“Each canvas is a portal that I must decorate to invite the viewer in. If they accept, opening the door takes them somewhere only they can witness. It is that journey that is true art, not the mere flat image I construct. All art is collaboration, for without the viewer it does not exist.”
- Robert Taylor
It seems Someone (maybe it’s who Mirabai calls “The Dark One) has hung canvases on the walls of our life. Decorations to invite and entice. I live for the unsolved mystery, the next clue always showing up on time. And so I ask myself, what is it that I want to call into existence today? What is it I wish to witness today? Or will I pick my door by means of synchronicity and see what surfaces as a result?
On this day it all started with a search for the perfectly sized lightbulb to fit our lamp. A mission my oldest boy ingeniously re-termed as “The Mission of the Source, because light is the source of everything.”
The day unfolded from there. A trip to a place without that pesky gravity to weigh us down.
We walk in and immediately place the headdresses of medicine men and women on our heads because we will need the help of flight and clairvoyant sight to allow our imaginations to soar.
We take a trip into a secret garden, one previously discovered the last time we were here. So hidden and private we feel like it was carved out of the belly of the location just for us. I sit in the sun in the gazebo while the boys gather sticks and fight off enemies.
I ride turtles, scoping out the horizon.
We peeled back the next layer of our eyes and peered closer.
We saw woodland creatures.
A smurf hidden underground with just his little white floppy hat exposed above the surface.
Arrows, vines, intertwined branches, wind chimes, colored glass, chipped away walls with chunks of vulnerability exposed. They told me all is well. They told me life is as it should be. They asked me if I believed in having my breath taken away. I told them I very much did.
And then, as if a canvas freshly added by Someone and placed on the walls of life, we saw a gate that had previously eluded us.
A gate marked with an “X” and guarded by a stone man. I told the boys they’d have to go without me. That only little people could fit in. They’d have to do the exploring, but they’d have to go quick and they’d have to be quiet. Their eyes lit up. We all want to believe there is territory that only we are so fortunate to be the first to discover. (The stone man told me there is.)
My boys came back with tales of a bridge and a stone path. Their hearts light. They took pictures from the inside. I took pictures from the outside.
We heard voices from the outside world. Other people were coming. They had somehow found our secret garden. Of course the garden would never reveal itself to them the way it had done for us. They wouldn’t collaborate with the canvas in the same way we had. And certainly on their first visit they wouldn’t see to the depths that we saw. We decided to get away from the newly discovered “inner” gardens, to respect our fresh secret.
As we walked away we saw the leaves floating on the surface of the water in the fountain. The still water a sign that our garden had not been intruded, but it was indeed time for us to get out before it was too late.
“The mere act of breathing is poetry in motion, the art of life. We are all artists – our body is a brush, the world our canvas and life our painting.”
- Robert Taylor
We found an escape hatch and pushed buttons to make our way out of that imaginative world we had entered and into a new reality that was fresh and waiting for us. Canvas upon canvas, so many to explore. And upon exploring, we interact and collaberate with what we see there. And upon collaborating, we create, so that we way may make something of it for ourselves. In this way we pay honor. We acknowledge. We express. It’s a catch and release, both parts necessary for our thriving.
We will leave no stone unturned. This is the way of the imaginers.
“My art reflects my own spiritual journey and it gives me the ability to make peace with the physical world. We all have that feeling that something is missing, a part of the puzzle we haven’t yet found, and so we make our place in this world by adding Art to express our Inner Being.”
- Robert Taylor
