The Art of Life

You are painting. Your images are everywhere in the room - on the walls, floor, and canvas. You are working slowly now, but you remember making some of them in a feverish burst. The room has your smell. You feel like there is someone watching you work. You don't know how you got here or why but you feel the need to create. You want to make something beautiful right now, and sometimes you want to make other things. You remember watching others paint, in a room with familiar smells. They are gone now and you don't know where they were or where they are. Maybe you painted over their work. You can remember looking at it and making a stroke. You remember a sense of loss and of excitement. That feeling comes out in the expression on the face of the child as your fingers dance on the canvas. As you draw her eyes you feel that she is watching you. You remember opening your eyes and looking up. There was color everywhere. You are in the moment of your work.

For all of the rules that we make and for all of our ego and self-importance, we will never know anything. When we are bored, this makes us feel particularly lonely and we make up stories to keep ourselves company. Time changes the meaning of stories, and like children we are easily distracted.

The very simple truth is that we are inspired by the things we see around us, and we in turn re-form what is around us by our reactions to this inspiration. Our reformations in turn inspire those that come next. In a cosmic sense life is art. In our human gallery there are dark periods and light ones, and some bright threads that connect them all. From the the first spark of life until the end of the universe, it is one great mosaic of continuous performances. Perhaps it is not meaningful, but it is our exhibition and you are part of it. Part of why we long for God is the great desire for someone to appreciate this, our collective masterpiece.