{He}art + Mind + Body

Now back from a week “back East” to deal with property issues and carpenter ants swarms. It was a lot of hard work in some incredible heat (and I just packed one pair of shorts, and literally lost 8 pounds!) but I did enjoy seeing old friends, meeting some interesting people, taking some refreshing after-work dips in the Atlantic, and treating myself to a few excellent meals of New England’s best. I’ll post some pics soon.

Ever notice how a day takes up 100% of your time? Time is a bane, but it seems to banish when you’re focused deeply on something.

Concentration on important matters which are “real,” transports us to a different level of existence. Every artist and magician knows this. It is said enlightenment is the perception of 1/100 of a second.

Meanwhile, time slows down, but constantly ticks away in the background. Therefore redeem the time you have left with serious, penetrating, thought.

It’s not about “finding yourself,” but releasing false impressions, opinions, ideas … and self-deception … and seeking the truth. The universe helps us along, whenever we break through the limits of time, and expand into eternal notions of reality.

Love knows no limitations.

From a Flash animation I created for work, describing a 18th century period of English history with the power struggle between catholics and reformed protestants.

Click on the image and enjoy a short clip of the funny effect I got, which was simply to hilight each side, and ended up looking like a scene from Harry Potter with dueling teams of Wizards!! (too bad I couldn’t get it to loop, but I’m an artist, not a programmer, dammit!)

Basically up to my ears now. Hoping things will settle in July, then can get back to more stuff we all take for granted, like health, reason and spirit …

On the career front, I just finished re-re-doing my web portfolio, so if anyone wants to check it out, let me know what you think about www.hobbitdance.com

Hopefully, I’ve taken it a step up. The pieces are in place now to look for work and not feel to foolish recommending my website to employers. As I continue to get some 3D pieces done, I can easily plug them into the site. I added some of the recent Flash animations I’ve been doing for work.

For this site, since I’ve been blogging less about {art} and more about {heart} I think I’ll try adding a second page, and dedicate it just to the spiritual side of expression.

This mystical path seems unescapable to me - to combine art and spirituality, even if the art is more commercial these days. With a couple of decades of experience behind me I feel I’ve produced a fairly large body of work on “human insight.” My eyes and mind dont miss much, and pretty much my whole life has been about experience and learning and looking deep . . . so we’ll see what happens.

Life sure is complicated, but keeping it simple is important. I’ll share what I can - at least just to get it out there - and hopefully I’ve found a good recipe and haven’t missed any of the ingredients.

Life is full of oxmorons, which is pretty ugly, unless accidentally on purpose you discover that it’s awfully good. One of those great apparent contradictions in the spiritual realm of discovery is how to accept the ideal of Non-duality. How can All be One, harmonious, inclusive capsule of Life, when we still suffer and witness daily destruction and division?

What I’ve discovered is how we misuse the rational mind. We’ve gone hyperdrive with our thought processes to insist on distinctions, delineated borders, and assign good-bad value judgements to everything that confronts us (antidote: classic zen!). Certainly many moral distinctions are a necessity, and if some folks long ago didn’t devote their intellect to the scoping and cataloguing of the cosmos, I wouldn’t be here writing this to the world on a computer.

- Reason is needed for survival in temporal affairs and making those critical choices to progress in daily life. The rational mind is for the service of our human hearts, but serve us too well … it does (my best Yoda impression). In fact it takes over, and tends to create a huge irrational mess.

Without knowing how to stop the thinking side of our brain enough to engage our intuition and deep spiritual insincts (for fulfillment), instead we become news-junkies, trivia buffs, sports stat freaks, and oh the fascion glamour of celebrity gossip! To top it all off, the shit we spew out of our mouth, before we even know what we said, and are powerless to stop this neural verbal barrage (think of the irrational way swearing takes over!) - and so we shrink and waste away our potential, clogging our cranial pathways with banal TV and cultural cholesterol.

Humor is so great to perplex that narrowing, confining ego process. It’s silly and perplexing and we know we like it for some reason - enough to think that cute furry animals have senses of humor too, since we think they’re so funny. The mind expands for a second.

Horror and suspense movies are good like that. Nothing like seeing some zombies to make you want to go later hug your loved one, and think about your life.

Getting out in nature, or heading out of town for a fresh perspective is healthy.

Meditation is good too. I never could have acheived any sort of detachment without having had the experience of living in a practicing zen co-op house for a year.

Without the ability to set aside the ponderous thinking mind for a moment, one can become mired in half-thoughts, obsessive intellectualization, and compromizing rationalization. Gone too far, the brain refuses to see the paradox that sometimes perplexing illogic is sometimes logical, just as excessive moderation requires a bit of moderate excess.

This is just to get the juices of life flowing. Give your dried out brain a rest sometime, and dig a little deeper. Behind the intellect (and emotions as well) there is a well spring of something refreshing and new.

It’s all about one thing, Curley. Just one thing
(actually it’s 3, but they add up to 1)

What do I know? Show me …

Earlier, I used the standard international symbols for Off/On/Off, as

O|O

to symbolize basic reality - just like an electrical appliance.
Also consider the binary equivalent 1 and 0 for on and off - just like a digital memory.

How convenient.

However, as a left-to-right progression, with the introduction of Time, it might make sense to to connect the 2 ends with a middle horizontal line:

O─O

but this is only a partial glimpse at the reality, and is a minus, or negative,

so while bridging the ends, we can also aspire to add significance to existence by adding the upright, thus creating a positive!

O+O

For me, it is necessary to complete a simple graph of life in this way.

But to what can we aspire, while we follow the flat line from our temporal beginning to it’s flat-line (EKG) end?

Simply the truth.

Ha! What is truth? That notion - whether genuinely questioning or merely cynical - existed long before any 21st century post-modern relativist, being uttered for the record by Jesus’ condemner, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, 2000 years ago.

Before anyone thinks they have me tagged as a christian, let me simply point out the fact that all over the place, people believe in something, that has no basis in reality. Whether they think they’re a great singer and should be America’s Next Idol, or think they can drive home no prob after Tequila shooter Night, or think they should rule the world, people are simply mistaken about a lot of things. Self-deception is a rampant disease, and often our best friends are no luckier that we are, so where do we turn?

If I were you, I’d plead to the heavens for some ultimate reality. There is evidence on the record that this has worked to point folk to Truth.

What ever it does, it gets us closer to finding the meaning in our lives.

Truth = freedom
Look up. Reach. Climb. Ascend. It only helps to get a better view.

Blogs are great, blogs are good, and we thank you for this food.

I love how often online discussion will spur me on to verbalize what’s going on inside my head. Despite no time to really be doing this, I need to get it out …

How firm a foundation do we stand on to tackle life’s meaning, and our purpose in it?

The most basic formula, I think, comes down to these symbols found on many modern appliances:

O | O

off - on - off

not alive - alive - death

We have a beginning, middle and end. This much is obvious.

Where we each diverge is assigning value to it.

Is it:

nothing - something - nothing

non existence - existence - non existence?

or

Union - Separation - Union?

This is our choice … what we need to get our brains and intuition working on to figure out, while we are stuck here.

Is this it, is this enough, or is there more?

What does history, society, and our individual selves tell us? This Flashy-thingy I did for work sort of addresses this …

(to be continued…)

For several years now, I’ve been trying to get my life beyond a somewhat orderly clump, to create a highly efficient, lean mean organizational machine. When I’m not being pulled here and there by the forces of family and the universe, there actually has been some progress getting mundane stuff (chores, house projects ) checked off my list - some have been copied and recopied onto to-do lists for years.(!)

All this a good thing, with good goals: be a nurturing father, supportive husband, and become a joyful artistic success - while unlocking the mystical keys to existence, and producing the unbounded elixir of creative life-force, thus healing all ills of humanity.

The rub thereby lies in balancing the family life with the ideals I’ve set before me. At this stage, I’d be happy without the unlocking and producing, and just “become a joyful artistic success.” And now is the critical time … my life will from here on actually depend upon it.

I have a hard row to hoe before me, and patience, support, and energy aren’t improving, unfortunately. But none of that can matter now.

“My sketch group” seems to have fizzled to a ZERO interest proposition (after 2 fun, productive meet ups), which is very disappointing. Just move on and keep up my contacts with the 2 new artist buddies who still return my calls.

Then there’s the home life where things are definitely frazzled to Koyaanisqatsi. It’s near impossible to find the balance on a routine basis to manage a family with 4 people running around, work part-time, re-re-re-re design my website (yes, that time again), focus on a new career … and have time for relaxing/reCreative outlets. Which are mere amusements, and which is valuable time spent?

I have yet to find anyone out in space - cyber or otherwise - who has dealt with anything similar. Usual creative pundits-with-family, were smart enough to start their career first, and find their focus early on. I’m still struggling, and complaining about it for a year now on this blog …

So, what to do? Risk & hope for luck … the true foundations of the american capitalist dream. Working & learning … I guess I still need more of it, plus some real time management to squeeze the creative juices out of each day.

My work contract ending in September is compounded with the sobering prospect that future times will require me to earn considerably more, to support our fancy suburban lifestyle. I vote “pitch it all and move to the country” … but it’s not just me making that decision.

Council before active operation. But I’ve got no one to discuss this with, and I definitely need a new captain for my brain-ship, coz this one’s drunk at the wheel.

It’s just hard to move forward, when the earth and heavens are shaking so much.

Keep tuning in, because I’ll keep trying to record my artistic progress, and share the notions which keep me going in heart, art, mind, and body.

” What can I do
we just live in a zoo
all I do is play
the spaceball ricochet … oh mama, the spaceball ricochet … oh baby, the spaceball ricochet … ” - T Rex

Oh God I had it

It was right there, and I had it, but I got pulled away.

I’ll meet that same crossroads tomorrow,

or it may get delayed another day.

Why am I doing this?

Go along, roll forward or rollover?

I keep trying to get it

but it’s taking forever.

Oh God I’ve had it,

show for me once and for all this May

why spend so much time looking

and have nothing to say?

I’ll remember tomorrow

and forget yesterday, if that’s alright

unless something comes up

and catch hold of something

and get swept back into the night.

Hate is a strong word, and I really don’t mean it that way.

I love all music, it’s just that Jazz has an uncomfortableness to it. It’s too much like life. Too many ups and downs and speed changes. Jazz is messy and complicated … like life.

Rock, blues, R&B, and pop command a steady familiarity we can enjoy and be comfortable with. It’s nice to catch on to a catchy melody, or a good beat you can dance to. And really, what’s more steady and comfortable than that old boot, Country/Western - a massively popular style? Okay, maybe that’s too simple even for me … but that’s not to deny the power of it’s basic, comfortable beat.

Some jazz can blend into a nice groove, but it demands too much sophistication and confidence with life for me to like it much right now. To get into jazz, one needs some rarified air to breathe, and zeal to exude. It requires training to quickly get into attack positions, and rip into something. But the air is getting sucked out of life now, and everything is making me uncomfortable, and so, jazz is more than I can handle at the moment.

Not to say I don’t admire jazz. It’s real - and abstract at the same time. The players who play it are the best. They have style, fire, and can deal with the uncomfortable complexities of their music. They seem to handle life like a stone groove, man. They’re copacetic.

Not grumpy old me today. I think I’ll go listen to some Conway Twitty.