Conscious Evolution

Picasso's Old Guitarist hung above my mother's ratty chair in the family room all my life. A crowning mantle on her throne, she painted black walls to surround, with thick black carpet under foot. Large black beams jutted up across the ceiling, holding up the roof. Between the beams, white paint, enough to keep your eyes upward, ever open to the possibility of heaven.

After all the lights were out, who wanted to get up alone and wander down the hall to the bathroom? Not me. The ghostly figure, crucified like dead Jesus, always hovered above my mother's drunken head. She'd fall asleep with a lit cigarette more nights than not, red glow in the black room burning to her fingers. I wanted desperately to help but the white kitchen linoleum was a moat that required more than my supply of courage to cross. The oreos were in the scary antique armoire, middle drawer, at the edge of the kitchen. I'd reach across from the hallway, put my finger in the deep key hole and pull it open. I was sure the creaky, haunted sound would wake her, so I grabbed fast and ran back to bed in the dark. Oreos under covers, better than fear. That kind of sensation in the dark, cream against the roof of my mouth, crumbs spilling on nerve endings across my chest, in my ears or eyelashes - seductive, as if someone cared.

Frame it on that wall forever, the way it is in my mind, still. A beautiful drunk artist sits under a sad Picasso for decades. Then ask, What is consciousness trying to discover?

Walking through the Picasso exhibit at MOMA last week, the most remarkable, notable feature was the placement of several American painters' work beside Picasso's. I stand before a rendition of a simple bowl. So what? What's so great about that? Yet beside it, suffered attempts to replicate the same piece by several other artists. Everyone wants to ride the wave of the impulse behind the that image. Why?

Without understanding and context we see a simple bowl. But when we commit to living through every step and stage of the experience of how awareness unfolds - the dormant seed, the breakthrough furl of the first shoot, the unfolding sprout, and the manifestation of form into embodiment - and it ends up looking like a simple bowl.....ah, freedom, arrival, achievement, union. We've been there, we know it, we are in the fluid orb of new awareness.

If we don't ride that wave, we stare and wonder why someone would want to catch it at all. And the feeling of separation ensues. Easy to think we're better than that, or that we're too stupid to get it, or that we don't care anyway.

Many artists, upon seeing Picasso's first American show, were distraught. They couldn't pick up a brush for months. Jackson Pollack's wife ran to his studio to find out what the crashing noise was, to find Pollack sitting on the ground, having thrown his supplies. He looked at her and said, "Picasso, dammit, he thought of everything!"

What happens when someone walks at the frontier? Others are compelled, out of deep sleep, out from pleasant dreams, to follow in pursuit of that dazzling, scintillating precipice. Even for a shape, if that shape is a burgeoning new idea of consciousness. Once one person begins that dance, watch, around the world, the same act of art will appear at the same time.

Consciousness becoming conscious of itself.

Relationships are like this, too. Sure, we can have an affair, a fling, an experience of union, but it's a weather balloon, above everything else. What happens when we attempt to replicate the bowl? All the late night hours in front of a blank canvas. All the shitty attempts that miss the mark. And the pain of our position, always somewhere else than where we ideally want to be.

Exactly.

Dinosaurs, plants, poems, planets, and people - we inch along filling the shoes of all the similar forms close by....and then we are lifted by consciousness into layers and realms that we will come to embody (just to give us a glimpse), but not yet.

We have to take every small step, every mile and year and a thousand pages out, to live into what is already inscribed upon our cellular spire.

I'm cleaning, packing, cleaning more. More cleaning that I've possibly ever done before. Who cares, right? But I do it. I repeat the simple tasks again and again and I begin to see that the door is everywhere. The door to that wave is within every object and every action....and there's a standing, open invitation to seek, find, and enter.

You can scrub a sink until you are no longer scrubbing the sink. You may as well be hiking in a drove of Willow trees. You can contemplate the placement of one sacred object on a table for longer than is required and you will enter a zone of geomancy where light enters the equation. And others feel it.

Passing the first couple, early to the Open House, I hear the woman stand in the room and say, "Something about this, the feel, I don't know....beautiful." And I trail out the door, unseen, smiling. There's a gift we can give each other. Just be willing to be all bothered and bitchy about doing the unpleasant task before you and stay with it long enough to see the light, then join with it, continue your task, and when you feel happy and released and grateful, complete it. Bless it. Then leave it for someone else, who may need that particular kind of shimmer to help them take their next step.