Point's of Light, an artist’s heart and soul are always vulnerable, raw, and exposed. Naked and bare, his heart and soul forever lay before him and wait for the complex mysteries life will always send his way. His life is full of the emotions and feelings that are his ups and downs, highs and lows, happiness and sadness, victories and defeats. For the artist’s vulnerability, these mysteries are magnified and received with an intensity that ravage him to the marrow of his bones. Yet, the artist isn’t someone to pity. In this life of raw nerve soaking up these hyper emotions, the artist is always taking them to find the inspirations he needs to discover and create fantastic pieces of art. I can tell you with calm assurity that if you’ll look closely at my work, you’ll see my life at both its best and its worst. Then if you look even closer, if you’re a keen observer, you might even notice a book of life unfolding before your eyes.
An artist ponders on many things, like, eight isn’t a big number, that is unless he considers one number more than seven to be a big number. But what if he considers one number less than nine not to be so big? For an artist, even though this may seem trivial, something like a choice between seven, eight, and nine presents a quandary, and rather eight is or isn’t a large number is a matter of the artist's perspective. Now consider the artist being a poet choosing just one word. The alphabet are just marks we recognize that frame letters and words in our minds. Found in our alphabet, the article “a” and the pronoun “I” contain a singular letter that signify how we ought to begin to form a thought in our mind. “And” contains only three simple letters, yet it helps our mind prepare for more needed information we now know will follow those three simple letters. Now, what if a word needs eight letters to form meaning in our mind? Having eight letters, does that number of letters add significance to our knowledge as we find meaning in this word? These are questions artists and poets ask, just as I’m presently asking myself these questions. I’m asking myself these questions because, at this very present and consequential time in my life, I’ve found a word of very substantial import to my life. So, I’m in need of forming in your mind a grand thought, but my word contains only eight letters and it’s only within these eight letters that another of life’s lived mysteries has been revealed to me, and another page in my book of life is presently being allowed to turn.
Don Mclean once wrote this:
Starry, starry night Paint your pallet blue and gray Look out on a summer's day With eyes that know the darkness in my soul Shadows on the hills Sketch the trees and the daffodils Catch the breeze and the winter chills In colors on the snowy linen land
Now I understand what you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
How you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they'll listen now
With these words, Don Mclean is telling us Vincent Van Gogh’s painting is a reflection of his heart and soul, which as an artist, I’ve already mentioned is always vulnerable, raw, and exposed. Think about what Mclean is asking you to consider: “Catch the breeze”, but how does an artist do this? One just doesn’t think to “capture” a breeze in a painting, right? It’s not what most people might normally think about if they were to paint either a tree or a daffodil. Why? Because a breeze is soft; a breeze is subtle. A breeze will only gently caress the “trees” and “daffodils.” But in looking at nature, and upon seeing what nature’s beauty so much wants to share with an artist, a breeze will touch what’s vulnerable, raw, and exposed within the artist – his heart and soul. So, now look at Vincent's picture, if you pause, if you pay very close attention, do your eyes see the breeze catch the trees and daffodils? If you do, I want to suggest you’re lucky because this breeze has been painted just as the artist received it – softly and subtly. Why? Because his heart and soul is vulnerable, raw, and exposed.
When I listen to this song, I always hear the tenderness in Don McLean’s words. I’m of a belief that I find this tenderness because as an artist, Don Mclean’s own heart and soul, which is vulnerable, raw, and exposed, allow him to be open to receiving an epiphany in his understanding of another artist's heart and soul. Perhaps the seven-letter word “organic” was created at this very moment.
Songs evoke so many emotions inside me. With evoked emotions, when I listen to this song, I see my own life reflected back to me. In this state of electrifying self-awareness, I’m so grateful that as I reflect on my life, I can experience the repose I find in McLean’s tender words. Here’s where honesty demands you know I often hear his words this way, “Now I understand what my life tried to say to me and why I suffered for my sanity. I always write of light, color, and beauty, and hoped people might not feel their pain. They didn’t listen, but maybe, just maybe, they’ll listen now.” I always draw hope from this song. My hope is always delicate and I’m so thankful it’s said of hope, “For in this hope we were saved [by faith]. But hope [the object of] which is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he already sees?” Said differently, with similar intentionality, elsewhere, it’s said like this, “What is faith? It is the confident assurance that something we want is going to happen. It is the certainty that what we hope for is waiting for us, even though we cannot see it up ahead.” Hope is very precious indeed, and in a world filled with tedious pain and misery, now more than ever it seems, as an artist I want people to feel light, color, and beauty like a gentle breeze gently caressing their troubles away.
While I’d never want or desire to change Don McLean’s beautiful work of art, in my heart and soul, I often find too much pain in his words that also sing this to us:
For they could not love you
But still your love was true
And when no hope was left inside
On that starry, starry night
You took your life as lovers often do
But I could have told you, Vincent
This world was never meant
For one as beautiful as you
Having put these very hard lyrics here, I feel every letter, word, and sentence of these lyrics in every fiber of my being. I’ve cried for the pain of these lyrics. Why, because I’ve lived that kind of pain in my past. And again, honesty demands I reveal that my past has led me to choose to try to end my pain just as Vincent did. But, here’s more honesty – even greater honesty – in pain, even when I pretended not to notice them, throughout my lived life, fragments of light have always found their way to penetrate the darkest of night I ever experienced. So, here’s a question I’ve had to ask myself. If beauty has as its predicate, color; and if color's predicate is light, the question needs to be asked - hasn't science proven light is a vibration? If the answer is yes, do we need light's vibrations to see color in order to experience beauty? The question is rhetorical just as the answer is self-evident.
Maybe with a belief that Vincent himself must have also noticed them: I think Don sang these lyrics to us so that we’d all experience these vibrations- and their attending fragments of light:
Starry, starry night
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze
Swirling clouds in violet haze
Reflect in Vincent's eyes of China blue
Colors changing hue
Morning fields of amber grain
Weathered faces lined in pain
Are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand
I’ve already shared my eight-letter word with you. It’s rare when we receive an “epiphany” so how grateful ought we be when we find that rarity? Plenty grateful and at least plus one more is the only correct answer to that question. I’ve recently discovered an epiphany, for this epiphany I look forward to turning a page in my book of life, that is, after all, brief.
The same singer, songwriter and artist, Don Mclean, also sang these words to us:
The people ask me how
How I've lived till now
I tell them I don't know
I guess they understand
How lonely life has been
And yes, I know how lonely life can be
The shadows follow me
And the night won't set me free
These same words can be said by many people, and in loneliness, pain is always hard to bear for anyone who’s been left to live alone. Even a child intuitively knows this. As a child, after he had to leave my mother as well as myself and my two brothers to live alone, I once asked the divorced man I thought was my father if he felt lonely living by himself. I assumed the answer was yes, but I think I asked out of a childish hope that he’d say he didn’t feel lonely at all. I vaguely remember asking him because somewhere in my own life of a young child, as precocious and adorable as I absolutely was, I began to feel alone and isolated. My life felt like everywhere I looked I only saw darkness and fear seemed to be my only constant companion. Still, my internal make-up, or as science has it, my DNA was wired to remain precocious, and my artist’s imagination sometimes overcame my fears as together we imagined somewhere out there in the great beyond was something beautiful. As I grew, the artist inside me remained fixed, and the entirety of my life lived meant that my heart and soul were always vulnerable, raw, and exposed. So as I grew, it seemed like the fear of darkness in my lonely life, more often than not, overwhelmed me. Still, I’d always have those tiny fragments of light that always came piercing through.
It took years of fighting darkness to get past a type of living that allowed the darkness to continually beat me down. My book of my life was being written, and most of its stories were negative, dreary, and full of despair. Still, there were occasional glimpses of light that peppered and enveloped colorful stories on a few of the pages of my book, and those pages were always astoundingly beautiful!
But breaths have been breathed and steps have been pushed through time and space, and only a short 5 years ago, I begin to write my story differently. I eventually pulled myself up and out of my dark gloom along with the fear it had clung to. In getting away from my past, I enjoyed life chocked full of light that wanted nothing but to surround me. Within all this newfound light I was able to see colors everywhere -and I mean every imaginable color possible. I quickly found myself happily taking each and every one of these colors I found so that I could find more beauty than I dreamed possible. Life finally held mesmerizing significance for me, and so much of life’s everyday ordeals seemed to be transcendently happy experiences.
But then it finally happened, the darkness returned. As the light in my life dimmed, colors faded, and beauty began to vanish from my life. Severe depression rose its ugly head as it began to envelop me. The depression seemed to want nothing less than to devour me. It was continually with me for three months. Returning here, returning to a place I thought I’d long since left forever behind me, I found I wanted my life to disappear and my book of life to come to its inevitable end.
So, yeah, I began to wonder about all my hard work and what good was it to accomplish everything that I’d worked for only to return to the place I’d celebrated leaving. Life had returned to, well, the shit of darkness and the fear that accompanied it. Here in darkness, I didn’t want to share my life. Why? I was Tod the great artist that destroyed the darkness in my life with a few colorful words of writing that painted in the imaginations of anyone willing to read my pieces something both beautiful and happy. I had been able to do this because I write with so much light and color that afford the reader all the beauty they need, and with this color, their imaginations can fly and soar to any height they desire. For me then, darkness was both retreat and defeat, in short, it was miserable.
Then a rare epiphany gladly, gently, tenderly, and lovingly envelopes my heart and soul, my vulnerable, raw, and exposed heart and soul. The book of life, rightly and respectfully, is a mystery. It unfolds slowly as it reveals to us our ups and downs, highs and lows, happiness and sadness, victories and defeats. To live life well, it seems life has to have a balance, it least until we finally transcend this life of breathing and pushing one foot and then another through time and space. It was with this epiphany of “balance”, I learned that to live well, from time to time, darkness will have to greet me, just hopefully not as often as the light and its’ vibration will happily greet and then spend so much more time with me. Darkness isn’t fun, but darkness has life lessons and in its own way, helps reveal the mysteries we need to solve as we live life. It’s often said the darkest hour is just before the dawn and dawn has always been a beautiful show rather it’s painted, sang about, or written of because of an artist’s vulnerable, raw, and exposed heart and soul. Eight letters, like the eight found in the fantastic word epiphany, are just enough to form beautiful thoughts. Don Mclean went on to say this:
The book of life is brief
And once a page is read
All but love is dead
That is my belief
As Always,
Love and Peace,
Tod w/only one d
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