Welcome to Unbound Art, Embracing Life

Welcome to our new blog Unbound Art, Embracing Life. Kim and Fernando will be posting images and observations created to share with you our longstanding exploration of the relationship between consciousness and life.

We clearly sense that the ground of human existence is not in personal consciousness, but in life as a whole.

Personal and tribal identity, which is based on exclusive memory and self-centered and provincial thought, has separated each one of us from most others and alienated the entire species from life. The consequences of this double separation have always been bad, and are becoming increasingly dangerous.

Our present levels of conflict in every sector and at every level of society, as well as the ecological consequences of our reckless exploitation of the biosphere, seems to be placing in jeopardy the very survival of our species. This danger and the urgent necessity for sanity it underlies, seems to be begging every concerned and sensitive human being to question whether there might be an entirely different mode of being in the world.

Is a radical integration with life and harmony with one another possible?

Sunday, October 16, 2011

There is No Separation


As I walk the path from the house to the garden, I can see the bright yellow Rudbeckia blossoms moving with the wind. The birdhouse that protected a chickadee and her young this spring, is now empty, except for a spider that is busy making its own webbed nest. As I pass through the gate and into the garden, I stop to look at the squirrels chasing each other in spirals down the trunk of one of the many Black Walnut trees surrounding this small garden. The air is full of the sounds of crows, woodpeckers, small song birds, crickets and cicadas. The sun comes and goes under the clouds. I move through the garden in an almost trance-like state, not in any hurry, nor with any real purpose, except to see what is there. It occurs to me that nothing in this garden is aware of its own beauty. The flowers don't know their power of attraction, they just attract. Each flower comes from a seed in the ground, unfolds its beauty, petal by petal, attracts and is pollinated by bees and wasps, and eventually drops the seed that it has created so that the next part of the plant cycle will continue. Are we, as human beings any different from this cycle of life? While we may get caught up in our own vanity and drive for individual identity, are we not carried through each stage of life, our body growing, changing, transforming, without our control or initiative. Isn't it true that just like the plants, we must have the sun, water, minerals from the earth, air, warmth, and the interaction between us and other beings, in order to fully develop and survive? Where are the boundaries between the body and nature? Where are the boundaries between the human being and Life? There is no separation.