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Me vs. Me

 

 

This is a favorite piece of art.  There are two small ceramic balls inside each square of the grid I placed over the whole surface.  The balls are all at varying distances from one another.  When I made this I was thinking about relationships with significant others but today it makes me think of how I relate to myself.

See how the tension changes inside each square according to how close or how far away from one another the balls are?

It’s like during a day how we feel good about ourselves,  how we think:  ”cool…this is going well and I’m on a roll here..”,  then you open a bill and you distance yourself from yourself only to go out in the world to do an errand and someone opens the door for you with a genuinely kind and heartful smile and life is different once again.

I sense that the suffering the Buddha talks about has to do with this very thing:  that we have an erratic relationship with ourselves,  we are not trustable in being rigorous about keeping our consciousness like a river;  softly easing around the boulders in the way while surrendered to the movement.  Not fighting it,  not loving it,  not telling someone about it to make ourselves feel good,  not hiding from it….  JUST BEING IT.

I’m going to try that today.

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