Sky Art

Magical Clouds

First, I make the art..

Next, I try to figure out what it means...

Today I have created for you, 

magical clouds!

Clouds mean sky.

Sky means air.

Air means what you cannot see, but you need.

Art means what you need to see.

I’ve got a new art installation. It’s about that half of the picture we usually ignore, the sky half. All day we obsess about all things worldly, all of the stuff and things of getting around, and doing what needs to get done, but in so neglecting the the other half of our reality, we are missing out.

Just even the ever changing painting that is our sky, is a glory to behold! Not only the colors of sunrise and sunset, but the drama of the great majestic day star dancing in and out from the clouds, the starry sparkle parade in the night, and the daily changing of the perfect moon. And then there are the rainbows...

So I celebrate the sky. I am Mountainskyrainbow. Sky is my middle name. First I did rainbow. Then, I did mountain. Now, I am doing sky.

Sky is an important arena where the problem of global warming and climate disruption are taking place too. Air is mostly sort of invisible to us, detectable by what it does, like moving the clouds around. So my newest unit of art is another modular, moveable, play-with-able, installation.

 About Sky.

You can play with the pieces, moons and suns and stars and clouds. Our thoughts are like air, invisible until their effects are seen in the way things are happening. Maybe people can dance a circle dance with the clouds; or a sun or a moon. 

What will happen with our worldwide climate emergency depends on how we change our thoughts, in the sky of our mind, including our shared implicit beliefs. Here on earth I wonder what the people will decide to do with the pieces in their hands now...

An afterthought to this piece: pieces! Each of us holds a piece of the commons, a right to stand under our common sky, a piece of the game of fixing the common ground. I make some game pieces, tokens. Tiny hand held sky shares. Pocket sized reminders of the job of the day.

I wonder when we will start taking care of our sky, our atmosphere, instead of scribbling on it like kids.

On Gold

Gold!

Gold, the metal, is not universally loved. Gold the metal has been the cause of countless disputes between humans because it is useful and rare, and because we have used it as money across the centuries. Plato warned that all the gold in the world was not worth exchanging for virtue. Kahlil Gibran calls pitiful those who turn their dreams into silver and gold. 

Gold the metal is not inherently all that valuable. The Spanish conquistadors were astonished that the American Indians used it casually and gifted it freely. Several Earth masses of gold are said to have been manufactured by an interstellar collision observed recently.

Mining gold usually creates a toxic mess.The  Rumplestiltskin story comes to mind when you see the cartoon image of a little fellow who is sitting on top of the world with a spinning wheel, proud he has spun all of the worlds’ resources into gold. “Now what do I do?” he wonders. 

In ancient Tibet, powdered gold is tossed to the wind as an offering of renunciation from worldly attachments. Many other holy places humans have built are adorned with the amber colored metal. Perhaps we wish to redeem the negatives associated with gold by donating it to the community place.

The malleability of gold, the metal,  gives it usefulness in creating so many of the accoutrements of modern life, including the device you are reading this on, which contains gold. Gold is the play dough of metals, soft, conductive, easy to use and form.

But we can’t quite dismiss the color, gold, as just another yellow. 

It shines! It reflects light plus it adds warmth. 

The connection to sunshine cannot be dismissed.

There is no denying the beauty of gold. 

Artists employ it to create a sense of beauty and grandeur, people have been banging it into adornments for the body practically forever, and it is a status symbol to use and possess.

My favorite source of the color gold is sun glitter, or the sunlight that is reflected on water. 

I love the golden diamonds sparkling in the morning dew. 

When something is of extraordinary value, we say it is as good as gold. 

A very glorious person is called “golden”.

Another symbolic meaning of gold is purification.

 Jesus tells his followers to get from him gold that has been “tried in the fire”, referring to the process of refining gold from ore by burning away all that is not gold.

Use gold to explore your feelings about wealth, attachment, royalty, sunshine, and beauty.

I wonder if and when we will ever return gold to its place of just being beautiful and useful.

Seeing Red

Seeing Red

"If you can't make it good, make it big. If you can't make it big, make it red." - an art joke, possibly by Paul Rand

Red is the original color. 

The first color that we humans tend to give a name to is red. 

Red is for beginnings. 

Red is basic.

Red is the longest wavelength of light we can see. 

Below this frequency, we begin to literally feel red, as heat.

“Red is such an interesting color to correlate with emotion, because it's on both ends of the spectrum. On one end you have happiness, falling in love, infatuation with someone, passion, all that. On the other end, you've got obsession, jealousy, danger, fear, anger and frustration.”   -Taylor Swift

Red gets our attention! Like when we are bleeding. Red is primal. Red feels close and physical. Red is decisive, proactive, and assertive. Red says comfort and security, but may also threaten aggression. Red seems to have universal appeal, appearing in every land in flags, costumes and traditions. Red is included in almost every color system, game, and model. It’s not the most visible color, that would be orange, yellow, or bright chartreuse. Red can stand for danger, warning. Red is a traffic stopper. Stop lights are red, and red is used in many road signs. But everyone notices that red is striking.

Red can mean sexy, red can stand for love, as in valentines. Pinks and purples can also be sexy or signify love, but red is more definitive, somehow more serious. 

Pink flowers are nice but red ones leave nothing to the imagination. 

Like sex, red is used extensively in advertising.

Red is an attractive food color, unlike blue, which is pretty much the worst color for food, unless it is used as a plate for contrast to make the food look more orange! 

Women tend more to like a red with more pink; men prefer a red with with more orange, but red is considered culturally acceptable for both to wear. A stereotypical woman may wear a red dress, a man might wear a red sports car or team uniform, but no one wants to be left out of red. 

Red and blue are the two most popular colors, with red being more emotional and blue being more cerebral. We currently call democratic majority states blue, and republican states red. Interestingly, brain scans show that liberals form their political opinions with their rational thinking mind, whereas conservatives are more emotionally influenced. Blue for cool calm decisions, red for hot feelings. But no matter what your political leanings may be, unless you are colorblind, we all respond to red.

You can use red light for illumination at night if you don’t want to lose your night vision because it won’t cause the pupils of your eyes to constrict as much as full spectrum light. But if you want to reduce your light exposure in the evening so your body won’t shut down its production of melatonin, red is not the actual best frequency to use, because red has a bit of blue.

The opposite of blue, orange light, is better.

I have noticed that red flowers tend to bloom in the heat of the summer, rather than at the edges of the blooming season, the spring or fall, when we see more yellow or purple flowers blooming.

Use red for feeling grounded, safe, confident, and strong. Make sure you want to get attention, because you will.

“More than any other color, red is loaded for action” -Robert Gen

Food Quality

On the quality of my food:

I would choose carefully when choosing my words, my steps, my goals and intentions.

So why not also my food?

And when I choose what I shall eat, what will my criteria be?

Pleasure, obviously, evolved in us for a reason, which presumably indicates valuable nutrients. 

But this one all by itself is tricky, for food products have been designed to fool your pleasure centers. 

Many people choose food by the price they have to pay for it. 

Again, tricky. Do we mean the dollar amount today? What about the cost to the environment and thus, in the long run, to us all, of degrading our shared common support system?

Do we mean the cost to our individual health in the future?

 This is a wise question to start with. Then we might ask how to align this with the greater good of our neighbors, and then the healing of the already frayed fabric of nature around us. Good questions.

If one must drink dirty water for a day to survive in the desert that is one thing. Otherwise there are many choice points. We must not try to live in a food desert, unless we can create an oasis there, full of good fresh natural food. Get out of that desert!

You, a noble child of the Earth, do not deserve to scrabble around on a dry, toxic desert, (unless, of course, that is what we, the humans from Earth, turn the planet into!)

Then there is our irrational food taboo programming. 

Why do humans create so many weird food taboos? My guess is that cultures overlay their rules onto the scaffolding of an instinct already hardwired in us. We evolved to remember, really well, the thing we ate that made us sick. To share this information with our tribe mates, this was codified later into food taboos.

So I propose new, rational food taboos. 

How about we just don’t create and sell food that is bad for people and our environment?

     “I started being vegan for my health, then it was for moral reasons, and now it’s just to annoy people” -overheard joke

Here are my food rules, for your consideration:

If it (they) would rather run, swim, or fly away, don’t eat it (them).

If I can find it organically grown, buy (support!) that kind. 

Keep it in its most whole, fresh (in shell or peel, whole grain) form until I eat it.

Lots of raw food.

Try to find things to eat that are in season and grown nearby.

Eat only when hungry, and not too much. 

It’s better to fast than eat poor quality food.

Better to eat less good quality food, than more poor quality food.

I try to eat food only six hours a day, at mid day, to give the body a rest.

“I think; therefore I’m vegan”- author unknown

Gratitude and Struggle

Two ways of proceeding, two attitudes, two paths...

I am not saying we should just accept injustice. We ought to speak up when we witness injustice, in person and even if we simply know about it. In this world of the twenty four hour news cycle, that means all the time. And if fighting in the political arena invigorates you, do it!

“So keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't forget to have fun doin' it. Be outrageous... rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through celebrating the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was!” 

― Molly Ivins

But it is tough going, except for the talented few, to work for freedom and justice by contending. Often the process is exhausting for everyone and only strengthens the grip of each side on their own point of view. Still, sometimes the only way to resist is to fight, and I, for one, am grateful to those who have gone before and fought for my freedom.

I am grateful that I have the freedom and leisure to think and write about this. Sometimes we get so angry, even for a righteous cause and on behalf of others, that we forget about the very positive things we do have going for us. 

More often, naturally, we get the most upset about slights to ourselves by others. It becomes a distressing syndrome. We walk around ruminating on points of unfairness. We are all too aware of it because we pour our precious divine gift of attention into our angry thoughts. Then we transfer our smoldering resentments to the surrounding world and walk around like ticking time bombs, waiting for events to confirm our negative expectations. 

This line of thinking leads to making political presumptions based on fear or scarcity, which cause us, en mass, to make bad decisions.

But this erroneous cascade has an antidote. Naturally we have evolved to avoid danger so we exaggerate the importance of the negative aspect of things. So we have to seek the good and pay our precious attention to it.

Gratitude works. This Great Attitude fills us with a feeling of well being and empowers us to do something about problems. If we remember that the great and small things we enjoy daily  are a gift, we get a bounce. An urge to share, to give back, to keep it going, to pass it on. It connects us.

Let us begin to count our blessings. Recent books point out that in many ways, more people are doing better in measurable ways than ever before. Just to use one example, while the technologies that create wealth by doing more with less that have been steadily raising the standard of living globally in recent times, even though the money system efficiently distributes most of the money to the elite, most people are doing better on the current crumbs than the previous crumbs dropped by the greedy men. 

There is a true wealth in the ability to communicate, to access the knowledge of all the other people, and this is more or less freely shared now on the web. This free wealth is a true game changer. The sharing of our knowledge freely is leading to more tangible sharing as well. Sharing is now a thing.

People are routing around obstacles by helping one another remotely, often bringing very close up results. We are swimming in this bonanza right now like tadpoles, getting our bearings in the new pond full of all of us. Most of it is, like in the precyber age, wasted flailings about, undirected, silly, and even all the bad things are starting to figure out ways to cause trouble there too, but still:  we are way underestimating how great of a gift it is to be connected at the speed of light.

We seem to take it for granted that all the wisdom of the ages is at our fingertips. 

We shrug off the security of traveling with the power to summon help in an instant.  We have the magical power of smart maps to guide us through the mazes we have built, to warn us of dangers on the way in real time, to help us find food, shelter, friends, and any other thing in the world. 

Then we even dare to complain about how much others like their little pocket sized glowing magic rectangles.

I feel so grateful that my present self has this gift. Because of it, I feel so much more wealthy and well than my previous self, who lived in the days before we all were this connected. It is a wealth and richness of one another. So I have hope that we can build on this platform of connectedness to take care of one another and solve our problems.

“The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness.” -Dalai Lama