Looking at Art

It's a tricky thing, going sight-seeing with someone.  Some people race through the rooms, hardly stopping to look at anything.  You see them ahead of you, not looking at the objects on display, but looking back at you, their impatience barely contained.  You know that their ultimate aim is to get to the gift shop where they will purchase something that will serve as proof that they had come, seen, and conquered.  I do not judge them.  Who am I kidding... I do judge them. Why come at all, if they can't slow down enough to take anything in.  But then again, who am I to say what is and isn't the right way to go through this world.

Then there are those who wander slowly but can find nothing good in anything they see - you point out something that you like.  "Meh..." they say, pulling their faces and shrugging their shoulders.  You ask them if they liked anything and they say "Not really."  It's very depressing to go sight-seeing with people like that.  I can't help but lose some of my excitement in their company.   Sometimes it's hard to know whether a friend falls in this last category.  Over time I have figured out that these people are excited by relationships, they like to talk about things that happen between people, themselves and others.  They like drama more than beauty.

I used to think that I would know beforehand whether my friends would make good sight-seeing companions.  I realized over time that I was really bad at spotting the racers and the shruggers.  Now I prefer mostly to go by myself.  And why do I go?

I go because going to an art museum is like looking through the windows into a child's doll house.  All the rooms are different.  Art is a window into the artist's house.  When I look in, I can see a slice of who lives there.  But I can also put myself at the window of the room that the artist was standing in when they created that specific piece of art.  I can see what they saw.  And when I am in someone else's house I see things I probably wouldn't have seen from the limited vantage point of my own house.

That is what I like about art.  Not all the rooms I look into, or views from windows I look out from are beautiful or inviting, but most of them are interesting - exactly because they are not mine.

The first time I saw a Georgie O'Keefe painting from up close I was amazed by how the texture of the paint mimicked the texture of flowers when they are seen from up close.  More than anyone else, her paintings tempt me to touch (of course I would never dare) because they look soft and velvety, just like flowers.  As a little child I remember gazing at the flowers in my mother's garden and it felt as if I could never gaze long enough.  I wanted to drink in their beauty.  Little violets and purple irises, roses.  I wish I could see the world in that same clear-eyed way now.  When I look at Georgia O'Keefe's paintings, I think that she was able to see flowers in that unfiltered way that is now mostly lost to me except when I stand in the house her art built.

The Mind-Blinding Vastness of the Universe

My favorite museum is the Museum of Natural History in New York City and my favorite exhibition there is the Scales of the Universe exhibition in the Rose Center for Earth and Space.  Along a 400 ft walk-way you come to realize how very, very big the Universe outside the self is and then, if you reverse course, you discover how very,very big the universe inside the self is.

It was after that exhibit that I truly realized that one should do what makes one happy and that living by society's rules is not the be-all and end-all of life.  How hard do we not work to do what is expected of us... to do what we expect of ourselves?  But we are star-dust spinning in space for not even a billionth of a billi-second (there has to be such thing as a billi-second right?) We could tell ourselves that we do not matter because we are so small but when we look inside ourselves on the atomic level we are each a universe unto ourselves.  We are both infinitely small and infinitely large--- in body and in mind.  What strange creatures who can not understand infinity, but who can understand that there is such a thing as infinity.

Here's a video that illustrates the vastness of the universe (how lovely that the universe (one verse, united verse?) is called the universe.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAVjF_7ensg&feature=player_embedded

Here is the wikipedia link for the word Universe  I never knew that the literal sense of verse is to roll into one.

What is a Good Day?

Some days go by and we accomplish very little.  Today was just such a day.  A snow storm closed the schools and we all stayed home.  What bliss to not have to get up before sunrise!  I had many plans for the day.  I was going to make cookies, crepes, a pot of soup... (when I am hungry I tend to over-estimate what I am capable of).  We were also going to play in the snow, play a game of Monopoly, and have a really good time together as a family.

Almost none of those things happened.  The Monopoly was sabotaged early on by the one person who did not want to play (no names will be named).  The cookies were not made because frankly, I am just really bad at baking. The crepes would have taken too much time.  In the end the soup is all that came of my big plans. 

I can't say that I don't feel a little disappointed that the day passed by in the way it did.  A little frustrated (mostly with myself but also with the rest of my family who seem utterly content lying around all day doing nothing).

I seem to carry a feeling with me of how short our time here on earth is.  Christmas rolls around with all of its hype and work and hooplah and expectations.  But if we are very, very lucky, we will see 100 Christmases.  And 100 is not that big a number.  We live as if we have infinity at our disposal but here in this body, in this place, we do not.

The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on
Nor all thy Piety, nor Wit shall lure it back
to cancel half a line.
                              - Omar Khayyam

This is not meant to be depressing, although, if I think about it long enough, I can surely get depressed.  No, rather, it is a call to live each day as if I am writing it in the book of my life - which I am.

But that begs the question... who says what is the right way to live?  Who says it is more noble or somehow better to bake cookies and play Monopoly than lounge around and do nothing?  Is it really a crime to be idle?  Is the beggar really to be scorned for not making his living in the culturally accepted way?

I don't have the answers for these questions.  Most of us are guided either by our happiness or our sense of duty (and isn't duty a commitment to the happiness of others?).  So happiness and duty are the guiding lights by which most of us lead our lives.  Few would argue that one is more important than the other.  So, is there really something wrong with leading one's life in a way that makes one happy even if it does nothing for other people?  Is there a spiritual contract that we make, in coming to earth that we will try to make others happy?

So many mysteries and so few answers.  But I think I will let it be.  The day was what it was.  It was neither good nor bad.  It is only my thinking that wants to label it.

At every moment in time we create our own reality.  We can not control other people and we can not fully control what happens to us, but we can control how we choose to think about things.

On a different note, Quinten asked me what I was doing and I explained to him that I was writing a blog and also what a blog was.  This is his contribution to the blog today:

How to be happy if you are 7 (thoughts by Quinten)

If you have a trampoline, you should go and jump on it.  


If bad things happen to you, you should take a pillow and let your anger out, or if you have a punching bag, you should use that. 

Good Writing

Once in a while you find yourself at a little lake with a couple of hours to kill.  And while you slowly contemplate the possibilities---should you skip stones, go for a walk, lie down in the sun---you see a rowboat tied up to small dock.  I prefer to imagine the rowboat as smallish, big enough for two people at most, old, with peeling red paint and wooden oars.  Perhaps there is a name on its side in in faded gold lettering but from this angle of my imagination I can't see what it is.

So you decide to take the little boat up on its invitation.  You idly splash around the lake for a bit and the times passes by pleasantly.  After a while you think that you had better start heading back, but just as you have that thought, you suddenly see a little outlet where the water from the lake seems to flow away into a little stream.  You row closer and you look down the river but it disappears around a bend and you can't see very far down it.

Then you deliberate with yourself.  Should you investigate further?  Soon it will be time to go home.  If you spend the time to find out, will it be worth it?  Perhaps around the bend the river turns into a murky morass.

But something urges you on and you decide to row down it, just a little bit, just to see what lies around the bend.  And so you go, and, oh, happy day, you find that it's a perfect kind of river.  Not too slow, not too fast.  A gentle current where you want to look at the river stones and faster when you've had enough of that.  It leads you past the most interesting little alcoves and trees and rocks and makes you forget completely about everything but the moment.

A good piece of writing is like a little river.  It can transport you to places that you don't normally go.

Anyway, the following essay was just such a piece of writing.  It took me on a delightful journey and fulfilled completely my wish for a little relaxation and adventure.

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**********************Marking The Self**************
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