This applies to all my work: as an artist, a writer, and Zen Buddhist monk.
I spend every moment of my life in the happily hopeless task of learning how to put into form and words what cannot be seen or spoken.
Thomas Merton said poetry was a door to that place about which nothing can be said. Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘We have reached the edge where painting breaks off and takes her way into the silent land… and all our words will fold their wings and sit huddled like rooks on the tops of winter trees.’
I ask why something must mean? Does dawn mean? Do stars? A flower? Broken city streets? When art devolved into being just for its own sake, we lost something vital – a voice for the reality and joy of our being in the world. Art emerges from the ash of thought when it is touched by our need to be affirmed by reality. To me the joy of reality subverts our ego’s delusions about reality.
Joy is the great revolution.
Reality is the last nostalgia.
No blame. Be kind. Love everything.