Channeling the Artist

 The eccentric artist is one of the most beautiful archetypes I have had the pleasure of observing in our collective psyche. He is a philanderer, making love to life so deeply, exploring each nuance of a crevice that is his art to the deepest depth possible yet having no commitments.

If one must go deep or high, they cannot travel with a lot of weight. 

He is a nomad, where each village he encounters is a temporary bastion. A place to sell his wares from the adventure he has been on. His travels are sacrifice in the purest biblical sense. he travels not only to sate his own curiosity. No. There is a deeper purpose, a dharma to his journey. 

Each step of his life, each movement of his feet, each stoke of his brush, each key he presses on his keyboard. Each movement of little perfection is also a movement of truth, of sacredness. It is not mere curiosity that drives him, but the very flow of existence. 

No less can he be forced to pursue excellence in his art than a wave be stopped by the water. 

Finding new conceptions, new ways to think about things. Thoughts, ideologies, opinions, movements and anything material is just another tool for the creative, to make love to life in another interesting position. Pure Maya is what he observes, as he contemplates the essence of truth and lets the divine feminine unfurl itself. What life shows to him is divine revelation with intrinsic authority. His art is but a rendition of the truth he has absorbed.

The creative is like a sponge for the truth. And suffering. His heart must be open, as much as his hands are skilled. The suffering of the world, creates its own passion. The need for excellence. The need for one to be a reminder to humanity of the potentiality for perfection that lies dormant in us. The refinement of his skill is just a process coming into being which can happen no other way. 

What the creative must fight against is the fear. Not of his own faculties, for they shall expand to fill, nay overflow whatever comes through him. What the creative must fight is the conceptions of finitude in human society. It is a divine war perhaps, and his step must be thunderous enough and his presence regal enough to envision and at the same time establish that higher authority. Society celebrates his candor but he pays it no heed, for he has no choice but to say words laced witih the most hypnotic truth he has seen. For he is deathly afraid of not having spent everything he has been given. Of not peering into the deepest abyss, of not having seen the most effulgent truth life has to offer. 

Life is creativity. filling, Overflowing brimming playfully at every corner. It is the seductive curve of a woman's body, the beautiful ray of sun falling on a leaf, the coolness of a raindrop hitting your palm, the texture of dirt as you rub it on your hands, the smell of petrichor. As one watches and lets it reveal itself to him, it flows and flows, and fills and fills. Leaving you full, with nothing but a gasp and childlike wonder. Wondering where these words came from, where the beauty around you came from. Like a clueless chlid is adorable, so too is the good natured human being. But the creative takes it a step further. 

Stepping foot into the unknown, forging his own stories, his own pathways. Staying in perfection and silence as the movement of life grows ever more intense. Letting it flow through him and selfishly picking out the pearl that is most beautiful to him. A hardened innocence, a subtle discipline. That to me is the nietzschean creative soul. An overflowing dionysian creativity. And this is my love letter to that archetype. 

Namaste.