Here is an interview with Michael Franti. What an inspiring human being he is!

Technorati Tags: art, hope, Michael Franti, Music, Spirit

Many months ago when I first performed “Bursting” for my friend, I came to the line that says, “Lines and measurements, gridlock to life”, and I saw him flinch. He is an artist. Line and measurement are intrinsic to art, and for that matter I suppose, any moment in this life we are in.

Whether I choose to admit it or accept it or not, I am in this life. I am in this body which is in this skin sitting on this very chair. I do spend my time in certain ways which certainly can be looked at from a myriad of perspectives, but I can’t get away from the fact that perspectives exist and whether you look from this angle or that, you are limited within a point of view.

At least until I get beyond the fear of it all and let the waves carry me. But how do I explain that to myself or anyone else? I don’t know what that means.

Forget that. Love. Focus on the love and it doesn’t matter. The love carries you through the lines and definitions carrying you from limitation to expansion on more and more beautiful waves of experience.

Again, I don’t know what that means. But I won’t try too hard to figure it out.

I have had a real disdain for business. For vocations. But I only have had disdain for vocations because I think of them as business. The exchange of money. I think of it as being a grasping, greedy, cut-throat activity where people are looking at each other as adversaries in the pursuit of survival. An activity which turns people toward hatred and fear. This has been my extremely limiting belief.

I think that this is a point of view that many people share, though. But I have hope that it is changing. I think that it is changing in me. I have always wanted to focus on love. But somehow, putting love into that which makes money has seemed like throwing light into a limitless well to me. Like the light disappears and is wasted. Most of the time, I guess I still believe that. I am just beginning to question that.

It has seemed to me like so many things which are of inestimable value are not valued at all economically. Like home and hearth. Like friendship. Like love. But to start to put a dollar sign on these things turns them into commodities. You shouldn’t have to pay for any of these things. But sometimes I think that these are the things that I truly do have to offer, and because I want to focus my energies on them, I am going to starve. I have been told repeatedly that this is not the case. But I just don’t get it yet.

I wrote earlier about a job that I took on for the past month. It has been one of the hardest and most fulfilling things I have done in my life. I love it. But it doesn’t pay enough to live on. So how do I create or find that which will actually pay my bills and yet be something that can carry all of that love and life that I have to offer?

Maybe as I widen my view and begin to not just accept, but love the lines, variations and spectrums within my own life, life may support me more. To love and accept the light, I need to love and accept each color in the spectrum. To become a part of the flow I need to fall and rise and fall again.

Technorati Tags: art, love, Selling out

I have been hesitant to write lyrics for my songs for a while now. I did write one song with lyrics a few months ago. But usually, I can’t seem to fit what I want to convey into words.

It could be that my level of craft is not up to snuff in my use of words. Words seem too tight. They hone in on a thought. I don’t want my thoughts to be captured that way.

Feels to me like when I try to hone in on a thing, its meaning becomes more elusive. You try to pinpoint a thing and somehow the space grows around it, and it is no longer as definable as you once thought. Like particles. I never studied physics. But I have heard that if you study small “things” on a nano scale called particles, their behavior changes depending on whether they are observed or not.

Maybe it is this rational analytic process of thought which is self limiting. Maybe it just goes in circles after a while. I don’t know. How can I? I may just be going in circles myself.

So I give up. Well, part of the time, anyway. Sometimes I seem to be able to convey so much more when I wail and growl and create my own language and just send my raw emotions through that avenue.

I have a friend who is an artist who encourages me to think outside of the box in regards to my own art. At my friend’s suggestion, I went down to see an exhibition of Xu Bing’s art at the Williams Art Center at Lafayette College in Easton. There is a book there which must be a part of a work called Books from the Sky The piece was created through a long painstaking process of carving small wooden blocks with imaginary Chinese characters and using those characters to print the book I saw and a lot more. The book I saw was put together with rice paper, traditional Chinese binding and water based ink. The book is beautifully crafted, but the characters used are made up. The book does not actually say anything. There were other works there as well, and they all spoke to the relationship between meaning and language.

There seems to be a lot similarity in the different ways in which we humans express. I guess it says something about what it means to be human. Or does it? Sometimes it seems like the shape of a thing on the outside has little relationship with what is on the inside. There is so much to know. Yet, maybe silence will tell me more.

Technorati Tags: art, language, meaning, Xu Bing

This is a discussion that I would like to have with a bunch of you who are out there. I am feeling my way through my own process of creating, what, well, everything that I have an influence on in my life.

Maybe every moment is a piece of art. Every moment intersects form and substance; movement; being. But it usually feels like movement of substance through form to me. Sometimes it feels like form coming down on substance like an encasing prison. Other times if feels like substance freeing up and going everywhere before it settles back down again wherever it will.

I am just playing with this now. Maybe it is best that I just continue to play with it as gleefully as I can without using my serious eyes to place all of the pieces where they “should” be.

What do you all think? Or feel? Or do?

Technorati Tags: art, creative process