Clouds and Kindness

These clouds have appeared as gifts of tumultuous beauty throughout the past month at precisely the right moment, reminding me that Life has an...

"...uncanny way of showing up at exactly the right moment to summon you below the surface of your life."

~Kim Rosen

The above quote is how Kim Rosen describes the poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye. You can read an interview between Kim and Naomi here.

Her poem, Kindness has touched me to the core this evening. Kindness is the one thing that we all need to give and receive more of. Perhaps it is all that is left after everything else has been stripped away.

 

Kindness

By Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride

thinking the bus will never stop,

the passengers eating maize and chicken

will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho

lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,

how he too was someone

who journeyed through the night with plans

and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

It is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend.

Violent Beauty

Violent Beauty / 24" x 40" / acrylic & mixed media on canvas / 2011

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?

and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,

and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.

~Rainer Maria-Rilke

Rilke Poem, Music and Painting

A video collaboration between Detlef Cordes in Germany and myself, here in Canada. Detlef is a talented musician, poet, writer, philosopher and thinker. I love the way Detlef combined the music, words, birdsong and urban sounds to create a distinctive pattern of sounds allowing the images of a painting in process to unfold, much as a tree unfurls it's new leaves every spring to the passing seasons.

My life is not this steep hour,
Where you see me hurry.
I am a tree in front of my background.
I am just one of my many mouths,
and the one that closes most early.
I am the silence between two tones,
which do not ease into each other lightly:
as the sound "death" likes to rise.

But in the dark interval they reconcile,
quivering
And the song stays beautiful.

~Rilke translated by Detlef Cordes

Transition Exhibition

                                 work in freefall

                                 she jumps, and your heart 

                                 floats like a lost tri-leaf,

                                 shuddering on fall winds

                                 valkyrie cries slash icy air,

                                 flap of wings unfolding,

                                 flames fill burnt heavens

                                 cliff face glows iridescent

                                 black white droplets burst

                                 radiant splatters of blood.

This is a piece I have worked on for months and months.  This is the first time I have integrated the poetry of Jim Larwill into a painting.  You can't see the words in this photo but they move down the silver-blue line and up the red flame.  I like how the words invite the viewer to come closer and move into the work's movement of vertical heights and depths.

It is most appropriate that this is the piece that I am including in our group exhibition entitled "Transition".   As I learn to get out of my own way and paint more from intuition and heart, strange and sublime archetypal energies are released.  I don't want to scrutinize this piece too much cause it says what it needs to say in image, colour, movement, texture and poetry.  I can tell you that my own cancer and the cancer scouring our planet is a big part of this piece, as is the so called healing through burning and radiation.  

As the beat poet John Giorno says, "You gotta burn to shine".  

One of the definitions of Transition is:

Physics - a change of an atom, nucleus, electron, etc., from one quantum state to another, with emission or absorption of radiation.

CHANGE, passage, move, transformation, conversion, metamorphosis, alteration, handover, changeover, segue, shift, switch, jump, leap, progression; progress, development, evolution, flux.