There I am, trying to stop, and then I get my first comment, after over six months of my little monologue here...So the first thing that happened when I intended to stop is that I found that I didn't. Or. What? I stopped, but the blog didn't. I stepped back, and something flowed into the space.
Jim's comment about the Master seems to point directly to what I've been circling around these last few months. I wonder if what stops, when you slow everything right down, is your mind - your intentions, your plans, your goals - all your trying. But if you're lucky enough to be able to stop all this, even for a moment, you don't turn into a blank; you don't go away. Where there used to be the endless rabbiting of thought and the mind, there's still, or, perhaps, now, awareness.
Awareness is a space. Do things appear in that space, if you get out of the way?
If they do, I suppose they're likely to still be the emergent effects of the subterranean interactions I talked about before. Could you ever slow it down enough that even they would stop? And would you want to? If you're alive, a living system constantly in motion, renewing itself, adapting itself, in order to stay alive, you need those interactions and their effects - to guide you, to lead you on. But perhaps consciousness gives you something unique that you can insert into the mix (because, of course, consciousness is only a tiny part of what actually makes things happen as they do in your overall system...). It gives me the possibility of considering what kind of spaces I want to make, and the possibility of observing and pondering upon the different things that appear in the different spaces.
After I posted this, I suddenly looked at the image and thought of Anish Kapoor again. Perhaps what happens when you stop intending and trying is that you start to notice. Which links back to those earlier thoughts about responding. When you're a little more to one side, you see things that you wouldn't have noticed before. Things that you think you know suddenly reveal themselves as something extraordinary. The world changes.
very good blog, congratulations
ReplyDeleteregard from Reus Catalonia
thank you
"In his memoirs, Kandinsky described the actual moment of the accidental discovery of abstract art. He was 44 years old, coming home at sunset from a session out doors, 1910. Still absorbed in his work, he entered his studio and was struck immediately by an "indescribably beautiful painting, all irradiated by an interior light." He distinguished only forms and colors, no meaning, in the canvas. Then he realized it was one of his own paintings, turned on its side. He knew then that "objects" were harming the painting. His development began in rationalism and culminated when he fully embraced intuition."
ReplyDeleteWhen we stop thinking and start listening we reconnect to our bodies - that intuitive all knowing part of us!
ReplyDeleteIt's lovely to read that it all started flowing for you again once you stopped! I'm loving your site - I've added it as a link to my facebook page too.
What a strange and wonderful thing to come in here after a few weeks and find all these connections to my post-that-was-never-supposed-to-happen. Thanks, guys, for letting me know you're reading. I'm not quite sure about the protocol for commenting on comments, but I decided last time to use the comments as a stimulus for my next post, rather than write a long response here... So I will.
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