Waiting For the Light– Coming to the Principle Gallery, June 2022
This notion that we must wait and wait while we slowly progress out of enslavement into liberation, out of ignorance into knowledge, out of the present limitations into a future union with the Divine, is only true if we let it be so. But we need not. We can shift our identification from the ego to the Overself in our habitual thinking, in our daily reactions and attitudes, in our response to events and the world. We have thought our way into this unsatisfactory state; we can unthink our way out of it. By incessantly remembering what we really are, here and now at this very moment, we set ourselves free. Why wait for what already is?
― Paul Brunton, Advanced Contemplation: The Peace Within You
This new painting has an interesting dichotomy of feeling for me. On one hand, it makes me think that it might be about waiting, with the Red Tree here perched on a hillock anticipating the coming light of day.
Like Penelope on the shores of Ithaca waiting for Odysseus to return.
But on the other hand, I get the sense that the Red Tree here is beyond waiting, that it already understands that it already has all that it needs in this moment, that it already knows what it is.
That it already knows the was, the am and the will be of itself.
It waits for nothing because everything is already at hand.
It makes me wonder where my own self lies between those two poles, one of waiting and the other of being. I am not that advanced as a human, so I imagine it’s much closer to the waiting side of the equation. My anxieties attest to that.
This piece serves as both a reminder of where I might be now and to a point to which I hope to advance. And both are in the same place. Both are at hand.
Just have to unthink my way to that bit of knowledge.
The painting at the top is a new 12″ by 12″ canvas titled Waiting For the Light. It is part of my upcoming annual solo exhibit at the Principle Gallery, opening Friday, June 3, 2022.
The quote is from Paul Brunton (1898-1981) who was a British writer who traveled to India in the aftermath of his service in World War I where he encountered Hindu/Buddhist mysticism for the first time. He wrote several best-selling books on his experiences that more or less brought Hindu/Buddhist thought to the west for the first time in popular form.
I first stumbled across his work at a decisive point in my life and might not be here today but for that chance discovery. I still often turn to his words and observations when I feel overwhelmed. And like this painting, he points out that most of the answers are already within ourselves.
Redtree Times 