Universal Urge 3/30/09

It is only those who have a deep and real inner life who are best able to deal with the irritating details of outer life.

Evelyn Underhill
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Read on my friend.
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An artist is an artist because he has to be. Science tells us what the facts of life are. Art tells us what they mean. It is the forever, infinite search for those meanings that propel an artist into places that few people know about. It is a window and a door to the invisible truth of our existence. It is an exploration into a cave of an imagination that becomes a reality to anyone awake enough to realize it.

An artist knows what the painting looks like and keeps painting until it looks like that. The composer Hindemith once wrote that he hears the entire composition in his head in a flash, like a bolt of lightening lighting up a landscape, and then he sits with a pen carefully putting musical notes on a page until the score says what the flash of inspiration showed him.

I know the ending of my Brian and Christine story and every day I make inches toward it. I had to stop to do my taxes, but when they were done I was able to pick up writing just where I left off, because the story and the writing of it were the more important things in my head. I don't ask if it is important to the world. It was given to me in a flash. It has to be written.

What that means is that the real deep inner life of someone such as an artist takes the place of the mundane, petty tasks of the day and thus renders them easier to do.

The uncomfortable road some people find themselves on is one where life is defined by those simple tasks. When the deeds are done, then what? If there is no other life going on those people will start looking around for other simple tasks until life is filled up with them, tiredness easily sets in because there is no excitement in doing them and the person has become robbed of the chance to really explore something deeper and more important, some flash of inspiration that reflects off a distant planet from the universal mind into the only mind on earth capable of receiving it.

One doesn't have to be an artist to have "a deep and real inner life." There are deep, intellectual, philosophical, spiritual, technological, natural, scientific roads to travel . There are inventions and discoveries to be made everywhere. The early steps of the journey are to admit that the unseen and unknown are there waiting for you, that you have the right to the discoveries along the way and that pursuing is the joy and not proving anything to the world.

We all live on the crusts of the most sublime wisdom and there is no more exciting place to be,

Vagabond Journeys
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May your light shine bright today.