A RITE OF SPRING

On Friday, March 27, 2015, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

Inspiration is a bit like fishing. Though i’ve never caught a fish, haven’t tried, preferring to leave them in the water where they’re in their element.

 

Although, as with fishing, you can’t grasp inspiration head on, you have to wait. It’s a receptive non-pursuit like meditation, waiting without waiting, just be fully present, what else can you do?

Any other way is artificial and only results in artifice (arty fish), and the art of art is the avoidance of mere artifice. You can of course be present but not fully aware, but even so, your unawareness is fully in the present, where else could it possibly be?

Tangentially, though indirectly integral to the present narrative, when i put peanuts out for the small birds, the ever watchful rooks usually swoop in and dominate the situation and i’ve tended to deter them to give the small birds a fair chance.

So for a change, thinking to get a few close up photos of their impressive blue-black bold-beaked presence i put the bait out on the path especially for them.

They did arrive, but very tactically, and knew exactly what i was at, despite me being indoors. Timing their swoop, retreat, and apparent absence perfectly. Instinctively millennially wise to the ways of humans and our predictable tricks.

Though they may well have provided me with a preferred alternative game to fishing, as well as a potential new source of artistic inspiration. These birds are so aware and one-with their surroundings that they must have eyes and ears in every part of their being.

The preceding few paragraphs plus the photos are a unified experience, succinct and complete as a momentary happening. While, in the hours since, engaged in social activities, namely market day, i’m still left wondering and wordless as if still fishing for its artistic significance.

It’s not as if the process goes ahead all at once like some caricature of what we may imagine the process of making art to be like. Actually it’s quite the opposite. Typically, before i can do something new, the path i thought i was on runs out, as if into a thicket. Going nowhere, now-here, and happens without fail, except fail is what it feels like.

This could be quite daunting and usually is, for a while, but for the fact of it always having been so. There’s quite obviously a principle at work here.

Though with hindsight, undiminished trust in unknowing and a guiding aspiration, contemplation, preparation and application, well, who knows? It’s all an experiment anyway, and only as serious as we choose to think it is. To anybody else it doesn’t matter at all.

So i’m always somewhat relieved when i come round to embracing the fact that i haven’t a clue, all i can draw is a blank. Just another blank in a long series of blanks, all the way back to before the dawn of relative maturity, and until this eternal now, couldn’t even envisage sitting down to put words to it. How do you describe a blank?

Yet, there’s the way through the wood! How can you find a new way if you don’t lose the old one? The snake sheds its skin, the phoenix rises from the ashes, spring springs eternal, and the crusty crystalized caterpillar emerges as a beautiful butterfly.

So, i do have a clue, i was moved by something. “So now”, says the higher self (not as if that’s somebody else), “what exactly is it that’s so moving about it?” That’s where you start to focus in on actual perceptual impressions which otherwise may have been gone in a flash, a blank without trace.

Though the way those big blue-black bold-beaked birds so majestically took off on an instinctive instant, they clearly own the unalienable right of spring. ~

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Martin Rainbowmaker