Michael Divine

Writings : spirituality

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Some Gratitude on a Chilly Evening

I'm rounding the corner, walking home from the organic market that we shop at, and it's a chilly evening. The sun is well past gone. I have a small bag of groceries in my arm - chocolate, coffee, some vegetables, some coconut milk creamer - and a man pushing a grocery cart filled with plastic bottles and aluminum cans passes me. He looks to be smiling but then again maybe he's grimacing and I wonder: what stroke of life gave this man a cold evening to push a grocery cart filled with plastic bottles, maybe just trying to find enough to make a few dollars and buy something to eat - and me, walking to my warm home. Sometimes, driving through downtown LA, I end up on one of the blocks of homeless people living in tents, pushing shopping carts that contain everything they own, living in the gutter. I wonder at how it is that I am in my car, listening to music, on my way to a meeting, or a dinner with friends, or just getting on the highway and heading home and they are there, stuck in some all together different way of life. I wonder at how the uber-wealthy end up so high up on that pedestal they place themselves upon, sometimes unable to truly value the little things.

I wonder at this... this world with all of it's countless threads of lives going on: where some are bombed, others are swaddled, some are cared for, and some are left to be trodden upon, some walk tall, some walk small, some don't walk at all... I wonder how it is that man is legless and I walk along or that child was born without sight, and I can see. How that person appears to be ahead of me, and that person is behind. The vast multitudes and all the myriad walks of life. I wonder at it and I wonder at how I ended up here: making art, doing what I love, living unafraid, neither angry nor resentful, but loving it. I'm in a wonderful marriage to a wonderful woman, with a home that is warm and, right now, smells like fresh baked bread, with a cat on my lap and soft music playing and soft lighting. I wonder at it all and the only thing I am left with - the only answer that comes back to me, echoing from my heart and what feels like the heart of all things - is gratitude: at this gift, this life.

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Living From an Aesthetically Pleasing Perspective

The thing is, at 3am you're up and you're getting something to eat and maybe a drop to drink and you notice: the plane of the wall meets the plane of the ceiling and the busy-ness of the spice rack to the planar composition of the stove top sort of off sets the shifting perspectives and it's so sublimely perfect that you really just want to go wake everyone up but you know that you and you alone might be the only one to ever have appreciated this corner of reality. Blue to burgundy to beige to gold and you can't help but want to run to the type writer - the keyboard - the pen and the pencil - and get it down - that inspiration. Maybe you just study the lines and do your best to remember it.

To the casual observer that sounded like a lot of hokey artspeak. But you and I: we are not casual observers.

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