Gateway

Reflections Of Light

Acrylic with Mica

10 x 22.5"

 

It's common to say trees come from seeds. But how could a tiny seed create a huge tree? Seeds do not contain the resources needed to grow a tree. These must come from the  environment within which the tree grows. But the seed does provide something that is crucial: a place where the whole tree starts to form. As resources such as water and nutrients are drawn in, the seed organizes the process that generates growth. In a sense, the seed is a gateway through which the future possibility of the living tree emerges. Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future.

I remember picking up this book, flipping open to the first page, and reading the above passage, I felt as if an electrical current had passed through my body and I knew I had to read this book.

The authors, Peter Senge, C.Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworksi and Betty Sue Flowers meet for a year and a half probing how a new theory about change can improve our world. 

 

Letting go is a big part of their conversations. Letting go of our own perceptions of how things should be, our invested egos, our desire to control. When we can do that we experience a shift of thinking, a collective consciousness, which allows us to become the gateway for the possibility of change. Tibetan Buddhism call this "wisdom awareness".

As I read these two words I realized, as children we were inherently wisdom aware. There was no separation between us and "them", no separation between us and our  environment. It was only as we grew and learned to speak that we were taught the labels of all things and we began to separate. 

 

As artists, we are naturally wisdom aware when we are in the midst of a creative session. All time stops and we are so unaware that we become supremely aware. It is in those magic moments when we become the gateway through which our art emerges.