Canvas

can·vas: a strong, coarse unbleached cloth made from hemp, flax, cotton, or a similar yarn, used as a surface for oil painting. 

The Storyteller feels the rush of nature trying to find its own expression. 

Creativity hovers near the porous white canvas of an oil painting not yet conceived; Albeit energy exchanged. She trades this one-dimensional medium for the four-dimensional, as she contemplates the fabric of silence soon to be decorated by reverberating musical notes. With her eyes on the horizon, she next wrestles with the blank page as words and thought architecture seek defined form. In the listless and ineffable, she shifts her attention to movement ready to embody stories not yet told. 

They say the world is our stage, and so with due care we channel courage to motion the pen that writes our ending, or new beginnings still. Reel after reel, and footage after footage, she comes to understand the bidirectional relationship between art and its medium, enthused solely by one soul’s journey:-

“Seeking the sacred echo of its own voice, melody of its own truth, and its own authentic light”. 

Correspondingly, the seeds of coniferous species such as Cedar and Sequoia congruently choose their true expression and sterling substrate. Forged from the radiating heat of fierce forest fires, the cones from the tree open to release its prized seeds. Moisture matches soil, and life unfolds for another generation still. 

And in this moment, a tortured artist turns her mirrors inwards to become her most prized canvas. The very olive hewed slate to be tortured and mutilated into pattern and rhythm. In her world where possibilities are conflated with probabilities, a place of rampant imagination and endless realities. 

She whispers achingly, “My mind. My body. My connection. My agency and authenticity. All parts called to this chosen medium”. 

With this new substrate born, energy pierces this medium. The Storyteller witnesses her ego as it undergoes a series of back-to-back deaths, sometimes followed by the glorious risings of phoenix and other times devastated and destroyed. She kneads and kneads her muscle tissue and covering like dough. 

Lash after lash, drop after drop, and piercing of skin after piercing of skin. Violence, ferocity, and savagery. Brutality fuses might. From perfection to perfection, to destruction and resurrection. Concealed and unconscious, markings multiply and hieroglyphics materialize. Structure after restructure, illusions shatter, iterations ugly, and meaningful narratives unveil. 

Mutilated and aching body drips in crimson, adorned by its comprising cells, platelets, and plasma. She gasps for oxygen and manages an exhale; She murmurs to her selves:- 

“Lean in”. 

Sorrow in full mastery, hesitation pungent, she perceives for the first time the most honest and vulnerable of art. 

Shapeshifting, shape inducing, shape aggrandizing. Shape dysmorphia channeled into shape morphia. Unity to illuminate harmony. 

Nowhere to hide. No desire to hide. Eventually the scars form patterns which bare revelations profundo. 

The formless is channeled into form, as emotional fluency emulates the strokes of a master painter in the hard-earned battle for agility.  Evidence of malevolence, and in equal transcendence, told by tracings of drugs, infusions, intoxications, sobriety, celibacy, entanglements, and transcendent sex. 

Equanimity exchanged in favor of movement. She now a galaxy onto herself: One of inordinate desire. One of heart. One in activation. 

Governed by action, new marks etch as she further sews the thread. Metaphorical and real piercings brush her soft skin. She who drowns in death and loss, voluntarily buried in quicksand. She who is now: palette, object, and subject.

Tidal wave energies and frequencies shift the figurative currents, restructuring the very streams that originate life. “Move with the intelligence and fluidity of water”, the energetic reveals from the chronicles of the one true Domain. 

She stands at the edge of paradox, and duality collapses to essence. From channeler to channeled. From still to animated. And from lover, to loved, to love. 

Agency saluted on the back of magic depicted by sacred geometry on her sweet skin. In the quantum, artist, dancer, speaker, writer, domesticator, liberator, lover, explorer, and performer all collapse to one.

Destroyer meets creator. Aptitude meets deprivation. Sex transmutes to sexuality. 

Intimacy obscured to platform templates. 

Receiver and giver. Beauty and strength. Futility alchemized to essential. 

Outside time, the energetic meets sex - the foundational element of creation. Control exchanged for light, now doubling as particle and wave. Authentic to core, decorated form but a projection of the purveyor’s naked eye. She seeks the void cradled in the unconditional.

As tears pierce the carbon canvas, she recalls echoes:-

“Baby, you’re so busy treading the water, you forgot you love to swim”.

As eyes consume the body’s markings, mirrored reflection divulges the other’s most internal. Finally, a human turned inside out, wearing its wounds, scars, and organs in devotion to Truth. A soul ignited by its own fire. The highest in devotion where expression becomes itself. 

Her body the temple, her body the ultimate canvas. Called to the service of others, she becomes the download of yesteryear, namely that her telos is to venture in solitude to the edge of experience to release others from the treacherous pain of the “alien” wound and deliver connection. She builds paths in rhythm and love, borrowing from the consecrated architecture of the past: chapel, church, mosque to synagogue and Mayan temple. 

In KNOWING, she prostrates herself in worship of the cuts on her body.  Tracing each scar, she confesses, “I feel everything” – her aura and body porous as ever. Sex, seduction, and scars. Free as much as pained. All senses conscripted, the Self channels through its tongue; And, she fathoms: 

“Heaven resides in the darkness”. 

Deep in reflection, the Storyteller concedes that it is her history and emotional arras to which the human connect. In the end, if the value of art is understood as correlated to the delta weight of new emotional charge beheld by its patron, then what more can cause extreme deviation than a mutilated self-canvas of a tortured artist to secure the pivotal connection.