Michael Divine

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Some Gratitude on a Chilly Evening

I'm rounding the corner, walking home from the organic market that we shop at, and it's a chilly evening. The sun is well past gone. I have a small bag of groceries in my arm - chocolate, coffee, some vegetables, some coconut milk creamer - and a man pushing a grocery cart filled with plastic bottles and aluminum cans passes me. He looks to be smiling but then again maybe he's grimacing and I wonder: what stroke of life gave this man a cold evening to push a grocery cart filled with plastic bottles, maybe just trying to find enough to make a few dollars and buy something to eat - and me, walking to my warm home. Sometimes, driving through downtown LA, I end up on one of the blocks of homeless people living in tents, pushing shopping carts that contain everything they own, living in the gutter. I wonder at how it is that I am in my car, listening to music, on my way to a meeting, or a dinner with friends, or just getting on the highway and heading home and they are there, stuck in some all together different way of life. I wonder at how the uber-wealthy end up so high up on that pedestal they place themselves upon, sometimes unable to truly value the little things.

I wonder at this... this world with all of it's countless threads of lives going on: where some are bombed, others are swaddled, some are cared for, and some are left to be trodden upon, some walk tall, some walk small, some don't walk at all... I wonder how it is that man is legless and I walk along or that child was born without sight, and I can see. How that person appears to be ahead of me, and that person is behind. The vast multitudes and all the myriad walks of life. I wonder at it and I wonder at how I ended up here: making art, doing what I love, living unafraid, neither angry nor resentful, but loving it. I'm in a wonderful marriage to a wonderful woman, with a home that is warm and, right now, smells like fresh baked bread, with a cat on my lap and soft music playing and soft lighting. I wonder at it all and the only thing I am left with - the only answer that comes back to me, echoing from my heart and what feels like the heart of all things - is gratitude: at this gift, this life.

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Egypt – Luxor, Giza, Alexandria, and The Great Convergence

Observations, Experiences, and The Great Convergence in Egypt
Dec. 13 – 25, 2012

“We must be some kind of important,” I said quietly to Violet as the six tour buses of revelers traveled quietly down the twisting desert road away from the Giza plateau and the Great Pyramids and a party so unbelievably perfect that the bus is actually quiet and now here we were led by Egyptian police on motorcycles with lights flashing whisked down down down through the sand and back into the city and decrepit neighborhoods and little fires on the sides of the road, old man looking up and taking note and not a traffic light to be stopped at, straight on through back to the safe bubble of the hotel, six busloads of tired mind blown ecstatic alive and wild people.

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Luxor, Egypt

We've been in Egypt for four days and its been incredible. We arrived into Cairo airport several days ago. An opinionated cab driver navigated us around the outskirts of Cairo and into the noisy evening traffic of giza to the train station where we boarded an overnight train to luxor. The trains aren't fancy but the bed was nice after the many hours of sitting on the plane.

For whatever reason the train arrived three hours late even though it left on time. From the train station we were picked up by our hotel and brought to the lovely nefertiti hotel. Its a smaller place located across from the temple of luxor and the avenue of the sphinx. It's run by younger well educated men with a penchant for laughter. I appreciate the shared opinions and ideas as we sit in the al-sahaby restaurant whose tables line the tiles alleyway and smoke shisha (flavored tobacco) from hookahs and drink strong Egyptian coffee and talk and laugh. O the revolution! It could do so much! And they - the more educated populace - certainly don't want to be ruled by fundamentalists.... Its obvious that is the road towards becoming like Iran.

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Living From an Aesthetically Pleasing Perspective

The thing is, at 3am you're up and you're getting something to eat and maybe a drop to drink and you notice: the plane of the wall meets the plane of the ceiling and the busy-ness of the spice rack to the planar composition of the stove top sort of off sets the shifting perspectives and it's so sublimely perfect that you really just want to go wake everyone up but you know that you and you alone might be the only one to ever have appreciated this corner of reality. Blue to burgundy to beige to gold and you can't help but want to run to the type writer - the keyboard - the pen and the pencil - and get it down - that inspiration. Maybe you just study the lines and do your best to remember it.

To the casual observer that sounded like a lot of hokey artspeak. But you and I: we are not casual observers.

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Compassion and Vampires

“Compassion automatically invites you to relate with people because you no longer regard people as a drain on your energy.”

Chogyam Trungpa - "Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism"

I read the 'Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism' years ago and it has forever echoed in my mind. The title pretty much carries it's message: it's not about how many mantras or sun salutations you can do or how many retreats you've been to or how spiritual you dress or look or what temple you visit or how many holy books are on your bookshelves or how many pictures of holy beings are on your altar - it's about you and your process, everything else is just icing - a mask, something we identify with. I consider this often when I am in my day to day life - when I am interacting in my day to day world - buying groceries, crossing the street, cleaning out the cat litter box. It's al just stuff and my buddha statue on my altar is no more or less holy, it's just a different reminder, a placeholder - an icon to jog me back to - it doesn't matter what the fuck you are doing - if you do it with compassion and wisdom, it's awesome.

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What I Learn From Painting

Around 2am I usually just can't paint any more. Sometimes it's a tad later. Sometimes a tad earlier. But usually it's about five or six hours in and my hand is cramped and my back is aching and my eyes are starting to blur and my brushstrokes start to lose their precision. The good things is that once I get like that I usually feel pretty good about my work for the night. It means that I covered a lot of ground. Painting is about 'the process' as much as 'the product'. Sometimes, it's just a lot of blanks to fill in. You see, the story is written. The path is clear. I'm just following a dotted line that leads to an inevitable conclusion. There are nuances to be explored, and colors and lines to be enunciated but the gist of the piece - this piece that I'm working on right now anyhow - was decided long ago. I am merely completing the vision.

While I paint, my mind wanders through many worlds and my heart travels through multitudinous emotions the way one might try on different outfits. And there are pure zen moments where I'm not thinking about anything. Or elated loving moments where my heart is suddenly sort of glowing. Don't dwell on it, though! Such feelings are mere feelings and as ephemeral as the clouds. But I do appreciate those moments. It never hurts to simply center one's sense of consciousness in the center of one's chest instead of in the center of the head, where we tend to look out at the world from.

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It’s not all just pretty pictures: The Politics of Life

One might think that one might surmise from the general nature of my work and my posts that I'm not a particularly political minded person. I almost wish that were true. What is true is that I pay attention to the politics. By that, I don't mean just the 'political figures' but ALL of it. In my opinion, it's all politics. Since man first understood the connection between ego and a sense of power there have been politics. Unfortunately, today there is a deeply rooted connection between money, politics, and power. This quality is a sad thing to watch and yet it is what shapes the most important affronts to our health and well being from an entity outside of our own minds that exists today.

And it comes at us from all fronts - from the health care to the war mongers to the internet freedoms to the agricultural debacles to the religious pandering... it doesn't seem to end.

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The Art of Discovery

I started cataloging our art books today. Very exciting, I know. We have quite a library of books all together - between the art book collection, the dozens of philosophy books and the many volumes in between it spans more than a few centuries of knowledge and inspiration. What boggles my mind, when I look at the couple hundred books of paintings and drawings, is the lifetimes they represent. Hours, days, weeks, years of the lives of men and women who dedicated themselves to the creative urge. And each book - each artist - is a facet of a jewel that allows the light of inspiration to pass through it in a particular manner creating shapes, motifs, themes and designs, entire stories, entire lifetimes.

The books on the shelves are organized into several sections. One shelf holds the rather modern day visionary artist types - Robert Venosa, Mati Klarwein, Alex Grey, Gil Bruvel, etc - then a shelf of illustrators - Arthur Rackham, Kay Nielsen, Harry Clarke, Dr. Seuss, and more - then art history - historical movements like Art Nouveau, Surrealism, etc - and then, of course, many shelves of just artists - Vincent Van Gogh, Max Ernst, Michelangelo, Salvador Dali, Frantisek Kupka, Hieronymus Bosch, Gustav Klimt, and more more more.

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Balancing the Absurd and the “Spiritual”

At some point, somewhere, I read something about Surreal art and it's propensity for delighting in the erotic, the absurd, and the bizarre. Maybe it was Wikipedia... In any case, the truth is - Surrealism, as an art form, tends towards the erotic and the absurd. Was a painting in the Surrealist vein meant to make any sense? Or is it meant to simply jostle forth a free association of patterns, concepts, and ideas from the subconscious - placing a seemingly randomly associated sequence of images together, allowing the viewer to stitch them into some sensible relationship, a sort of Rorschach test in paint. I think that if the piece were "directed" towards some conscious goal or had too much consideration given to composition, then it would no longer be a mapping of that subconscious void space. I think that this is why Dali was ultimately ousted from the Surrealist Group - he began to try to direct that inner eye.

I think it a wondrous thing to paint the randomness as it arrives and kill of the self-editor that tries to squash our visions. However, I also think it is also a wonderful thing to be able to direct the vision and work with it - lead forwards without getting distracted by the swarming fetishes and the fireworks throwing cavalcade.  Hand in hand, you can allow it to lead you, the artist, to the highest point you can imagine. Every corner, each nuance, is a chance to pull the painting higher, deeper, and into more profoundly illuminating realms.

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Form, Formlessness, and Life

This afternoon, after a short time, I closed my eyes while sitting in the hanging chair suspended from the eave of my house. My sleepy sleep deep mind rocked back and forth like a babe in a basinet and I could feel each rise and each dip so supremely deep that I might have been rocked to sleep, if even for a moment. Eventually tho I rose again and put the book back - Shambhala: Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chogyam Trungpa - in which was spoken of and I read of the act of recognizing and indentifying oneself through countless reference points - now I am doing this, now I am thinking this - and then the act of forgetting, losing oneself in that. And then, if we encase ourselves in a sea of I's - how terribly lonely it gets! Because we have separated ourselves from everything at that point. Good food for thought and meditation. I find myself meditating on these things while making dinner, petting the kitty, working on whatever my work may be, while walking down the street, into a store, driving my car. I find myself considering - form is formlessness but formlessness is also form.

I read somewhere someone once - we'll say a monk or a lama - saying that, while form as formlessness/emptiness is relatively easy to understand - the reverse, that formlessness becomes form, is sometimes much more difficult to fully realize. We can intellectualize these things - we often intellectualize- we know this or that - but until we have the direct experience of it, it's sort of a useless tool. It's like having a hammer and knowing completely and thoroughly how it works but til we use it - til we actually lift it and heft it's weight and feel it's balance and swing it do we see how one might use it. Until then, it does us no good what so ever. the same goes for various concepts of form, compassion, wisdom, awareness. It feels that the more i understand the nature of emptiness, the calmer I am, the more loving, the more compassionate, and the less prone to whims of this or that. I've gotten better at it for sure over the years. but still... I get into arguments. I hold back. I do this or that. To be the warrior is to be exposed, to be raw, and to know that nothing - nothing what so ever - can hurt you because there is nothing, ever, that can be hurt that is you. Or me. Or anything. And so we are simply 100% honest - with others and, most importantly, with ourselves.

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