1
August
2008
At an old-fashioned soda-pop style lunch counter in Bowman, North Dakota, I met Scott Parsons. He was eating pie in black, white and pink spandex with a smattering of corporate logos across his chest. After he had learned that his friend’s daughter Mikyla had been diagnosed with Rett syndrome, Scott quit his job as Western VP of Sales with Georgia Pacific to ride his bicycle from San Francisco to Boston to help raise money to fund medical research for Rett Syndrome.
Our conversation covers:
• Scott’s motivations to ride
• Information on Rett syndrome and the hope of a cure
• Highlights of the great American landscape
• Impressions of the American people
• The goals for the ride and beyond
Learn more about Scott, his trip, and the cause for which he’s riding at
Mikyla-Cure.org
Enjoy the show and please add your comments! You may download the mp3 file, which will play in iTunes, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player and other media players or listen to it right here by double clicking on the purple media player below. (The interview is about 25 minutes.)
Listen at your convenience! Use this link for download, not the one below the player. Download this episode (right click and save)
Instructions for Windows Right click on the link that says “Download this episode (right click and save)”. Click on “Save Target as”. The file will start downloading. A window will pop up and the name of the file will be filled in, as well as the file format. Just choose to save it to your desktop in the left bar.Then you will have an mp3 file sitting on your desktop. Right click on that and choose Open with: iTunes (or your chosen player). Or, alternatively, open iTunes and just drag the mp3 into iTunes.
Instructions for Mac Control click or right click on the link that says “Download this episode (right click and save)”. Either “Open with iTunes” to listen now or “Download link file as” and save to your desktop. Open with iTunes later or just drag the file into iTunes and play it whenever you like.
jari 
interviews, future, human potential, culture, financial reward, creativity, meaning, body, environment, values, empathy, heroic, enthusiasm, money, solitude, solidarity, vision, freedom, Native American, America, fitness 
1 Comment » |
18
July
2008
Hay bales, guinea hens
Woman in a blue seersucker housedress on porch rocker at 9 am waving to you;
blond squat dog.
Eight women and one man at the esoteric service. Violet carpeting, polyester gladiolas. Prayers for Bobbie the Parrot, Cricket the Dog and Buddy the Dog.
Road kill: armadillo, turtle, deer, raccoon, rabbit, possum, porcupine;
Cherokee County Salvage
Briggs Tobacco Outlet
Barren Fork Creek Watershed
Fishing/worms
Trail of Tears Trading Post
Calves
Fried Chicken, catfish, corn
Hoedown;
Stone cottages
½ off all animals—get ‘em while they last
Payday loans
Go out shootin’ squirrels on the weekend
Hogging
Three generations in the back of a pick-up with their guns
Lives Under Construction Boys Ranch
Wal-Mart trucks
Butterflies; wildflowers; firecrackers
Come down the hill steel bridge over the river
11 miles to Butterfly Palace
Gas: $3.69
Heavy hailstorm/lightning about a mile short of Rt 44 on 86
How to skirt St. Louis?
Cuba, Missouri
Gone With the Wind plate collection
Fried steak with sausage gravy; huge pile of fries topped with bacon and melted cheese $6.99
Iceberg salad topped with cheese and fries
Canoes; cabins; tubes; kayaks
Road kill: faun, chipmunk, boar, skunk, squirrel
4×4 for sale
You can taste the iron in that well water
Purple lupine
Tire blow-outs; rusty radial shreds
More Wal-Mart trucks
Subway; McDonalds; Burger King; Denny’s
Gas: $3.95 near Youngstown
Heartland Scramble: 2 eggs, chopped bacon, country fried potatoes, green peppers, onions, topped with cheddar cheese, served with 2 strips bacon, 2 sausage links, hash browns and 2 fluffy buttermilk pancakes with butter and syrup.
Waitress to Mom with kids at next table: “Takin’ yer boys out for breakfast?”
The Mom “What a pain.”
Straw paper blown off straw at her by son #1.
What time zone is it?
In Ohio on the way to North Dakota, eating a white peach grown in CA, bought in NJ
Sinners; savior; radio bible study
Adopt a highway
Gas: $4.09
Canola fields
Red-winged blackbirds; orioles
Grain silos; threshers
Angus cattle
Inland wetlands, occasional gull
Sheyenne River
Lavender fields
A town named Voltaire
Big calf still going for the teat;
Lariat;
Sign: Abortion stops a beating heart
European mini-cooper diesel gets 60 mpg
67 miles to Faith
Sea of grass
Road kill: pheasant, prairie dog; gopher
Barbed wire
Next services 55 miles
The animals huddle
Badlands
Mom to son: “You know, Noah, that there are scientists whose whole job is looking at animal poop and deciding what animal it came from—is that what you want to be when you grow up?”
Son to Mom: “Yeah!”
Little Wound Elementary School
Little Wound High School
Sign: Alcohol and Drug Free Zone
G. Gordon Liddy Show
Wounded Knee: chainlink and Christian graves
T-stop in road: Left to Buffalo, Right to Bison
Guy who wrote Buffalo for the Broken Heart on Prairie Public radio
Indian tacos
Deadwood
Creeks
Horses
Black Hills
Rapid City
Everybody super nice
jari language, insight, education, culture, synthesis, meaning, environment, values, vision, health, reality, Native American, America 3 Comments » |
17
June
2008
With great pleasure the Living Hero program presents an interview with author and cultural historian, Morris Berman.
Our interview includes conversation about:
● What motivated Berman’s writing of the trilogy on human consciousness ● The mind-body split and the creative process ● The decline of America ● The dialectical principle in our lives ● A new monastic individual and the masses ● Progress, consciousness, and power ● What societies of hunter-gatherers and nomads had that we don’t have ● Berman’s sociological perspectives and suggestions ● Problems of “progress” and power ● American social conditions prompting Berman’s move to Mexico
Dr. Berman is the author of a trilogy on the evolution of human consciousness–The Reenchantment of the World (1981), Coming to Our Senses (1989), and Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality (2000). In 2000, his Twilight of American Culture was named a “Notable Book” by the New York Times Book Review. During 2003-6 he was Visiting Professor in Sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. and has held endowed chairs at several other American and Canadian universities. Dr. Berman relocated to Mexico in 2006, and in 2008 was appointed Visiting Professor at the Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico City. His most recent book is Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire. He maintains an interesting blog with related resources at morrisberman.com where you will also find his complete bio.
Enjoy the show and please add your comments! You may download the mp3 file, which will play in iTunes, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player and other media players or listen to it right here by double clicking on the purple media player below. (The interview is about 57 minutes.)
Listen at your convenience! Use this link for download, not the one below the player. Download this episode (right click and save)
Instructions for Windows Right click on the link that says “Download this episode (right click and save)”. Click on “Save Target as”. The file will start downloading. A window will pop up and the name of the file will be filled in, as well as the file format. Just choose to save it to your desktop in the left bar.Then you will have an mp3 file sitting on your desktop. Right click on that and choose Open with: iTunes (or your chosen player). Or, alternatively, open iTunes and just drag the mp3 into iTunes.
Instructions for Mac Control click or right click on the link that says “Download this episode (right click and save)”. Either “Open with iTunes” to listen now or “Download link file as” and save to your desktop. Open with iTunes later or just drag the file into iTunes and play it whenever you like.
jari psychology, consciousness, interviews, future, human potential, wisdom, philosophy, politics, books, mind-body, global forces, mental health, values, vision, power, reality 1 Comment » |
4
June
2008
Sometimes the mind and tongue go quiet for a stretch, precipitated by an event or experience, or just because.
This time, for me, it was the BBC video series entitled Planet Earth, a monumental piece of work that brings us, as never before, into the wilderness areas of our planet, as they remain at this time.
Watching this series daily has left me quite speechless; and therefore, I have been inactive in my blogging or reaching out to people by phone.
I am poignantly aware that the very technological advancements required to visually record the Earth’s wild creatures in the far reaches of their habitats, such that they are not disturbed in the course of their natural activities, rode in on the trajectory of industrialization, which also gave us toxic pollution, mass extinctions, shrinking habitats, global warming and all the other threats human beings have posed in pursuit of information, understanding, and ostensibly, reality.
So, if it was necessary for worldwide human consciousness to behold this planet and realize our place in the family of living things, then we have hereby accomplished this. Done deal! Time to celebrate and to retreat! And, on the way, let us make amends to the native peoples we considered primitive, who had figured all this out already before we decimated them.
Pythagoras, who was born in 507 BC, is credited for coining the word philosophy (love of wisdom). To him, a “philosopher” was someone who “gives himself up to discovering the meaning and purpose of life itself . . . to uncover the secrets of nature.”
But, now we must go beyond this original definition of philosophy to find wisdom, to give ourselves up to something else entirely: to the recognition that our notions about discovering the meaning and purpose of life, or uncovering the secrets of nature, have been misguided ones.
We have seen the ends of the Earth now–mission accomplished–so, the question is: will we, the people, be willing to act with the wisdom actually called for in our time–to shift our systems and morph our power structures? Can we stop advancing and relinquish our strangling power over the land and its marvelous creatures, and instead withdraw, back down, give way, surrender to our hard-won larger view of life?
Do we have the larger smarts to put to rest all our fascinating illusions and fantasies of figuring things out through the human mind, our inventions and our instruments?
In the bookstore the other day, I stood before the shelves marked Western Philosophy and noticed how dominated those book spines are with male names. Nice try guys, thank you very much. But that will be all.
What if there is no meaning and purpose to life except to live it in a state of poise and grace? Maybe it’s kind of jerky and pathetic to keep believing that we will ever comprehend the hows, whys, and wherefores of the universe. It’s like an abused and jilted lover who just keeps calling and coming back for another kick in the head, or a neglected child who just cannot accept his parents’ indifference, trying in vain to get their attention, only to be hurt and dismayed again and again. There are instances where hope springing eternal is just stupid. The universe will never be ours. It’s not available for that. Can’t we get over it?! Why don’t we give up on nailing the universe and find fulfillment in the here and now with the aspects of life that are wholesome, available and satisfying?
I am suggesting that we set aside our childish things, to enter and consider lives of love (there’s that L-Word), craft, community and intimacy, rather than ideas and puffed-up, jacked-up enterprises built on myths, misgivings, and false understandings.
The whole scientific enterprise has surely brought focused and precise attention to unsolvable mysteries; such as, Pi, The Golden Ratio, fractals, the intricacies of body functions and sense-organs in living things; but we don’t, and never will, understand them or know why there is life here on Earth. All our efforts will only bring us deeper into the shapeshifting mysteries of life and death. We would do better to concern ourselves with conscience than with science.
Yesterday’s NY Times article on the latest extremely expensive scientific roundabout.
Rather than penetrate these mysteries, it would help us immensely to really understand something: that it is for us to embrace, love, protect and revere them, not to parse, categorize, compartmentalize and use them. Let us retreat from dissecting and theorizing about them, not with a sense of failure, but with a sense of maturation.
Do we really need more science? Do we need more technology? Consider that the answer is: no, we don’t. What we do need is greater mental and physical health, greater wisdom and intimacy. And we wouldn’t need a fraction of the hospitals, prisons, techno-medicine and machinery, if we were living healthier, more loving lives to begin with.
The healthiest and wisest people are psychologically strong enough to soften and be tender, to expose their vulnerability, to let down, give way, express their fears, longings, idiosyncracies . . . and to share themselves with another person, one whom they admire on many levels, to share the experience of spiritual and physical energetic surrender in the act of sexual love.
How are we doing with that? Do we have healthy sex lives? Have we lives with time for stillness, slowness, sustained attention, quiet, peace and pleasure? Or are we continually fooled, like a fish, by the next glittering thing out there–the next thought, idea, prospect, product, structure, icon, expert, or procedure?
Do we celebrate our world and the gift of life with simple gestures, recognizing the things that truly bring peace and pleasure; such as real care and affection, acting in all conscience and virtue?
As creative beings, have we cultivated our creative gifts? Do we know how to let down and enter a passive-receptive state that fosters imaginative power through wholesome means?
The Tibetan Book of the Dead describes the rituals and practices of a people dedicated to wisdom and peace. So much of their attention is focused on preparation for death, on having the spiritual fortitude to die in peace.
Sooner or later we all have to surrender to life, to mystery, to that which we don’t understand. Some will do so with grace, peace, and dignity, others will not.
If we truly want disarmament and ecological restoration in our world; if we are willing to take the path of health and sanity, we must learn the art, honor and pleasure of surrender, of laying down and relinquishing our misguided pursuits, our divisive attitudes and ideas, and our physical and mental tensions.
We also want to put aside our cynicism, which has arisen from the consistent thwarting of our breathless pursuit of impossibilities and illusions: dominating, classifying, and understanding nature, the psyche, or the universe. Instead let’s consider sentiment, love, and brotherhood not the naïve, embarrassing, and obsolete concepts we taint with our cynicism, but the very center of a salt-of-the-Earth, reality-based life that brings about health, contentment and satisfaction.
jari holistic health, maturity, wisdom, philosophy, meaning, conscience, love, tension, feeling, environment, mental health, values, power, health, sex, reality 1 Comment » |
18
May
2008
Living Hero is pleased to present an interview with entrepreneur and inventor, John Green, who is domestically manufacturing an alternative vehicle, The Ecofueler, which runs at high speeds and extremely low emissions on compressed natural gas.
The interview includes conversation about:
The Ecofueler’s economic, design and safety features ● The business history of the Ecofueler ● The mind of a perennially successful and indefatigable entrepreneur ● How to make any business work ● The power of positive thinking in ventures ● John’s goals for the Ecofueler ● The Ecofueler’s progressive business model ● Politics of the gasoline economy ●
Enjoy the show and please add your comments! You may download the mp3 file, which will play in iTunes, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player and other media players or listen to it right here by double clicking on the purple media player below. (The interview is about 45 minutes.)
Listen at your convenience! Use this link for download, not the one below the player. Download this episode (right click and save)
Instructions for Windows Right click on the link that says “Download this episode (right click and save)”. Click on “Save Target as”. The file will start downloading. A window will pop up and the name of the file will be filled in, as well as the file format. Just choose to save it to your desktop in the left bar.Then you will have an mp3 file sitting on your desktop. Right click on that and choose Open with: iTunes (or your chosen player). Or, alternatively, open iTunes and just drag the mp3 into iTunes.
Instructions for Mac Control click or right click on the link that says “Download this episode (right click and save)”. Either “Open with iTunes” to listen now or “Download link file as” and save to your desktop. Open with iTunes later or just drag the file into iTunes and play it whenever you like.
Eco-fueler.net
Eco-fueler.com
Ecofueler.net
jari interviews, future, culture, wisdom, politics, environment, economy, global forces, values, power, business, innovation, invention 1 Comment » |
12
May
2008
In our movement toward wholeness and maturity, perhaps the most fundamental challenge—and our goal—is the acceptance and embrace of our freedom. To live as sovereign individuals, so that our highest authority is our own sense of what is right, and knowing that we hold the wisdom to assess for ourselves the particulars of a situation, means that we fully trust ourselves and are willing to stand alone, if and when necessary.
Since creative people are so often ahead of their time, we must really know, as an experience deep in our bodies, that our assessments of relationships are right; and this deep, inner knowledge gives us the courage to be harbingers of what may one day also be discovered by the masses. Galileo knew he was right; Blake knew; Einstein knew; Walt Whitman . . . the great ones knew.
This type of innate knowledge comes through the experiences of intuition, inspiration, epiphany, and insight. These are spiritual experiences: understanding moves through you energetically, so that you see something and feel the rightness of it at the same time. This spirituality is fresh and personal; it exists apart from any particular theology or ideology.
Sadly, living without a personal spiritual connection to life and the freedom it supports is the grim lot of most people. Lives lacking a genuine, experiential spiritual foundation tend to oscillate between controlling others and being controlled. Without the spiritual ground of experience which is the very will of freedom, the prospect of freedom is just too much for people, and power is the woeful tether by which they aim to feel secure.
Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom explores the widespread aversion to freedom and persuades us that sadomasochistic tendencies underpin it. “It is always the inability to stand the aloneness of one’s individual self that leads to the drive to enter into a symbiotic relationship with someone else. It is evident from this why masochistic and sadistic trends are always blended with each other. Although on the surface they seem contradictions, they are essentially rooted in the same basic need. People are not sadistic or masochistic, but there is a constant oscillation between the active and the passive side of the symbiotic complex, so that it is often difficult to determine which side of it is operating at a given moment. In both cases individuality and freedom are lost.”
Later in his book, Fromm relates that these destructive tendencies to escape from freedom result from the thwarting of the individual’s sensuous, emotional, and intellectual expansiveness in childhood. These perversions are the torque our spirits take from the suppression of our exuberance, curiosity, and creative will in childhood and, which can continue all our lives. By continuing to suppress our natural tendencies to explore, move and stretch our bodies, imagine, try things out and invent, we perpetuate our pain and give rise to yet another generation of frustrated human beings stuck on a see-saw of power relations.
Here’s the remedy: reactivation of our creative and expressive pleasures goes straight to the root of perversions of spirit that we witness in our lives and our societies. Encouraging our children and each other to spend more time puttering and tinkering with things out of curiosity, creativity, and imaginative play, fostering our spiritual connection to life through observation, meditation, and the many means that help us to do this, and providing ourselves with the conditions for the experience of intuition, inspiration, epiphany and insight will all feed the hope of a new humanity that has the courage for real freedom.
jari psychology, insight, future, maturity, human potential, human development, culture, wisdom, philosophy, holistic, creativity, feeling, values, vision, freedom, power 5 Comments » |
1
May
2008
To live your life as a creative artist, everything you do and experience is invested into vision, meaning and insight; and in this, there cannot be a separation between self, work and life.
Successful creation is a distillation of many hours of time alone just sponging things in and then processing them with the light of solitude on. Solitude, a word that comes from the Latin “solus,” is akin to the Greek word “holos,” signifying whole, entire. An artist comes to wholeness in and through solitude.
You’d be hard pressed to find an artist who isn’t poignantly aware of her existential aloneness, and yet, like anyone else, she lives in relationship. However, often, instead of social relationships, she relies upon deep, abiding relationships with the ineffable intimations of her gift. There’s a sense of partnership with the unseen–the muse, the unconscious, the universe–to get her work done.
And so the artist working in solitude is not really “alone.” She is having intense affairs with aspects of the self and with the numinous. Henry James once told the journalist Morton Fullerton that the “essential loneliness” of his life constituted his “deepest” aspect.
The quality of relationship with one’s own inner dynamics, which are nurtured in solitude, provide the conditions for creation. The feeling arises, when you are creating, that you are doing what you are meant to do and it is sustained by the experience of being touched by something larger– a communion experience that one simply cannot explain, but instead must honor and serve.
But there is a big difference between solitude and isolation. To balance long stretches of unbroken solitude, an artist, especially a developing one, needs like-minded others, people who understand the passion and process of a creative person and who support him in his efforts, who welcome him when he finally does come out from behind the closed door. It helps to have a peer group or, at the very least, one trusted fellow artist with whom to share both the work and one’s life.
Solidarity means unity among people, a shared sense of purpose and understanding of what matters–values, feelings, sensitivities about things, qualities of life. Solidarity is every bit as crucial to the health, balance and survival of the artist as is solitude.
Some artists must or perhaps choose to find their solidarity without real-time contact with peer artists, but instead, through the works of more distant artists. In the words of painter and art teacher Robert Henri, “If the artist is alive in you, you may meet Greco nearer than many people, also Plato, Shakespeare, the Greeks. In certain books–some way in the first few paragraphs you know that you have met a brother.”
T.S. Eliot states something similar about our solidarity: “A common inheritance and a common cause unite artists consciously or unconsciously: it must be admitted that the union is mostly unconscious. Between the true artists of any time there is, I believe, an unconscious community.”
I wonder, are these qualities, which are so obviously critical to the life of the artist, not important to the health, balance, development and well-being of everyone? What do you think?
I have been traveling alone since the end of March, and also living among artists with long days of solitude in my studio and cherished connections at shared meals and walks through the Illinois prairie. I have now relocated temporarily to Austin, TX and I have been exposed to a great deal of art and culture along the way!
Since that last week of March I have seen:
The Homer and Hopper exhibitions at The Art Institute of Chicago;
Laurie Anderson speak at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago;
The collections and current shows at The Milwaukee Art Museum;
The current shows at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin;
The Kohler factory tour;
Columbia College Book & Paper Arts facilities and the M.F.A. show there;
A lecture by G. Edward Griffin at the University of Texas;
The On the Road show at the Harry Ranson Humanities Research Center in Austin;
I was also invited to spend an overnight as an all-expenses-paid guest at one of the exclusive private Kohler clubs.
Ask me about any of these–I have many notes and an abundance of memories! And I am look forward to hearing from you!
jari psychology, creative arts, integrate, culture, holistic, creativity, values, art, solitude, solidarity, vision 1 Comment » |
16
April
2008
It is my distinct pleasure and honor to present a conversation with author, coach, entrepreneur, speaker and process designer Maria Nemeth, Ph.D., MCC.
Maria is a heroic personality whose work actually centers around teaching and encouraging people to become heroes to themselves.
Our interview includes conversation about:
● The transcendent power of an open heart ● The story behind The Energy of Money ● Shifting your relationship with money ● Maria on Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett ● The distinction between physical and metaphysical reality ● The three most powerful words you can utter● Maria’s journey as a breast cancer survivor ●Taking your body to a couples counselor● The peduncle we’re in
Maria is a clinical psychologist with more than twenty-eight years’ experience, a former clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California-Davis School of Medicine, and a former columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal.
She is the founder of the Academy for Coaching Excellence where she trains other coaches in her program Mastering Life’s Energies, a personal and professional development seminar that supports people in shifting their relationship with money from scarcity to abundance. Her widely acclaimed work has recently been brought to the attention of a broader audience through an appearance on the Oprah Show.
Enjoy the show! You may download the mp3 file, which will play in iTunes, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player and other media players or listen to it right here by double clicking on the purple media player below. (The interview is about 45 minutes.)
Listen at your convenience! Use this link for download, not the one below the player. Download this episode (right click and save)
Instructions for Windows Right click on the link that says “Download this episode (right click and save)”. Click on “Save Target as”. The file will start downloading. A window will pop up and the name of the file will be filled in, as well as the file format. Just choose to save it to your desktop in the left bar.Then you will have an mp3 file sitting on your desktop. Right click on that and choose Open with: iTunes (or your chosen player). Or, alternatively, open iTunes and just drag the mp3 into iTunes.
Instructions for Mac Control click or right click on the link that says “Download this episode (right click and save)”. Either “Open with iTunes” to listen now or “Download link file as” and save to your desktop. Open with iTunes later or just drag the file into iTunes and play it whenever you like.
jari psychology, interviews, future, human potential, wisdom, books, creativity, meaning, mental health, values, coaching, self-esteem, heroic, money 1 Comment » |
7
April
2008
I am writing to you from The Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois, a lovely northern suburb of Chicago. Ragdale is an artist residency program that grants support to working artists by providing work/live space and meals (the chef is great here!) so they can concentrate on creating new work.
Immersing myself again in the making of visual art has been healing, surprising, and nourishing. I’m here for a month with other visual artists, fiction writers, and poets. Many of those here since I got here on March 27th will be leaving on Wednesday, opening the space for another group of ten whom I’ll meet, since I will stay on until April 23rd. I’ve met Anne LeClaire, Debra Darvick, Lucy Ferriss, Larry Thomas, Johnny Horton, Anita Garza, Katie Rodrigues, Rone Shivers, Lori Kagan and Amy Walsh. . . I am honored to be in this fine company.
Places like Ragdale acknowledge the need for free time and space to simply BE, to allow oneself to enter a passive-receptive state, a state of quiet engagement and inquiry, which provides the prime conditions for insight, intuitive leaps, and breakthroughs in composition.
You know, all artists are composers: it’s all about composition.
The artist combines and arranges elements to produce a harmonious whole through non-analytical means; a piece of work that has a formal coherence is born of synthesis (as opposed to analysis), which includes both conscious and unconscious layers of experience and that reconciles, in a fresh and new way, the multivalent human experience. This happens through the artist’s own visceral and emotional powers of deduction, which are cultivated with practice, enabling something ordered and fixed to be born from the most general, encompassing and ineffable aspects of existence.
Whereas philosophers and scientists seek to encapsulate themes of the human universe and experience through mathematical equations and contextual theories; artists do so through their compositions. In any case, the construct is meant to stand in, reductively, for that which is overwhelming and mysterious, yet ever-present.
Composition provides a resting place for the viewer or listener, a place of contemplation, recollection, absorption. It can do so because it represents and displays a synthesis of the artist’s own many hours of reflection, self-confrontation, and composure.
Works of art thereby become highly fertile common ground for fresh perspectives and cultural progress, not as objects in and of themselves, but as catalysts for insight and understanding: the artwork is where the strange seeds of consciousness, of both artist and audience, meet and take root. This is perhaps why dictators and tyrants seek to either squelch or use the artists.
But in the complicit tyranny of our society, people have allowed themselves to become so busy and distracted that so much of art goes unperceived and thereby rendered impotent and inconsequential. Because even the greatest music, art, books, and dances are nothing if no one is sensitively and receptively listening, watching, reading, and engaging with them. Artist and audience are of equal importance to the enterprise of realizing art. It is vital to take the time to compose yourself and reflect on what is real, true, and beautiful in life; it’s crucial to civilization and human care.
jari consciousness, insight, human potential, culture, synthesis, creativity, creative, mind-body, values, art, composition 2 Comments » |
28
March
2008
The celebrated psychiatrist and author, Alexander Lowen, says that “the loss of faith is the key problem of modern man.” Are we in a crisis of faith? If we are, what are we supposed to do about it?
The astonishing scientific discoveries of the late 19th and 20th centuries have repeatedly shattered the ideological and theological constructs that guided human life for centuries. There’s no solid world out there anymore, no objective world; we now know the world only as we engage it; and so, as a people, we are unsure of ourselves and cynical about trusting or accurately evaluating anything.
In this sense, faith is an absolutely essential part of the life of an artist, a creative person, if his or her work is to successfully address the needs of our culture. But what kind of fai
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