In a northern exposure groove...

So today I find myself in a Northern Exposure kind of groove: reflective, ironic, a little melancholy but simultaneously hopeful about what God holds in our future. It should come as no surprise that my main man is Chris - especially when he's making art or talking on the radio - and as the rain POURS down today, my heart takes me here:

How sweet. How true. How beautiful and happy/sad all at once. Remember Tim Buckley? I fell in love with his "Happy/Sad" album and used to drift off into new and untried places with it oh so many years ago. And even now his groove seems to be where my soul drifts when I'm not paying attention. My Northern Exposure man, Chris, put it like this:

Well, you know... the human soul chooses to express itself in a profound profusion of ways. What I'm dealing with is the aesthetics of the transitory. In this particular exhibition, the fleeting nature of the piece itself becomes a comment on mortality. Like the temporary installations of Christo, I'm creating tomorrow's memories. And, as memories, my images remain as immortal as art which is concrete.

And then, of course, Chris flings a huge piano into the air. It was going to be a cow but that became both cruel and too complicated - for Chris and everyone else. So... in cooperation with the whole community, his encounter with art changed. And it became better...

I was fixated on that flying cow. Then when Ed said that Monty Python had already painted that picture, I thought I was through. I had to let go of that cow to see all the other possibilities, even though that was frightening, because Ididn't know where I was headed - and I didn't know where I'd come out, see? As Kierkegaard said so well, "The self is only that whichit is in the process of becoming." Art, same thing. James Joyce had something to say, too: "Welcome, O Life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."

That's what today feels like in this northern exposure groove: happy/sad, exploring and discerning and all the rest. We are here to fling some thing, an image that bubbled up out of the collective unconscious of our community. Blessed Sabbath.