“Music really did mean something to him, he realized, and it always had. It called to him, although there were no words to describe what it promised. It was like a secret language he never forgot how to speak, a hometown he could always return to when he tired of what life was throwing at him.”
― Tad Williams
As I write this I am listening to Chasing After Shadows by the band Hammock. I find something about Hammock’s music to be fantastic to write to. Even when there is no music playing externally tho, my life has always had a soundtrack. Whole periods of my life represented by different bands. The Doobie brothers, Lynard Skynard or the Who are my high school years. Listening to Teenage Wasteland energizes me with a flavour of angst… Early adulthood is represented by Rush, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Bob Marley and the police. Jean Michel Jarre and Metallica played out through my thirties. Of course there were many others, a list wouldn’t do it justice. I hitch hiked down the road singing Willie Nelson and Neal Diamond and Cat Stevens. I had sex to the wild bass of club music and serenaded lovers to the Beatles. I found self-expression through the words and melodies in an ever expanding repertoire provided by others that has brought me to equanimity. Friends and family have been there (more often than not) but music has been my most constant companion.
Blessings, G
“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer
I believe that many men do mistake the limits of their vision as being the absolute limits (which is as good an explanation as any I’ve heard for how some of the fundamentalist views I occasionally hear espoused can still be held by more people than I care to think of) but every man? If this was true than the only way that we could expand our limits would be by random chance and never of our own volition. How can you expand a limit that you don’t know exists? It is only because we know that Reality is so much bigger than we can imagine that makes it possible to continue expanding our fields.
Blessings, G
“Life’s an act of magic, too. Claire Hamill sings a line in one of her songs that really sums it up for me: ‘If there’s no magic, there’s no meaning.’ Without magic- or call it wonder, mystery, natural wisdom- nothing has any depth. It’s all just surface. You know: what you see is what you get. I honestly believe there’s more to everything than that, whether it’s a Monet hanging in a gallery or some old vagrant sleeping in an alley.”
― Charles de Lint
Have you had your magical moment today? I have known many people who have times in their life when they are in a pretty dark place. You know where everything looks like 3 PM on the 3rd rainy grey day in a row, smells like sewage and tastes like cigarette ash? I have been there myself more than once. At some point I learned a way to find my way out of those moments and vastly shorten them. I look for and find the magic moment. Oh it exists in almost any situation. It may be the dog or cat making a funny face. It could be the way the sun hits the window. It could even be that you notice an angle on your landlady’s face that’s beautiful even as she’s yelling at you or perhaps you have seen as she walked away that she thought of something that made her happy and smiled. If I can’t see it I look around until I can. There is always something going on outside my immediate self that can make me smile. Perhaps someone is helping another person who shows their gratitude. Perhaps a dandelion is growing in the middle of a parking lot. Collecting those magic moments and sharing them has kept me from wallowing in the grey areas.
Blessings, G
“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.”
― Confucius
Today on my FB feed I saw something that troubled me a bit. A friend reposted a picture of a girl with Down Syndrome that her brother had posted. The brother was upset that the girl did not consider herself beautiful and he wanted to convince her she was. The friend (well acquaintance, you know how these FaceBook things go) demanded to know why people think its ok to lie to others and that the girl knew the truth so why should he let her think otherwise. This struck me as wrong on so many levels. Yes, the fact that aesthetics is subjective is a cliché at best yet even without that being a consideration it occurred to me what a narrow definition of beauty my acquaintance had. I believe that any combination of features can produce beauty. It may be a smile or a moment of strength through adversity that shines in the eye or even sorrow. The prettiest person can give ‘ugly’ looks.
Even beyond people you can find beauty anywhere. A raging fire or gunshots in the night can appear beautiful. A deadly micro-organism seen through a microscope may as well. I don’t know but if its between looking for the beauty in something or seeing a marred surface, I know what I would choose every time.
Blessings, G
“No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
In each moment we are reborn to the person we will become. Both child and midwife, father and mother as every moment before inseminates our awareness of our future being. If its so that As above, so below, than the universe itself is eternally being born. Since each moment leads from the one before, tho we may be strange to ourselves (and definitely to others) we are never as strange as we may believe. What truly matters is being who we are at any given time for that is most becoming.
Blessings, G
“It was a rainy night. It was the myth of a rainy night.”
― Jack Kerouac
We live in a world of myths and we try to keep up. There is the myth of romance and the myth of rain. We have the myth of Christmas and Family Get-togethers and holiday vacations. When most of us encounter any of these things, we have an idea in our heads built up of the past and media exposure and stories we’ve read and heard of exactly what they should be like and feel like. Yet how often are we disappointed when the reality does not live up to the archetypal image in our heads? It may actually be better, bigger and more wonderful yet how easy is it to get caught up in, “I thought it would be different.” Whenever I find myself expressing anything like the feeling of disappointment in those situations, I try very quickly to get past it.
The only thing that I can expect from a rainy night is that it will probably be wet and probably dark. The only thing I can expect from a travelling holiday is I will probably not be at home. After that its a matter of throwing out the maps and models and treat it as something new never encountered before. It is only then that I am truly experiencing it. Would we really want things to be exactly like they are in the brochure with no surprises? Where then is the chance to experience something wonderful that no one else ever has?
Blessings, G
“On soft Spring nights I’ll stand in the yard under the stars – Something good will come out of all things yet – And it will be golden and eternal just like that – There’s no need to say another word”
— Jack Kerouac
What lies untouched
stays pure,
the self behind the curtain
that we are just echoes of
masks, educational toys
that play out these dramas
to us so real
then put away at days end.
So we play our part
yet hear whispers of
life beyond this stage
and wonder
at fantasy’s construction
while discovering our will
and playing it out
as only artists can
our intent to know eternity
made manifest in our toy lives.
— G A Rosenberg
“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”
― Edgar Degas
The other day someone commented on one of my pictures and told me that she had seen a wolf there. I admired her perception and when I looked, I could see it tho I had put no wolf in. This has happened a number of times. People see things in my art that I have not potentially put in. Now it is given that I tend towards the abstract yet this tends to surprise me. On another level it also humbles and gratifies me. People are interacting with my paintings and getting from them symbols that are meaningful to them. When this happens I remember a quote that said something along the lines of “What do I know what it means, I’m just the writer?” I create my images and I pull together both intention and mood from the inside and a variety of materials (stock photos, filters, brush work, etc) and it often feels like a collaboration with the universe. Just because I didn’t put something in does not mean it isn’t there.
Blessings, G
Still time to enter contest for a free art print of your choice:
a) go to the Art Gallery 2013 page (link above)
b) Look through the art I created last year (clicking on the thumbnails gives you a full screen view of the pictures.
c) either comment or message me with your favourite.
d) Somewhere on or around January 15th I will randomly draw one of the entries and the winner will get a signed 12″ X 18″ print of the art they like the best.
“…and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?”
― Vincent van Gogh
Still time to enter contest for a free art print of your choice:
a) go to the Art Gallery 2013 page (link above)
b) Look through the art I created last year (clicking on the thumbnails gives you a full screen view of the pictures.
c) either comment or message me with your favourite.
d) Somewhere on or around January 15th I will randomly draw one of the entries and the winner will get a signed 12″ X 18″ print of the art they like the best.
The Gate by G A Rosenberg 
