. We craft this work in some larger way visible to eternity as it peers through our hearts, minds, and soul longing. What you hope for, what you lose, what you care for, and what you neglect, that which touches you in love, and that which harms you, all of this, expressions of the beautiful work that is you.
While you may strive for career, for some success, marriage, family, spiritual attainment, goodness in the eyes of God, notoriety, or fame, you do so in the medium of this earthly existence, and this is your art.
We paint these works together here. The earth itself becomes a giant collage, a collaboration between you and I, stardust, geology, prehistory, and all the creatures that slither, swim, swing, dig, crawl, and fly.
The medium is loose today, some would say in a state of collapse. There emerges exceptional tension in some quarters, dissolution in others. Undoubtedly, this is a ripe and transformative time. Where we go from here, indeed, the biosphere, is yet unknown.
Think in terms of art. If this world is a painting, how would you like it to look in 500 years? Work towards that.