Sometimes the very things that have made us the creative thinkers that we are, are also problems with our perception. We create these realms where we remake the world as we want. It's a place that mixes dreams, subtle lies and embellishments that weave us wholly into more of who we want to be or thought we should have been instead.
Often at night I lived a life that was far more interesting than classes and confounding rules growing up. I would go to unusual places that seemed real, far more real than this inert, life that just doesn't appear to respond or take our greater self very seriously. To each one of us this greater self is the most important inner quest we have and we spend our days and nights struggling to manifest it here for all to see.
As a kid I realized I could fly over my house near the graveyard where I would scare myself and friends with attempted camp outs and soar over the small town of my youth; past the humdrum buildings of the elementary school and over the nearest mountains; gliding and diving through the air in pure freedom. These were the first flying dreams I can remember. I had so many of them in fact that I was convinced it was a sign that I could fly and had other supernatural abilities.
Naturally I spent months standing on roofs and climbing way up in trees trying to find just the right way to lift off and soar through the sky in the middle of the day for all the mere mortal folk to see. Instead of course I fell and kept falling, over and over again. I was in the 3rd grade and fantasy life was easy to enter and much richer than the instruction I received on how to function in this world. I spent a lot of time in secret spots up the trials in the meandering oak groves, daydreaming on my true nature and reality. After a while I’d usually just lay around on the large gnarled branches spacing out my thoughts to make room for this power over the natural world to emerge.
Not too much has changed over the years. In fact now I go there in meditation but bring as much of this outer world of ours into my focus as well. I don’t try to levitate objects anymore or lift off in a gust of magical air but I do use certain ideas and principles to let my imagination assist in moving my perception into what can be referred to as a meta state.
I’ve recently come to realize that this ability I’ve honed throughout my life is also what makes it difficult to trust my thoughts and emotions and discern what’s real and whats unreal at times. I’ve been known over the years to have a spooky sense with intuition but when I’m emotionally disturbed or out of my mind (usually by extroverting myself to far) I get all mixed up and can’t trust what I’m thinking or feeling.
This is a core issue with the creative process and how we align ourselves to activate the subconscious and enter into a creative flow. What helps me find unique processes in painting will often cause me to fail at some pretty basic life situations. I just read into things way to far and find the simply packaged version suspect to the core. I like to know how it works and in a deeper way, love to get lost in the nuances but that isn't making it work any better than it was. It’s a complex way to get the profundity out of the perfection it already has as it was created. The real simplicity is letting things work as they naturally do without a reflective process hindering the flow. My personal favorite of life's greatest conundrums.
Here we have a need for reflective thinking to comprehend the depth of meaning out of our experiences yet if we spend too much time in the mirror realm life gets real hard real fast. Talk about awkward. Our controlled experimental spaces become very comforting compared to life's sloppy brouhaha of none stop elements outside our control. So where is the magic realm where this inner world and the outer merge and interact? Where is that place where we co-create reality and find that real thrill of life in doing so? One version I've discovered, is that it's in the balance of reflection and action without the thinking about a thing really at all. If your like I am I easily mistake my thoughts as my truth and believe the conclusions without any field experiments to back it up. We do, simply put, have to just dive in sometimes and get wet.
I learned in my hard knock ‘bohemianistic’ school of the starving artist that we had to sacrifice our time to learn and learn, drudgingly study and apply everything we could from the past; completely abandon our style our personal approach and do as they did. My heroes in art did the same thing. When I looked back over their earliest work, they painted as their heroes did. For them you could see that, all of a sudden, out of nowhere came their true voice after moving through existing styles, palettes and applications. They had found themselves and entered into their own dialogue with mankind and the universe. They were tapped in!
Putting ourselves aside to learn other ways of thinking, seeing, feeling and then acting is a messy business and potentially dangerous in its own right. Some artists never make it out of there. I know without a doubt that I messed up my head for good with everything I studied and romanticized about. But here the truth becomes clear. I wanted to be someone else, something better than I was. So there by a dirty process of elimination we can know a thing for what it really is. I couldn’t possibly be what I originally was. Not this flawed joker. This discombobulated delinquent who can’t focus, couldn’t hold a gaze with anyone, couldn’t stand up straight or get a complete thought across to save his life.
I’ve been called a chameleon before and used to think it pointed to my incredible ability to adapt and change. To bend like a reed in the winds of struggle and poverty. Though It really meant I hid myself in the realities of other things. Other people’s ideas and opinions. I could reasonable see almost any side to an argument from a empathic humanistic view, so why not. Now to be fair both of these observations are true but if you're anything like I am you’ll focus on the negative component’s hoping possibly to squeeze out any self pity, or demoralizing and jaded motivations to play around in. With a good enough reason like these I could cast off moral responsibility or any sense of a higher standard I had been trying to achieve. It's a dangerous playground of fuzzy abstraction I stay clear of even if I have to take a dark alley or unknown trial to get home, it's better than the almost certain future of that playground after hours .
If I’ve learned anything from this fumbling journey through my own awakening; as I snap out of it and wake the hell up, put on my painters pants and be a man of action, is that I actually did have the answer’s all along. Hidden as they were in natural untainted mechanisms of survival and community contribution, I had the clear and present ingredients for developing into a fine young artistic talent from the start. I was convinced it was far more complex than I’ve finally come around to rediscover and now the only benefit to having spent two decades learning how not to do everything is perhaps my spectrum of experience and how that may help others.
It’s true to some extent that suffering brings us that deep reality in a creative thing that allows us to tap the veins of humanity and touch deeply all those that see, hear and feel our work but it’s also true that when you are given a perfectly good computer and it’s fresh with no data to bog it down it floats like a butterfly and sings like sinatra.
I’m happy for my problems with perception now because I have tools to engage them and new awareness of alternate realities that can also be true. All this keeps me humble and invigorated. There is great joy in being a sort of veiled rider between the realms of potential yet it came at a great cost. Here and now I find myself overwhelmed with the desire to share and upload my reflections and insights and give these new understandings to you and our friends. I feel very strongly that it’s the beginning to a wildly exciting journey of exploration that I hope relates to your own.
Born from the dust of stars we yearn and fight for that eternal freedom again and again. To love as we want, be what we want and do what we want. To feel how alive we are right now with everything at our fingertips.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this journey together. Please let me know what you think? Your thoughts and opinions are important to me. Sign up on my newsletter to stay updated on my weekly blog posts. We’re just getting started here. I have so much more I want to explore. Stay tuned, stay inspired.
Luke Caleb Lamar