Blank

A blank piece of paper or a blank canvas is often a nightmare for writers and painters. As a sculptor, you have it easy, at least you have a chunk of rock or a shapeless lump of clay you can sink  your teeth in. Even photographers have it easy, there's always something in front of your lens, even if that is still out of focus, there is already something of form, color, movement.

Blank, for most people, is something ominous, the feeling of not knowing what to do and not know how to behave. Form, opinion, judgment and emotion gives something to hold on to, even if this grip is scary or improbable, a grip is a grip.
 

As a child I looked under my bed at least ten times before I dared to go to sleep. The folds in the curtain all by themselves became a robber with a dull ax and how ever scary the robber was in my eyes, he had a form with matching emotion and that made it manageable. Later I learned to transform the robber into a giant rabbit with three ears or a fat woman with huge breasts, but it never became the curtain.

Lately, my hunger for blank increased enormously. Not know and to find no support in form of emotion is a sometimes confusingly liberating.

Poem

Will I cast a deaf eye

Will I turn a blind ear

Will me be you and you me

Or will the line be thicker now, broader even.

When does sound become movement

And movement become thought

Is sound the absence of silent’s

Is silent’s all sounds, like white light is all colour

Is awareness the prism where all passes through

To become palatable, touchable, knowable

Is mind but an innocent bystander,

Catching but a glimpse of what the universe offers

All is energy, nothing is without

The driving force,  the binding agent

The what that makes you me and in reverse

change direction and it makes form, sound, touch

What makes energy change direction,

Intention of..

Random action of..

Collision off the line between you and you

Mind will never know or draw the picture clear

But I will try

I´ll try and fail

But I will get close if I can only let the paint brush go

Let colour pass back through the prism into pure white

Containing all motion all love.

No life line

I think we forget from time to time that live is not a linear thing. It is not a straight line from birth, to school, to career, to death. Life and learning is a circular thing, with all lives events polka dotted around in a random order. Mind tells us it is linear, but you know in your core it is not.

The feeling of failure comes from the expectation that life is linear when it is not. That is where a lot of fear comes from, not knowing what will happen next, what your next step should be. If life was linear, as mind wants us to believe, the next step would be crystal clear, clearly visible, for all to see, no doubt possible and easy.

But as it is not linear and it is not clear what our next step should be, we just take a step, a well thought through step or a random one or stand still. The feeling of falling and failing comes from judging one outcome of a step taken being better or worse than another. Our mind has us running in circles thinking life is one straight line. Weighing and judging thinking back and forth and back again.

Because mind firmly beliefs life is linear it cannot see the circles each step makes, like raindrops on a lake. We reincarnate every second of the day or like someone else once said it: “what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly”

Poem

I feel I fall and rudely I awake.
Pillow snug and duvets safe,
heart pounding and mind not clear.
Where am I and what am I doing here?

This jolt, this shaking of the senses,
comes when I drift off, relax of sorts,
at times when I’m blind-sided by the past,
or stumble into a unclear future

Those bumps tell me I was not here.
The bruise I get is now, I’ll hide it.
I failed I feel, I felt into the then and one day,
words of don’t and not me creep in.

I know not to let them creep to far,
weighing me down as they creep along.
I tell them hi and goodbye in one breath
and welcome a new moment to be me.

I Mind - Mind You

When I looked at mind I saw is was a four year old child trapped in a archivist body, stuck in a stuffy archive. It was constantly asking: “why?” and diligently filing away the questions, not knowing what to do with incoming answers. The archivist sorted them out by category: religion – nonsense – science – junk mail all the while the child kept nagging “why?”

I gave mind a pacifier and told it that the answer to “why?” is always “to learn!”. That freed the child and it went out to explore. The archivist now had only one stack of answers and that cleared the mind. The archivist however was not content and needed another category to file things under, for that is what it is there to do. The archivist created a new question: “what?” and took the old stacks religion – nonsense – science – junk mail and was very content it could file things away again.

I pat it on the head and let it be and I go out with the child and explore some more, not bothered with the why or the what.

Who I am? I am you.
 

Frozen full of color

It froze my true being.
Fear did the freezing for me.
It builds layer upon layer in my defense,
cooling down my spirit, slowing down my life.
Fearing the fear and the thaw.

Two things I could choose
Stay within this frozen circle,
or
Look for a hole in the ice.

I looked.
Friction between fear and want.
Friction creates heat.
Heat melts.
Melts the barrier between the me in me and me.
Colorful me, fear free, not fault free.

Poem

How sharp does the line say I’m mountain.
The khaki tells the gray,
here is where I begin and end and here is where I’ll stay

When sunlight breaks through heavy sky
and touches autumn gold,
it tells me, listen friend it is my story too here told.

Then falling leafs disguised as bird
no longer hide the singing thrush.
I gather them where they fell  and play to hear their brush

My life but a circle wide and as deep as I can see,
where heart’s content and cloudless joy
tell the story that is me.