Lost In Translation

When a person is inspired to create something - a painting, a book, a piece of music, a dinner, a flower arrangement - it seems like it comes from somewhere else. An inspiration, which literally means something s/he breathed in. There's no personal gain to be made other than the necessity of somehow expressing - exhaling - whatever was inhaled. Surely, that is true art. It comes from somewhere else; a place beyond ego, a place where the singular desire is to participate in creation to express whatever that 'je ne sais quoi' is that blows through us sometimes, and which is always beautiful. The great artists, the great musicians always says that they do not know where it came from - it just seemed to work through them. "For the wind bloweth where it will; you know not whence it comes or whither it goes."

The idea that art is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration was surely brought from a mind that was bound up in the old - and happily, passing! - idea that we are here to labour like slaves. Sadly, most of us bought into that myth that somehow to succeed at anything requires great suffering and sacrifice, or that there must be a purpose in our creations. Watch children painting. A dab here, a daub there and they see with their mind's eye a work of art that we don't see without the eyes of that child. They have to kind of translate it for our slower brains - it gets lost in translation.

When a person sets out to create something from their own desire, it is quite different. It might succeed instantly if it is hyped by the general race-mind media, which says, "This is what people want." Art, music, literature has been handled this way for a relatively short time (about five decades, I think) but there seems to be a real return nowadays to wanting something that goes deeper than that veneer and is rather something new - not as in rushing to latest craze, but in the sense of a new creation. Unmade beds, pickled fish and so-called poems about joy riders and crime have had their brief day and happily are no longer our daily diet. The exposure of corruption in parliament, the shame of the greedy city-boy bankers, the whole sense of living in an unreal reality governed by egos has been blown wide open.

I think we are living in crucial times and when people speak of 'people power' it is very different from the socialist myth (which is really tyranny!) but is really about handing back individual power to people to live their own lives and to shake off the notion that we are anything less than Divine beings whose sole purpose here is to realise the beautiful creativity within us and to be.

On a lighter note! Congratulations the the brilliant 'Diversity' - who won Britain's Got Talent (why can't they be grammatically correct and call it Britain Has Talent ???) - what an utterly stunning performance! Congratulations to Susan Boyle, who sang so beautifully and what a gracious response to those who came first! And congratulations to Julian Smith, who clearly plays from 'another place'. Thank you for giving us such a variety of beauty!