Stop and Hear the Flowers

. . . and smell the music.






For a ticket price of approximately $100.00, one can attend Boston's Symphony Hall to hear world renowned musician-violinist, Joshua Bell, play one of the most intricate classical pieces ever written - Bach - with his handcrafted 1713 Stradivarius violin (worth 3.5 million).
For a price of approximately $100.00, one can transcend the minutus details of daily life and immerse oneself in the beauty and the splendor of the sound of art.
For $100.00, one can STOP to smell the music.
But, apparently, without this price attached, one is blind and deaf and dumb and, well, just too preoccupied and busy to actually see and hear and appreciate Joshua Bell play incognito, on a busy Washington DC metro during rush hour.
He played for 45 minutes. Only about six or seven people stopped to take notice, mostly children. His biggest fan, a six-year-old boy, was quickly whisked away by his mother. Twenty people threw money in a till - a total of $35.00. Only one person recognized him. And when Joshua completed playing the six intricate pieces by Bach . . . the familiar sounds of silence (except for the noises in their heads) comforted the ears of the passengers. No applause. No recognition. Silence.
This was all part of a social and marketing experiment by Gene Weingarten two years ago today; January 12, 2007, proving that people will designate one of two identical items as being distinctly better than the other simply because it is packaged or presented more attractively.
Weingarten set the event as an ,"experiment in context, perception and priorities - as well as an unblinking assesment of public taste: in a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?"

Painting Myself into Existence

Finding myself within the stone . . . painting myself into existence . . . such is life . . . such is reality.

After Love, There is Only Art

It is my feeling that the reality in which we live is not real at all. Our struggles, our battles, our wars, our religious beliefs, our political stances, our morals, our societal rules . . . We have been programmed. We have been overcome. We no longer have access to our own minds, our original God-given minds. Everything we feel, see, do, think, is being dictated to us in doses proportionate to our energy. We are helpless pawns in a game of chess played out by something we cannot see. Something we cannot comprehend. Something that the majority of us deny with every molecule of our being; with every vague and distant memory we erase; with every breath we forcefully take; but "it," the invisible transplanted mind, nevertheless, exists. When our suspicions surface as anxiety, extreme discontent, depression, madness, or the likes, we are deemed ill or crazy and our symptoms are quickly sedated . . . masked. I think it all stems back to the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden - a story that has a deep-seeded truth within its core: God (the Universe, our Higher Power, our Creator) gave man and woman everything by bestowing upon (us) the freedom of expression; the powers of co-creation; the God mind. We were once expressions of infiniteness . . . in other words, He gave us art - heart - and it was good. Our hearts and our minds were, once upon a time, ONE in the same with God. Then, the serpent "the foreign being" appeared and offered man and woman a new mind, separate from God. . . the chance (risk) to attain knowledge without having to look to God. "It" led us to believe we needed to find answers to questions that do not and never did exist in the completeness of our original mind. And with that new foreign mind came our first belief: the belief we that are separate, that we possess an individual mind. We based that belief on our newfound freedom (within our new mind) to conjure perspectives, opinions and judgments. We had fundamentally created our ego. And with the ego, came our second belief; self-awareness - we are different. We found ourselves naked and ashamed of our own skin. Then, our third belief; that we are better than . . . God . . . We created arrogance. As creators, we were on a roll. But, it was not our own mind doing the creating, for we no longer had access to our own mind. Subsequently, we kicked ourselves out of the Garden of Eden, and since then we have spent the rest of our time on Earth blaming God or blaming the serpent or blaming ourselves - which is actually our favorite pastime: indulging in self-reflection and self-pity. So, here we are; call us zombies, call us pawns, call us puppets, call us food for thought (the thought of a foreign mind, that is). Call us Pavlovian dogs that cry when stimulated in particular ways, that laugh when stimulated in other particular ways, that fight when stimulated in yet other particular ways . . . and we blindly and so foolishly call ourselves individuals. Our only way to salvation is to release ourselves from the grip of this predatory mind; whether you call it the serpent in the Garden of Eden, or the devil, or societal values, or political beliefs, or religious creeds . . . whatever you wish to call it is irrelevant. What is relevant is the fact it is real, it exists, it is the reality in which we live. "Wake up people! Stop being Pavlov's pets!" Easier said than done, I know. For allowing something else to do our thinking and the rule-making and the moral setting, etc. takes the responsibility off of us and gives us more time to do what we do best; breathe . . . exist . . . pay the bills . . . cry at the horribly sad stories on the news . . . scream out against the war . . . point fingers at Bush or the Pope . . . make it to church on time . . . shop the sales at Nieman's . . . drink another cocktail . . . bitch out the cable man or the grocery clerk or the waitress . . . complain about the high gas prices . . . reflect upon what terrible people we are, you know, all the really important things that affect our lives every day. All the things we deem as real in our lives. But NONE of that is real. None of that is important in the BIG picture - in the grand scheme of life. None of that exists - all that exists is love and all that is real is ART. Art is our only true freedom of expression as creators. It is possibly our last and only link left to our original GOD heart/mind. It is how we express and acknowledge the suppression of our minds. It is how we express the love we are struggling to remember. It is how we express our deepest, most intimate, REAL selves . . . the real selves that we fighting to regain (whether we know it or not) as our own (while engaged in this cold war). Art is our true expression of our infiniteness. In reality, there exists no religion, no politics, no borders. There exists only love . . . and it's purist expression, art. For every painting, for every crayoned picture hanging on a refrigerator, for every symphony and musical composition, for every 5th grade flute concert, for every opera, every ballet, every preschool tap recital, every song sung, every pastry baked, every reduction sauce perfected, for every undercooked cake from an easy bake oven, for every novel never published, for every poem misunderstood, for every floral arrangement on a dinner table, for every variety of fillings inside each chocolate in a box, for every engine ever built to be more powerful than the last, for every scarf ever knitted, for every letter ever written, for every snowman ever rolled, for every angel made by a child in the snow . . . Art is the finest, purist expression of love. Above: Guernica by Picasso depicts scenes of death, violence, brutality, helplessness, suffering people and animals, buildings wrenched by violence and chaos. One might say, this does not look like an expression of love and I say to that; this is the highest expression of love for this is the TRUTH. This is the reality we have chosen with our free will and the subsequent loss of our original God minds.

The Things We Leave Behind

Last summer,
while walking
along the shore
of Lake Michigan,
I came upon a gifted sight;
a face carved in the sand.
I thought it was rather spectacular.
So simple and so mysteriously complex at the same time.
Kind of artsy.
Kind of philosophical.
The tininess of each grain of its sand.
The vulnerability of its form.
The certainty of its ruin.
And yet, it was lovely and unaffected.
The ideal way to be.
No name attached.
No credit to be taken.
Nothing sought in return . . .
The pleasure of its moment
for both its creator
and its immediate contacts.
It was really a footprint . . . something left behind.
Something beautiful and unselfish.
Something generous.
Something much more significant than the empty bottle of water left behind by someone else just a few yards up.


After reading Jon's beautifully expressed comment, I edited this post to include his words. He is a brilliant thinker and writer. Please visit Jon Zech's blog.
It's a sacrifice of sorts, this sculpture and this post. But there is something more. Your photo and poetic tribute has saved the sandman from destruction; like taking a flower from an alter and pressing it in a book. Is the flower saved or the sacrifice denied?
Both and neither. The sacrifice is completed with its giving. The salvation is completed when the object is raised above its token existence.