SEPTEMBER

I had a strange dream few weeks ago. Two birds were following me in my dreams, one had a human face and another face made of flowers. I read somewhere that bird following you in a dream symbolizes your goals and aspirations. Of course I had to get ambitious and dream up two. Feels appropriate for Gemini.

If one makes art one must understand why. I ask myself this question a lot and answer is different every time.  Art is a feeling materialized, and no one feels the same, or all the time. Art can be joy, grief, wonder. It can be a place to escape, like a time of happiness seen in retrospect. It’s a breath of fresh air, a door open or shut tight. It can be a trap, Bluebeard’s castle. Or wide open space with no limitations, basking in sunshine. Your unique personal manifesto, it’s a reflection of who you are at the moment, a time-capsule. And you can go back to it, hold it in your hands, relive your dreams. Compare your “now” to your “then”.

We think of time as being linear, we strive forward, set up goals, and achieve milestones. But time is more complicated than just a straight line between being born and being dead, it’s spiral and circular, and running away we actually run toward, meeting ghosts of our previous “selves”, and we look at them through dusty windows of our memory, this faded polaroid: I remember you, you are not a stranger, we walked this earth together many moons ago, my art is a proof that you existed, my heart will always be your home…

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

—T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding”