...about our perspectives...
...our beliefs in the possible, and the impossible...
...our need to make order of a thing that needs no ordering from us...
...and our need to make things conform to our understandings.
The worst thing we can do as a people is to look up into the sky and no longer wonder, dream, or try to understand. Believing we have all the answers necessary for our lives is a self imposed lobatomy, shutting off the aspect of being human that is so incredible: the desire to understand and the joy of wonder.
Some time back, in an art appreciation course that I really didn't appreciate, the instructor gave me my one and only A in that course for a paper on a local artists painting. It was abstract, colorful, and had a great deal of movement. The assignment: "what does this picture mean to you?" I took a cop out on this and wrote "I don't know. It has me captivated and looking into it for what's behind the brush stroke, and yet I no more than think I've got an answer then I find it slipping away into other questions". The thing was, I had no idea what I was supposed to write and so I wrote the first things off the top of my head.
It's now close to 25 years later and I think back on that picture and the response I gave. I never understood why I got an A, but I didn't complain. I still see that picture in my mind at times, and I still have no idea what the artist was trying to convey. What I do hope, now that I've grown to understand life just a bit better, is that I wouldn't try. Seeking to look beyond the brush strokes is wonderful, seeking to parrot someone else's understanding is a cop out.
