The Heart Still Beats— At West End Gallery
We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.
—Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
Just wanted to share the small painting above that is headed to the West End Gallery who will be hosting an opening this Friday for their annual Deck the Walls holiday show. This piece is 6″ by 6″ on panel and is titled The Heart Still Beats.
This painting holds a simple message for me. Whenever apparent bleakness seems to engulf us, it is important to hold on to the fact that there is still beauty and wonder to be found so long as we keep our hearts open. So long as we don’t allow the sometime harsh bleakness of the world to harden our hearts.
The opened beating heart– and its accompanying active mind– is forever free to find and to create worlds of beauty and wonder.
I see the Red Tree with its bit of color set against the drab gray of the landscape as that open heart. The sun rising over the horizon, also with a bit of warm color, as that distant thing keeps us moving forward. You might call it hope. You might call it a sense of purpose, that thing– a task, a goal, an obligation– that sustains one as they work toward it.
In short, I see this small piece saying that so long as we continue to think freely and keep a sense of purpose, the heart that sustains us will continue to beat.
And that might be enough. It might have to be.
Okay, here’s a song about the heart from Jackson Browne. This is Love Needs a Heart. from his 1977 album, Running on Empty. Hard to believe this song is that old…
Redtree Times 