Between every breath: a pure spaciousness.

Between each moment, each thought, each emotion.

Between each pulse of blood through the body:

Clear, brilliant, awake awareness.

From this vibrant and lucid field, breath arises:

Powerful. Or perhaps weak and close to death. Or drawn soft, or hushed, or raspy, or a thousand million other possible ways.

It is a fullness - a textural substantiality - that rises simultaneously both from, and with, lucid awareness itself.

There is no form without the formless spaciousness it arises from… and there is no formless, without the ever-churning bounty of form. To deny one is to deny both. They cannot be separated (though the mind does try). To deny either is to wish death upon the other, which introduces a feeling of schism… a rupture… inside reality itself. Inside us.

To create paintings, to write poetry, to sculpt with clay or dance with the body or sing with the soul - unselfconsciously - is to know this. Where else could the creative impulse originate? To think it is because of “me” is a marvelous hubris. To know that I am the emptiness - the point of origin - of that which now blooms into form - to know that I am both of these, and all of this - is to know who I am.

Each moment, every moment, we are both nothing - and something.

(And truly, everything.)

So: a bright luminous spaciousness pervades all.

And: a loamy rich darkness, which is the all.

Both are, in every moment.

And to create - prior to ownership, “my art” and “my intention” and “my work” - is to know this.

To be this.

This painting was borne inside this knowing. The dark folds of the immovable ground of being, the luminous brilliance of awareness that shines through the eyes of every being (no matter how clouded the mind and emotions may be).

How easy, how wonderfully simple, to rest in this. As this. And to be moved by this.

Moved by the bright, through the primordial unending ocean that we are.