I have a dear friend, or believe that I do… someone I love from afar these days, unable to quite trace the steps back to where we left off.  It was probably where the convenience and shallowness of Facebook entered the picture. FB should be renamed Time Suck and Deflection since, as it turns out, there is a cost to connecting too easily, a mirage that suggests it would be easy to start again, which begins to take the place of actual encounter.

My friend is an artist — an abstract painter — and the shifts of her being flow one through another along the ever more impressive walls of her studio space.  Just as I’m sure I know her work, understand her, she transforms again. It is not because she intends it necessarily.

Rather, there is a natural process that, when following an artist who is in love with their work over the course of many years, can just be seen.

The nicest quality of abstract art as far as I’m concerned, is that it resists definition. Techniques develop, play occurs; some processes are taken to and repeated more than others, leading and surprising creator too. It is about more than being non-linear; the best work of any sort imparts presence and feeling more so than fixed narrative, so you can take in its company a long time.

Also there are many textures and ways of time. The one who rushes to the beach to see the sunrise experiences sunrise time, but in the very same place, the ocean is time, the sand is time, the atmosphere is time.

As well there is the time that one brings… the resulting interplay of all that has seemed to come before. There is no real dividing line between inner and outer experience, or as my teacher reminds, “Mind and world are co-arisen.”

Thus, I’m learning to allow my life not to be easily understood, even by me.