Today,
I jump off of a little bit of where we were yesterday,
Creating our principles of delivery.
Rilke said,
Let everything happen to you,
Beauty and terror.
It's of course not simple.
We want to run from terror and run towards beauty and believe that the polarities don't have to exist,
As if we can fence ourselves in to one end and keep out the other.
But just as day needs night and sun needs moon,
We need beauty and terror,
If you want to suggest they are opposites.
Courage and vulnerability,
Humility as well as a bit of pride,
Are what it takes to ennoble yourself to live in these acts of heroism.
We suffer because of cowardice,
They become cruelties,
But in truth,
If we just faced the fact of polarity and the ability to harmonize and balance these,
Not just in our own lives,
But in our own lives,
Then into the world.
Cowardice won't find its way in,
And cruelties will simply fade like dust.
In the wedge of life,
World,
Living,
Society,
Culture,
That is yours.
As I've said,
Art,
For me very specifically,
Encaustic,
Painting.
In that little wedge of your life,
How can you stand tall,
How can you tolerate the tensions and add value to their presence in the work you do?
Like Rilke and many others,
Maya Angelou addresses that beauty and terror,
That polarity,
Through urging us to realize we are neither devils nor divine.
We have been great inventors,
Especially in the United States.
Entrepreneurship,
Capitalism,
Are marketed as the way.
This may be true,
But it's time to tip the scales,
Re-harmonize,
To become students of ourselves once again.
Learn how to balance that capitalism and entrepreneurship with the truth,
With the self-knowing,
With the sense of having it within,
Therefore,
From there,
Putting it out.
I'm going to close with something from James Baldwin.
He once said nobody can stay in the Garden of Eden.
That Garden of Eden has a hell.
It has to have a hell,
Or it's not an Eden.
The question is banal,
But one of the real troubles with living is that living is so banal.
Everyone,
After all,
Goes the same dark road,
And the road has a trick of being most dark,
Most treacherous,
When it seems most bright,
And the truth is that nobody stays in the Garden of Eden.
We each have our own small Garden of Eden,
Just as we each have our own small hell.
These may be private spaces,
They may be collectively communed.
Either way,
It's not about abolishing one to the benefit of the other.
It's about balancing and harmonizing the reality of both.
Doing it anyway.
Awaken.
Create it.
