"So is it study or is it art?"

The first is a wick drawn by a practiced hand, straight through wax. Patience dipped again and again to fill out a candle's form, layer on layer for length, strength and stability. There is dedication in study, repeated practice like a mantra, mastery a form of devotion. You give yourself and you give your time, your attention. You receive something human-born, earthy, quiet.  

The second is a flame that consumes wick, wax, and surrounding air! A candle flame dies in a bell jar, and roars into life with tinder and a breath of encouragement. The visual artist might dissolve into the canvas as forms begin to take shape, almost unbidden by the hand and unchained from the palette; an author vanishes into the words of his or her characters as they begin to reveal who they are, how they think, how they will act; a poet, into the filaments of meaning that whisper nuance to nuance, from one word to the next, the curry of one sound hurrying to meet its neighbor; a musician into the vibration that is a life born into and borne by the wind; a dancer to the internal movement that shapes and shakes his or her limbs... When you are empty, the spirit arrives; if you ignore it or try to tame it, the spirit departs. If you study art, and unless you stand in the energy of art itself, your study diminishes it.

Is what "study"? Is what "art"? Why, love of course. The question was: when you meet a new love - and it doesn't have to be lover: simply love, for what it is, for where it leads - when you meet new love, do you approach it as you approach yoga (for example), or do you fall into it like an ocean, like art?

I was speaking with a friend during a stolen afternoon, when neither children nor obligation intruded. The conversation wandered; it was a lazy afternoon, and the thoughts could go where they liked, like goats on a mountainside... :) Thoughts as goats, or vice-versa - I love it. We spoke of yoga and of art and of relationships, they all trotted into one goat-pile, and the bleat that emerged was this: when you find yourself opening to new love, do you meet it like an artist - with disheveled abandon, a bag of fritos for dinner (for example) and a demanding brush eager for the next stroke; or as a student, growing stronger and more convinced with each passage learned, or yoga posture tamed, or question answered?

Her answer was "neither". I wasn't so sure, myself. There is certainly the tendency - historically speaking, I notice it in myself, at least - to hold back, the waters building, the dam cracking, until the artist/author/poet/musician/dancer touches fire and the whole world is obscured in steam. Ok, maybe that's a "guy thing", and our little emotional metaphor to much more tangible biology. In any case, I don't think I am dedicated enough as a student to find that creative impulse in my studies, to bring all that good brain-juice like manna to the meeting, to stay balanced enough... or even to want to stay balanced in the first place...

It's like this: I have travelled so much in my life...


Cosmology of Ones

I will have travelled so much in my life
I'd rather miss that travel when I'm dead
and heaven, I think, is much too far
it's the station at the other end of town
and the time already well past midnight

no, I belong here; I remember too much
a flower opens: the scythe weighs my hand
how she whispered: dust blows on the road
which understood the passage of my heart
the loves I gathered like wind-fall fruit

they were the sweetest, and they were enough
if I have wandered, it was earth to earth.

(São Sepé, Brasil)


I have travelled so much in my life, I am adamantly disinterested in tourism; I am not interested in travel, if it means I bring a bubble of myself along for the ride, as a patient with no immune system wraps themselves in plastic so the world cannot touch their skin... if I wander the streets of a foreign town wrapped in Who I Am and unable to be cracked open... now that is no kind of travel for me. These few years I'm given -- oh my goodness! how few they are! -- I wish to live as the unbelievable adventure it is. So: take me to a new place, but only one where the herd of goat-thoughts are scattered, the ego shattered once again, and all my profane architecture cracks to let some new light in. Allow the merging of whatever is other and whatever is myself to polish another facet of being.

That's what love should be.

Now, in afterthought, I agreed with my friend. I don't think Love with that great capital L is one thing or another, yoga or art. In fact, I would like to turn it all on its head, and make Love king or queen, while the rest of this dance is the kingdom. The Indian mystic Osho said that love shouldn't be restricted to a brief physical act where one body rubs up against another body; rather the energy of Love or Loving is the energy of life itself. You should sit in that Love when you walk down the street, when you make your food, when you work... when you meet another.

So how 'bout this: yoga (study) should be infected by love, like the voices of the novel begin speaking for themselves, the colors of the palette merge to become something new, or the guiter string hums with the same vibrant life that a cell or a star contains; and art (expression) should be infected by love, as the monk whose pure devotion keeps him silent in his cell, as those who hunger to know and to grow lean over their books and lean toward their teachers. Art will live if love lives in it. And Study will thrive if love lives through it.

To get the right answer, sometimes you have to change the question...

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