Life as Art

On the top of a spalted maple bookcase with a stained glass door, I keep a square box of cards. Zen Cards with sayings by Daniel Levine and brush work by Yunn Pann. Flicking though them, looking for one particular card, I found several spoke to me tonight. Mediation. Yes, a reminder I should maintain a closer practice. Patience preceded Peace, preceded Love. A lesson lies in that random order.

The last card in the deck? Balance.

“The center is not always the point of balance. When you find that place where balance is achieved, peace will result in all situations. There is no conflict, for everything rests without strain.�

The card I searched for was missing, no doubt sitting on my desk in my other house down south or left to be seen on another bookcase.

Community. It reads loosely like this. Surround yourself with those you wish to be like and you will become like them.

What is the warp and weft of a community? In many ways the warp is the future unwinding and being pulled from the history. The weft the people living, visiting the community day to day. The pattern of the people, the clack of the hours, the days create the pattern we call history and refer to as community.

How we approach each day, how we decide to interact, how we shuttle daily across the warp of our community determines a pattern as distinctly visible as a traditional overshot pattern on an 8-harneess loom.

Recently I finished The Windshift Line by Rita Moir, a BC writer who lives in the Kootenays up near Nelson. Moving through almost ten years, the small book is contemplative memoir on love, loss, remembrance and perhaps redemption. Much of the book revolves around her father. At the end of each day, her father,–a Calvinist, a Presbyterian–would ask of himself and the family, “What did you do for others today?â€?

What did you contribute to thicken and strengthen the fabric of our society?

As artists, we provide the color, the joy, the sorrow and the hope for many in our community. At the end of each day, we must ask, not what we sold, but how we created something new in our community. That is the value of art.

And thus we become valued. And we prosper.

Prosperity

“Prosperity is not in what you have attained, but rather in what you give away. . .for it is only when you become empty that you can be filled with something greater.