Oscillating

Between Passionate Commitment and Contemplative Withdrawal…

I did not realize until recently that this is what draws me so compellingly to Miro’s work. It is this tension that inspires and haunts his work. And this same struggle that both catapults me forward into engagement and pulls me back into full retreat.

It is confounding in one place to imagine the other.

When we visited the Miro museum in Barcelona this past summer, I wept. It was unexpected and not driven by sadness but rather a strange gloriously painful feeling of having come home to a place I could not stay.

There was no troubling me there.

No impossibly hurt feelings. No circling around truth like a hawk. No trying to decipher other peoples’ intentions from their actions.

No mirror neurons. No emotional contagion. No blame or self-hate.

There was flying, adventure– journey.

No need to evaluate, deduce, denounce.

The world inside his paintings offer a different kind of oxygen. Molecules of play and possibility run wild. The elements comprise spiritual breath.

It is a world not of place but space.

It is not a physical location where all manner of realities must be contended with but rather and emotionally imaginative space. A provocative invitation where nothing is expected and you need not move to arrive.

In this space you can be as wildly different and disproportionately beautiful as you are. It is an internally alive world. There is room.

There are no human faults to fight against.

No blindingly complex issues to resolve or resolve to resolve.

Roland Penrose, responsible for Miro’s famous exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1964, commented that the ladder motif alluded to Miro’s desire to “to rise above the limitations that bind us to earth… to transcend the incomplete condition of daily life.”

Pain and suffering is the birthplace of beauty and love. And vice versa.

We all need ladders of escape in order to climb back into our hearts and spirits, back into the space where unity prevails, where we can engage retreat and retreat into engagement of a different kind.