Burst of Life

(Click image for larger version)

Life bursts out of every cell of my being. The world around me becomes alive as I share my own life with it.

I have been experiencing this state of matters for over 23 years now, but it still manages to amaze me every day. That is what life is.

Path of Spirit

Do you often focus on your goals, your target, imagining the life you want to be living? I know I lose myself that way from time to time - that’s why I’m writing this piece right now. I’m tired of running in circles, chasing ill defined measures of “success”.

The path of spirit is not as straight as your mind would have you believe.

Lately I’ve started challenging all the definitions and preconceptions floating around in my head, and they have slowly given rise to some very interesting questions: Do I even need to define a destination, and end to my path? Isn’t that besides the point of living, isn’t every step along the way a worthy place to reach?

Why does the notion of already being where we need to be sound so absurd to the logical mind? Why are we unable to just stop and look around?

If you narrow your own view to the point where you can only see straight ahead it can surely turn you into an efficient machine, but it also makes you miss all the beauty present in life. This world is surprisingly malleable - whenever you’re not sure where you’re going, all you have to do is to set one foot before the other with intention, and a new way will form itself before you.

Never be afraid of straying a bit. When you walk all paths of life as if they were only one, you will never get lost.

Don’t let “it” stop you

“It” can be anything. It can be your own fear, your perception that what you’re doing is not right, that you somehow don’t hold up to the imaginary standard you set for yourself. Your energy is constantly expanding, but when you put the various “it”s of your life in the way, you will only block yourself.

There are several things I’ve had to clear out of the way lately: The idea that any and all of my images must be accompanied by “thoughtful and deep” words, thinking it’s ok for a completed image to remain unpublished just because I don’t feel like writing today, believing I don’t need to share what I do with the world, that I only do it for myself.

All these things have proven to be so wrong on so many levels. I can’t keep hiding behind this kind of “it”. I owe that much to my creative spirit. Just like most paradoxes in life, as soon as you face it head-on it has a tendency to resolve itself, to vanish into air. I don’t have to write content to pad this wonderful image I present to you, but curiously, I can’t help it from pouring out of me.

99% inspiration indeed.

We are Never Alone

I have always known - at a mental level - that there are divine aspects present in our lives, no matter how I specifically choose to perceive and name them. One or several forces, entities, things I can hardly describe in words that make sense, surround me at all times. Most of the time, however, I somehow manage to ignore this fact, living my life as if there was absolutely nothing special happening.

That changed somehow after watching one of Stephens latest video post about Ho’oponopono, which made me (re-)discover this fascinating concept (I don’t know how to pronounce it either!). It really hit me on a gut level that our own connection to divinity is not something we vaguely know to exist, but something that can be lived with every cell of our bodies, every moment. This connection is one of the most amazing gifts of this life - the ability to just let go of our pains and be filled with love and inspiration by just asking for it.

In my case, this connection to the divine manifests itself in the form of digital art, words, ideas; but it’s something different for every person. So what about you? Do you nurture this connection to the divine in your life? How does it express itself physically? I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments.

The Second Half of Art

I have always said that creating art is only the first half of the work, half its significance. The other part, the one that completes the piece, makes it come full circle and gives it meaning, is the act of observation.

This was made very clear to me recently, when Deb left a comment in one of my latest posts to tell me how I had moved her to open up and start listening to her artistic inspiration. Barely knowing me, she told me of a vision that struck her, an interpretation I had never intended but which was nevertheless very powerful - in a way relevant to her and her unique viewpoint.

A particular image, just like the fractal it’s composed of, can replicate infinitely to present a unique and personalized version of itself to each of its viewers, sometimes meaningless, sometimes deeply transforming. My own perspective is only one among many, and with that realization, all I can do is take a step back and let my art speak for itself, allowing it to unfold and reach its fullest potential - without being hampered by the constraints of my particular interpretation.

In that spirit, today’s piece doesn’t come with an introduction. Instead, I’ll let you decide what to make of it, how to complete the puzzle that brings something deeper to this mere collection of colored dots. I must say that I am deeply grateful to you, for you have given my art a breath of life, and by doing that, turned into an artist yourself. I’d love to hear about your interpretation in the comments, if you feel like sharing it.

Peace

Slade has done it again. He took a simple concept and put it into words in a way that has deep implications. His latest post, Spinning your Story, talks about how we can transform the stories of our own life simply through a new perspective. The Stories that No Longer Serve You, the original piece that inspired his follow-up, is also purely magical. These two posts were the firestarters of what I’m writing about here, the changes I’ve been going through recently.

Our continual experience of this life is nothing more but a single moment traveling along the axis of time, changing at every interval. That is our prime human quality, our ability to evolve, to move away from the things we no longer wish for, to align our lives with our self declared purpose. In short, spinning our stories.

I used to be - still am, to some extent - a violent person. My emotions have carried me away more times than I can count, bringing me right to the edge, thankfully allowing me to stop right before irreversibly crossing the line. But after much searching within me for the cause of this seemingly unwanted behaviour, I came to a baffling conclusion: the energy behind these impulses I have felt isn’t something bad; it’s actually the source of my passion, my inspiration. The violent states I have found my mind in are too often just a way for my spirit to express a primal, creative urge that I haven’t really given an opportunity to come forward through other means.

I realize that I am able to transform the violence I feel into something different. Chaos can be destruction, but also creation - ultimately, both of these opposites join in a single circle of endless transformation. Physical matter continually changes form; oceans to clouds to rain to rivers, and so on. The same also applies to the matter of the mind, the heart and the spirit.

Now I finally have an explanation for those spontaneous bursts of passion overcoming me from time to time, those rare but overwhelmingly strong urges to create art, causing actual, physical pain to me if I don’t drop everything to follow them to the artistic extremes they will inevitably lead me.

That is what happened to me that other day when I made a fractal that expressed pure violence, an energy that burst out of me right onto the digital canvas, interrupting the midst of a regular, dull day at my job. It urged me to say what I couldn’t find words for at the time, releasing a vital passion from deep within me, making me feel like my spiritual lifeblood was being splattered across the screen.

It’s hard to explain if you haven’t lived it. My spirit was screaming, forcing me sit up and take notice; Social inhibitions and self-imposed responsibilities faded away, leaving room only for pure creative instinct. A long confined energy was liberated in the midst of a whirlpool of conflicting feelings. It was simultaneously maddening and exhiliarating.

Since that day, I have been consciously spinning my story, transforming a life of frustration, stress and repressed creativity into that of an artist on the path to self-discovery. Choosing to gain my bread elsewhere allows me to fully delve into my work without tainting it by thoughts of profit and marketability. I am starting to develop a sense of compassion, total acceptance of all the elements present in my life. I finally feel that I am beginning to know what I stand for. I am decyphering the message, and if there was only one thing I could pass on to others in my lifetime, it would be this:

All human beings are capable of creative expression. Rather than having you admire my art, I’d rather inspire you to make your own, whatever form it takes. Not all works of art are free, but Art, the right to create it, to feel it, to express it, is. Art is larger than any category we could slap on it. It’s so much more than just painting, sculpting, writing or making movies. It is a way of life, a way to express our divine spark in every action we take.

This has always been the underlying current of my blog, but now I have finally found the clarity to put it into words. This is a rather long post by my standards, and to wrap it up, I’d like to share with you a new spin I’ve put on a fractal you’re already familiar with, mixing up the same ingredients into something totally different, yet strangely familiar. I am calling it peace.

Violence

I just had to get this out of my system. Sudden burst of inspiration, expressing something I can’t even begin to try putting into words.

At times like this, I feel that only blogging keeps me alive. Thanks for reading.

Open the Fan

Your life is like a fan, fine cloth exquisitely painted in vivid colors.

The question is: Do you allow yourself to open it and show it to the world, or are you afraid? After all, it could be broken, stained, stolen, transformed! But I must wonder - isn’t that the whole point?

Magnitude and Chaos

I was inspired to write this post quite a while ago. Something totally unrelated I read gave me a tiny spark of inspiration, building up inside me for weeks, being pushed off by my conscious mind in favor of more urgent matters, until the sheer pressure forced me to let loose an avalanche of ideas I was barely aware of. Strange quirks of my creativity, I guess. I get the feeling sometimes that I have a team of gnomes working on all the ideas inside my head… I can’t explain where else these fully formed thoughts come from, just popping up in my head from one moment to the next.

Anyway, back to today’s topic, Magnitude.

Magnitude is the scale at which something resides. In the context of today’s post, that something can be an idea, an act, a thing, a thought, or anything else that interacts with other people.

I think it’s important to realise that order of magnitude is irrelevant. There are no small actions or large actions, there are just actions. Nothing is insignificant - there is no such thing. Whenever people affect each other, chain reactions will start happening, expanding continuously into the infinite. The pebble you’re putting out into the world today might just be the one that changes the course of an avalanche. This is the basis of what I’m saying here - the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings.

We don’t see this plainly in our day to day activities because the world, this oozy and ill-defined mass of matter, energy, awareness, is not a thread but a multidimensional fabric. There are a lot of factors at work simultaneously, which lead us to the chaotic mess that we see every day. You, me, all of us have an impact around us, a field of magnetic influence if you will, and its effects will spread far and wide until they blend right into the mix, being bent in strange directions and formed into bizarre shapes in the process.

The variables in play are innumerable, and so entangled that we could not possibly understand them fully (it’s a bit like that weather thing). Even the simplest things can cause lasting effects that stick around inexplicably:

-A childhood memory popping up, for no reason at all.

-A smile, given away for free, finding it’s way back to you - or not.

-The sweet scent of a flower, a butterfly trampled on (or a sound of thunder, perhaps)

-A blog post of mine, or one of yours, being read years, decades, centuries, millennia from now.

So, what does this mean for us? It means that we are causing a lot of things to happen, all the time, whether we want it or not. This is what gives us our infinite potential of creation, what makes us able shape the world around us in part - as one of many factors that define existence. It means that the responsibility is ours to reflect what we want from the world, first and foremost within ourselves, and let that influence spread out through all of our actions, big or small.

BEing the Change

Damian over at be the change - tread the path has put up a new article of mine as a guest post. You will definitely want to check it out, and stick around on his site a while if you haven’t already done so.

Drawing the lines - a creative act of self-expression

Also, let me share one of my older pieces I call white sheep. It matches the theme of BEing the change well, since it was the first fractal I ever did on a non-black background. That one step openend me up to really start playing with the whole spectrum of colors available - my art was never the same again.