ok...ok

well. sorry for the prolonged absence. I was pretty busy looking for a job. I've clearly been overtaken by the overwhelming desire for money...or something like that.

recent thought.
Some guy on NPR was talking about art the other day and gave his expert opinion on what makes good art. It was so profound that I don't even remember it. I did start to think about my definitiion of good art though. I deviate a bit but hang with me through this.

Good art draws art out of it's audience. Good visual art pulls it's viewers in close and invites them to create. It invites them to feel. Good written art does the same. It invites the reader to fashion their own phrases. At it's best, art fills it's surroundings with feeling and urges the witness to join in the feeling. perhaps add to it with their own art.
I speak of art in broad terms. I do not mean it in any strict sense and would, at one level, join it with self-expression. For even expressing negative things invites others to express and if not express at least to experience and witness raw life.

with these thoughts I drove down Higgins avenue noticing the beauty of my surroundings- nature changing seasons. It was stricking and being so I was, in fact, struck with this idea. Nature is the first art, well the first created art, and it entices, it begs, it nearly demands me to respond to it. It being nature allows and makes it easier to be "natural" so to speak. Being surrounded by the magnificent art of nature I am encouraged to be, as nature, nothing but my authentic self. Isn't that one of the things that makes the natural world so beautiful, so wonderful- it will not conform to what we want it to be. Nature is exactly what it was made to be- and it invites me to be the same. Just as people who are nothing more than their true self allow others to be the same.
In this way, art encourages art, nature invites the authentic life and people, unmasked and unbound by what others want from them, invite freedom and hope and peace. In this way when I read a masterful book, see an inspiring painting, hear a moving song, look into a river or at a mountain covered with trees there is, before anything else, the Creator. Calling me, through his creation and creatures to bear myself to the world. For what else does God want than to be with me as I learn to be more fully myself, made in his image, so that, in the end I will have acknowledged the presence of the Artist in me, the art, and lived in that knowledge.

I have been lucky enough to know some of the people that make room for free life, which is most definitely art. And I am currently in a place that, at it's best, names the first artist, the only artist.

so I'm driving content. the leaves are falling in the breeze and I am again acquainted with peace.

be at peace. lean in and embrace hope. He is present.
as I've said before sometimes I like to conclude my thoughts with a prayer and I'll do that here.
Father. I am crushed at the beauty you've revealed in your creation. teach me to see you in the faces you've made. open my eyes to a new world. Open my heart to embrace the hope in you and your presence.



thanks for reading.
paz sea el viaje