Pretty much any flight I take from Albuquerque requires a layover. I fly a lot, and always choose window seats, alternating port and starboard sides for each leg. Why? To save my neck. I tend to spend the flight plastered to a window, agape and in awe of the clouds, of the altered and natural skin of our Mother far below. It almost always draws tears.
If I don’t switch sides, I’ve learned I will have neck pain.
Occasionally, I find myself tapping a stranger’s shoulder, disrupting their TV show to point frantically at something in that limited oval, maybe an eclipse, an eye-to-eye with a lightning storm, a supreme mountain sunset. Usually they humor me, take a gander, nod, smile, thumbs up, and get back to what they were doing.
Sometimes I wonder about how detachment became the status quo. At what point did we decide to prioritize our comfort above our connection to the world around us? How did we lose the capacity to empathize, to feel on behalf of one another or on behalf of our environment? I am digging within my own humanity—my own capacity to feel—to find the heartbreak this stems from.
OK, so there’s that. And then there are those who wake up in the morning and ache, those yearning to reconnect with what was lost … or maybe with what we have never yet known. From this place, the choice becomes to investigate Creation through the creative process, or to perish. For some, without the privilege of access, there is no choice. So much art caters to the intellect, tickles the wit, holds the key to an inside joke. The cost to enter is only $200,000 in art school debt.
But there is also art that ventures into the magic, driven by a deep desire to know something besides disconnection, to become fluent in the poetry of the supernatural.
Art is about finding our way home to our humanity. We take so many wrong turns, and each one is a teacher.
