Another brilliant and timely piece! - In my middle 70's now - caring for my elderly life partner through Cancer and dementia these past three years - seemingly a sufficient catastrophe to snuff-out any and all creativity. My studio has become a storage space for the building mess and chaos of home life - trying to keep it all together when I'm only able to grab a few hours of sleep between the endless rounds of care-giving
This Christmas brought magic unexpectedly, in the recognition that my "art" my vocation has become all acts of caring and love - to providing myself as medium to my partner no longer able to navigate the world which has become frightening to him. This awakening delivered me from the exhaustion and feelings of helplessness - that somehow fate was cruel and unfair.
I look upon the body of my paintings....particularly the ones which confirmed my life at a deeper strata, as a legacy of the life I lived previously. Now I step fully into this late phase, not lamenting what is lost, but accepting that another purpose is brought forward for me to fulfill.
Thank you Matt, for your work which serves to reflect the deep reality of Magic immanent throughout the spectrum of life.
Yes, both love and suffering can subdue the ego and serve as a path to the portal. The light and the dark both get us close. I’ve been feeling this too lately.
Yes, but I have tended to focus on the light path and have tried to avoid the dark one (I think you have been fascinated with the dark one for a long time). I'm learning that neither can be truly avoided forever and it's a real trick to transmute suffering, pain into a portal. Integrating the shadow, and all that jazz. This topic has been on my mind a lot lately.
Yes. My attraction to the darkness and its path has mutated and moderated over the past decade. It's both a present reality and, in a real sense, a vestigial artifact. Or maybe more accurate, it has become recontextualized in a broader picture. The feeling is that this was all organic and inevitable.
Wow, thanks, Matt! I'm really enjoying your "thoughts, quotations, and fragments". I already own and have read Lachman's biography of Colin Wilson, which I also really loved. I find Wilson to be one of the more interesting authors, as is Gary Lachman.
Agreed on both counts! Gary seems the perfect biographer for Wilson, what with his symapthetic sensibility, expansive interests (much like Wilson himself), and critical sensibility.
thanks for the shout out. I have been thinking about the cosmic horror as spirituality recently bc it's still missing in psychological treatments of nightmares, to this day, as well as missing in contemporary liberal religious circles that I sit in too. so as usual both science and religion turning away from this vital way of knowing. Awe can be scary. We learn about the cosmos through the tremendum. that's important.
Another brilliant and timely piece! - In my middle 70's now - caring for my elderly life partner through Cancer and dementia these past three years - seemingly a sufficient catastrophe to snuff-out any and all creativity. My studio has become a storage space for the building mess and chaos of home life - trying to keep it all together when I'm only able to grab a few hours of sleep between the endless rounds of care-giving
This Christmas brought magic unexpectedly, in the recognition that my "art" my vocation has become all acts of caring and love - to providing myself as medium to my partner no longer able to navigate the world which has become frightening to him. This awakening delivered me from the exhaustion and feelings of helplessness - that somehow fate was cruel and unfair.
I look upon the body of my paintings....particularly the ones which confirmed my life at a deeper strata, as a legacy of the life I lived previously. Now I step fully into this late phase, not lamenting what is lost, but accepting that another purpose is brought forward for me to fulfill.
Thank you Matt, for your work which serves to reflect the deep reality of Magic immanent throughout the spectrum of life.
That's beautiful, Richard. Thank you for sharing this insight from your current place and experience. Al positive energy to both you and your partner.
Yes, both love and suffering can subdue the ego and serve as a path to the portal. The light and the dark both get us close. I’ve been feeling this too lately.
I know it's a place, a truth, that both you and I are intimately familiar with, Clint.
Yes, but I have tended to focus on the light path and have tried to avoid the dark one (I think you have been fascinated with the dark one for a long time). I'm learning that neither can be truly avoided forever and it's a real trick to transmute suffering, pain into a portal. Integrating the shadow, and all that jazz. This topic has been on my mind a lot lately.
Yes. My attraction to the darkness and its path has mutated and moderated over the past decade. It's both a present reality and, in a real sense, a vestigial artifact. Or maybe more accurate, it has become recontextualized in a broader picture. The feeling is that this was all organic and inevitable.
Wow, thanks, Matt! I'm really enjoying your "thoughts, quotations, and fragments". I already own and have read Lachman's biography of Colin Wilson, which I also really loved. I find Wilson to be one of the more interesting authors, as is Gary Lachman.
Agreed on both counts! Gary seems the perfect biographer for Wilson, what with his symapthetic sensibility, expansive interests (much like Wilson himself), and critical sensibility.
I'm glad you're enjoying these posts.
thanks for the shout out. I have been thinking about the cosmic horror as spirituality recently bc it's still missing in psychological treatments of nightmares, to this day, as well as missing in contemporary liberal religious circles that I sit in too. so as usual both science and religion turning away from this vital way of knowing. Awe can be scary. We learn about the cosmos through the tremendum. that's important.
Thank you, Ryan. Including for all the interesting thoughts and explorations.
i like how you are drawing out into the open, the tension between inner calling and measurable success.
· Salid a cielo abierto ·
( · Come Out Into the Open Sky · )
by Jesús Olmo
· dedicated to Meredith Spearman (Maze to Metanoia) ·
“What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight;
what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs.”
-Matthew 10:27
Come out, come out,
wherever you are,
you watchers of the sudden lights,
you who stood in fields
gone silver and speechless,
you who felt the air thicken
and the hours bend.
Come out, you who saw
what you cannot footnote,
you who heard the hum
beneath the hum of things,
you who woke with your heart beating
like a trapped bird
and no language large enough
to hold it.
Come out,
you keepers of the unsayable.
You who folded your memory
like contraband
and tucked it under years
of ordinary days.
You who learned the weight of silence
and wore it without complaint.
Come out, you who saw their disbelief
before you ever spoke.
You who read the doubt
already forming in their eyes.
You who imagined the careful smiles,
the softened voices,
before a single word
left your mouth.
You who never told,
because you had already seen
the look.
Come out, you rural Ishmaels
of midnight highways,
you apartment-dwellers
of flickering ceilings,
you children who counted stars
that moved
when stars should not move.
They always say
it has to be seen
to be believed.
Well — you saw.
You saw!
Come out, you who built entire lives
around an absence —
around a bright, unmarked crater
no one else would admit
was there.
You who married, worked, aged,
while circling that gravity.
You who called it stress, or dream, or fever —
though you knew,
You knew
it was not stress, nor dream, nor fever,
but something that would not be named —
though it stood in you
like a second spine.
Come out, you who fear the word “crazy”
more than you fear the memory.
You who chose silence over ridicule,
sanity over truth,
belonging over bewilderment,
a steady wage over the risk of being undone,
bread on the table
over the bright ruin
of being disbelieved.
Come out, you who have carried
the loneliness of the unbelievable.
You who became careful,
precise, small.
Come out into the open sky!
Not to prove,
not to persuade,
Not to perform your wound
for the curious.
Come out because what happened to you
happened to you.
Because astonishment is not a crime.
Because terror leaves marks
whether or not
a camera was present.
Because wonder can fracture a life
as surely as grief.
Come out, not as spectacle
but as witnesses.
Come out, not to be judged
but to be met.
Not to be diagnosed
but to be heard.
Your silence was a shelter.
Your silence was a strategy.
Your silence was survival.
But you are not required to live forever
at the edge of your own story.
There are others who have stood
in the same impossible clearing.
Others who have felt time loosen
like a button coming undone.
You are not the only ones
who have looked up
and been looked at.
Come out, you custodians
of the bright unknown.
You who carry both dread and radiance
in the same trembling hands.
Come out into the daylight
where the sky is wide enough
for memory, for doubt,
for fracture, for awe.
Come out,
and let the story —
let the truth —
breathe at last.