sonora2sonoma

We speed up our lives by means of transportation and communication improvements and the result is we see more than we are meant to see. And then we wonder why we don’t place as much value on the quality of what we do see as we did before, when in reality we’ve just overloaded our senses . . . because we can only take in so much information at one time. When we exceed those limits then what’s left just kind of falls off.

Beauty is always there waiting, if we just slow down enough to take a closer look . . but we usually speed right past because we’re preoccupied with our anticipation and our eagerness to see it all.

In the end, all mans’ works are nothing at best but footprints in the snow, and the snow will finally melt, and the tracks will be gone, and there won’t be any trace that they were ever there. Therein lays a hint concerning our real place in the scheme of things. But we certainly do like to give ourselves a big fanfare and pretend there’s more to it than that, don’t we?

Those of us who can’t accept the reality of our relative insignificance cling to things like art, science, engineering, in the mistaken belief and the fervent hope that they will make of us more than we really are, forgetting, as they do so, that we are much more than the limited vision they perceive us to be. In reality, we are a part of a Whole that is not only bigger than its parts, it is bigger than the sum of its parts, encompassing all and everything. When the creations of man are viewed against this backdrop, they seem of little consequence in relation to that Whole

And if we look at our works, and attach to them greater significance than they warrant, we demonstrate to the world our misjudgment of the degree to which our ego-driven and self-centered tendencies have caused us to forget momentarily that the Whole of which we are a part is also a part of us. Herein lays the key to restoring our understanding of our relationship with the world, how we fit into it and how to arrive at Us.

My own works are a joy to me and a source of inspiration and give me a sense of accomplishment, and even a sense of importance, tempered hopefully by humility.  But I pray that I won’t forget the fact that if they were destroyed in the next instant, it wouldn’t make me less, or diminish my joy. Which is to say it’s a joy to create them—and in fact the doing of something, or, more precisely, its “doingness,” is where all living occurs—but it’s folly to be attached to those creations, because life is a verb and its artifacts are, after all, nothing but footprints in the snow.

Originally written sometime in 1987, revised 6 November, 2018

Tim Konrad                                                                                                                               Petaluma