You know the guy or girl? The one whose heart is in the right place, but who is totally negative and unapproachable, screaming at their friends about the dying reality being transmitted through their television. Maybe it’s your parents, upset with the corrupted global banking system that is depleting the value of their life’s work and savings. Maybe it’s your neighbor, wondering why the water in their faucet smells like gas and catches fire. Perhaps it is even you screaming, “Why doesn’t anyone do anything?! Everyone needs to WAKE UP!”
Creativity Replaces Frustration.
The truth is, focusing on the destruction and chaos does not imply that you are “awake”. “Awake” is more multidimensional in its meaning and application. It means you are aware and thus able to make choices; Simply reacting to chaos with more chaos and spreading that sort of mental and emotional debris creates psychic pollution that pushes people away from your cause more than it helps them to get excited and inspired to action. We are looking at a worldwide shift in the structure of our reality that requires an entirely new way of perceiving the individual and the world. The individual and the world are One, an inseparable reflection.
When I painted “Water Is Life” in 2011, I wasn’t thinking about the global water crisis. I was celebrating water in all its glory, and my intrinsic inseparability from Nature itself. I was too enamored – enraptured even – in a love affair with Life. I was busy drooling in the front row of my biology class every morning after all-night painting sessions and leaving class weeping at the inherent beauty and elegance of Life. I was immersed in braingasm with the constant molecular transformations that left no room for separation between what I know as “I” and say, a tree… Or Everything else for that matter. We are constantly dying and being reborn – giving birth to 20 million red blood cells every 5 seconds and intimately exchanging molecules with the giant redwoods of our forests. That is what inspired me to love nature and to want to protect it.
Shortly after being ravished by science, I would also be in my Natural Science and Resources classes, crying for the opposite reasons. The world seemed doomed. It appeared that we were no longer living in union with that elegant natural intelligence, but rather seemed to be running in the opposite direction toward our own oblivion. I would call my dad between classes, crying and asking him, “Dad, why do people blow each other up?” He could only respond that not all of humanity is at the same level of consciousness.
When I Am Ravished by Science, I Am Inspired.
I see the 3.4 billion years of evolution backing us. We are all just part of the Universe evolving itself toward greater and greater expansion. It doesn’t make any sense that we had come this far, advanced our language, technology, or our civilizations for nothing and no purpose. Everything has been running smoothly, and then people come along and in a short time everything is f*cked up? This makes absolutely no sense. We are doing something… Nature is doing something through us.
When I Am Emotionally Overwhelmed by Global Issues, I Am Useless.
Inspiration is contagious and we all experience this emotional roller-coaster. Mark Ruffalo is an actor and grass roots activist that runs Water Defense and co-founder of The Solutions Project. He started as a fracking protester but quickly realized you can’t say no to something without having an alternative. So he found scientists that had real answers for our global energy crises.
He states that “it’s not simply enough to be against something,” and began The Solutions Project which, “uses science, business, and culture to accelerate our transition to 100% renewable energy.” I like this guy. He’s not waiting around for the same system that created the problems to try to solve them and he is using his privilege as a public figure to get people to create a better world.
Believe It — people want to live in a world of joy and abundance. I also believe there is a growing global community that believes in a natural intelligence — a consciousness uniting all things. People want to support this global reality that is paradoxically decentralized and yet the center of everything. People want to be Awake. They want to know their place, their passion, their purpose and how they can contribute to a better world.
If You Take All the Misery and Pain Out of the Idea of Making the Transition,
It’s Like a BIG Art Project.
Ruffalo points out:
We’re not getting the message about how wonderful a world we’re going to be living in when we make this change. People don’t know, what it will look like to go outside and see no smog. What it will look like to have cars that don’t make any noise, or have any exhaust come out of them, those that won’t even need caravan insurance when traveling. For the first time in human history, we’re actually at a place, technologically speaking, where we can make this transition, and the amount of money, and resources, that we pour into this fossil fuel infrastructure, which has been an appendage to us, like a third leg that we’re dragging around, will be freed up, and no longer will we be worrying about having to extract energy. We’ll be just harvesting what’s already pouring on us every single day.
To be Awake is not to bury your head in the sand, nor is it to kick and scream and create more suffering. To be Awake is to know that to act from Love is the most productive movement to creating the new structure that society and culture will be nurtured by, and to take personal responsibility in your waking life toward making it happen.
When we are inspired, we uplift each other, we feel expansion and excitement. We collaborate, we create art movements, and new philosophies, new technologies with the goal of raising & celebrating human potential. Yet, often it requires the pressure of an intense opposition – such as the possibility of total fiscal collapse, environmental degradation, and sociospiritual atrophy.
Sometimes We Have to Feel the Pain
Before We Stop Doing the Thing That Causes It.
What kind of world do you wish to live in? Give your energy to that which you wish to see in the world, and it will grow with the support of the entire universe backing it… because You/We are the Entire Universe. Whatever we choose to create, we can create, but we need to understand some fundamental principles governing our consciousness, and take action in that direction. Reach for the heavens, and bring them down to where your feet are firmly planted on the Earth. Search your Soul, find your passion, and you will find your purpose, and when you do that, you will contribute to the most epic party that ever happened.
March 22nd is World Water Day
To celebrate water and support global water and sanitation efforts & the transition to 100% renewable energy, this is my offering:
Every purchase of a print of “Water Is Life” will be donated, either to water.org, waterdefense.org, or The Solutions Project. You get beautiful art to remind you of the beauty and connectedness of life and your part in it, and you simultaneously invested your energy into creating a world that honors this connection. This is just an offering. Any and all ideas, suggestions, or improvements as to how to best proceed is welcomed below 🙂 If you want to see more of my art, you can visit here.
