I’ve been moving and packing.  The end of the process is in sight now!  Just a few more months.  It’s been hard to not be able to paint!

I just began reading “Unfolding Through Art” once again and continuing my initial intention of journeying through this book as a meditative exploration.  As I mentioned before, this was a suggestion from one of my classmates in one of my classes on Spirituality and Practice.  It is a bit of a quirky book.  It is full of not all-together Politically Correct vocabulary and opinions – the author has strong opinions on almost everything.  Just a heads up for other would-be readers.

Yet, I find fascinating insights that I’ve not encountered before, so I sift through my reading and will persevere with it, sharing what I find along the way.  I need to make it clear that by doing this, I am in no way agreeing with all of his views.  Like each and every one of us, our words will become dated and reflect the time period from which we wrote.   It can be as progressive as our historical time period comprehended and maybe even ahead of our times, but not on everything, and hopefully future generations will read our writing with a similar sense of tolerant forbearance.

Two conflicting ideas come immediately to the foreground as I read the next set of chapters.  First, according to Namgyal Rinpoche, Teilhard de Chardin observed that freedom stems from complexity.

“Freedom comes from the senses operating fully in a variety of experiences.  Teilhard de Chardin said that complexity is freedom, not complexity of the intellect, but quantum variety of experience.  The only talent to develop is to become introduced to more complexity through the senses.”

This perspective on freedom kind of goes against the grain of what we’ve come to appreciate as simplicity’s sophistication.  “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” – Leonardo da Vinci.  Being sophisticated in the dictionary definition is about having a breath of experience and appreciation for complexity.  Both concepts and positions are correct in their own right, that’s (in my perspective) not an either or but an and that creates a paradox in some sense.

I’m thinking again about that initial exercise about stability before expansion and learning to expand without becoming fragmented.

Will write again with more from my readings and work in the studio.