NO WORDS FOR TAO.

On Fri, December 13, 2013, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

'If you want the truth, just be honest.'

Artistically, i like to express what's currently emerging in consciousness. Especially when i'm aware of having nurtured its gestation within for quite a while.

That's a helpful tip for when you don't know what to create. But then, why would you express anything other than that?

I just now completed my painting called QUEST IN THE WET. One of many images from a four hour ramble in the rain which bandjaxed my new camera.

I'm self prompted to share what's in the picture from a subjective point of view, which of course was the motivation for painting it.

It's a worn out cliche that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." How would you know where it was? It depends on what aspect of beauty you're referring to. Otherwise it's just a matter of opinion, as everybody sees their own subjective orientation.

Talking of the Orient, Chinese traditional artists understood this better than most. Because there was a spiritual yardstick to measure excellence.

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then the Tao, an aesthetic intuition which is beyond description and can only be discerned through feeling, is in 'the eye of the heart.'

It's in the nature and essence of such non-things that, any description is only a signpost, whereas showing, is sharing.

Perceptions are diverse but essence is universal, being intrinsic throughout all natures.

Nature and naturalness is an indispensable key. Naturalness being the exact way nature does what it does, naturally. Human nature being in no degree separate from all else.

Except that human nature is seemingly the only aspect of it that is able to lose the plot of what exactly is natural, with naturally disastrous consequences.

The glitch is in thinking. When you think about how to be natural on purpose you've already deviated from nature, or so it seems. While if you had never thought about it at all you may well be deviant none the less.

It's not something you can do. Any more than you can just decide to become enlightened, as if it were something other than what is. But it can be discovered when you're not trying to be purposeful on purpose, which is just faking what you already are.

That's why creative art is important, as an area where you can discover or inadvertently uncover the nature of naturalness, which is only natural after all. Though the same applies to any activity.

So to improvise a few random artistic signposts... Look into nature not just 'the view', that's only everything relative to you.

Tao, as the art in nature, is not just careful and not just random. It's both, and neither, but always 'organic', as it flows flawlessly, artlessly, according to its nature. The beauty we sense in nature is that genuineness can't be faked, flawlessness can't be improved on and why would you want it to be?

Anything, when regarded as it is, in it's own unique distinctive character has intrinsic magic. Mundane manifest mystery and meaning which refers to nothing but itself in its just-so-ness.

We distract our attention from 'qualities of perception' when we focus solely on the practical significance something has for us.

Blurring the shades of meaning discerned through feeling, calling them irrelevant sensations.

We are habitually accustomed to dealing with things man-made and converting what just grows that way into useful artifacts. True 'materialism' respects the unique nature and process of natural material.

The Chinese word 'Li' refers to flow pattern such as the grain in wood. Similarly, in Japan, a Haiku poem is likened to a whorl or knot in the grain, a 'concentration of language.'

The hand with a brush for a mind dances, tuning in, follows the weave of invisible blueprints. Every nuance speaks shades of meaning. Random rightness startles formless mind into neural pathways synonymous with fractal networks of branch twigged foliage.

Even rocks are alive and hum in uncalculated tones of resonance.

Grey crag rock wrinkle grained. Stern root grasp fibres form and flourish. Fields fall fallow or farmed, clay clod crusts fertile and furrowed.

Exponential wiggles inscribe elemental rhythms everywhere and no matter where they fall, nothing is ever out of place. Serpentine spiralling swirls on slow river's surface.

Ripples fluently never make mistakes, true to the nature of water, always find the most conducive way down. The Tao is 'the watercourse way.'

There is a weave which flows through all things and happenings, greater than the things themselves. Being in itself nothing in particular but just the way of things.

Many words are used to distinguish 'things' one from another, by virtue of one another, but the all inclusive way itself is therefore ever beyond all such classification.

The way is that from which it is impossible to deviate.~

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Rainbowmaker.

Artwork:
        Like A Tapestry, martin law, Dec 2013
                 Quest In The Wet, martin law, Dec 2013
                        Druidic Shrine, martin law, Jan 2014