to touch the world gently
David Byrne says that "Beautiful insights, marvels, and miracles lie everywhere, peacefully awaiting a gentle touch".
The act of making is one way to touch the world gently. To bring to it the caress of awareness and recognition. A practice that awakens our ability to notice our closeness, our proximity, our connection to everything. It allows us the space to recognize that we are never mere passive observers, but instead, that we are always-already actively engaged participants.
The "World," says Rollo May, "is the pattern of meaningful relations in which a person exists", and though "It has objective reality...it is not simply that." The "world", May says, "is interrelated with the person at every moment" in "A continual dialectical process [that] goes on between world and self and self and world". A dynamic, reflexive, reciprocity.
Making provides us with opportunity to recalibrate our retinal relationships. To see and re-see the light and wonder of the world with sharp sensitivity. And to communicate with clarity and fine detail the beautiful strangeness of the mystery that breathes into the dust of our being.
P.S. ICAD Day 343-346 - all featured collages can be purchased here.
,, we are all ghost here - that particular one stopped me ....
I like that collage titled: "we're all ghosts here" - especially fitting on today's topic of your post. by making things like art and literature, we get to see that "beautiful strangeness of the mystery that breathes into the dust of our being." you mention. Well-said and I feel like a ghost sometimes, timeless and seeing the past 'me' as well as the 'future me.' Perhaps they are the ghosts? Interesting.