Altar: commentary art, human evolution

When sculptor, Jan Sanchez invited me to create an art piece for a gallery exhibit of assemblage art, I certainly wasn’t thinking “porta-potty”. For the past 2 years I have however been emptying myself – emptying myself to the point of having come to live a very quiet “cave-like” life (with the occasional flair for dinner and conversation with friends). In this process of eliminating I’ve come to see how very noisy is our society: A constant barrage of activities calling our attention. I’ve come to see how noisy we are “inside” to have created such an outer world…

The world we’ve created has become such a whirlwind in fact, that we seem less and less able to remember how to create the spaciousness of inner quiet from which the Soul of mankind speaks. …I wonder about what this says of the evolution of human consciousness.

I read somewhere recently: “Want to know God? God is where and how you spend your time.” This has served a good reminder to me of what I am making important -- and what I am wasting any given moment. It has made me more aware of what I am declaring as important in Life by where I place my time and my thoughts.

What is human waste? I mean beyond the immediate obvious: beyond those who live and die with serious drug addiction, suicide, premature death, birth defects. These may or may not be human waste, and for many these horrendous hardships herald great gifts. I mean the more insidious kind of human waste – the kind of mindless wasting we each do on a daily, moment-by-moment basis when we’re caught up in reacting, judging, worrying, gossiping, positioning, passively watching, and just going on “automatic pilot”.

What thoughts and behaviors constitute a wasting of life?

What parts of our selves do we give away, squander when we’re not fully present for life?

What course are we creating as the evolution of human consciousness by our choices of value and waste?

What are we missing out on experiencing when we choose instead to squander our time, our thoughts, our talents? …I hope that this altar will be experienced as a provocation of these questions …Something to contemplate.
For me this piece became an unexpected ceremony – a gift back to life saying: I look at all these faces of people (on the floor) whose life has now past and realize how short the gift of life is. I see how much I squander that gift every day in hundreds of small ways -- of ways by my wasting, I say “no” to life. I choose to look at this waste. I choose to see if I can find within me a greater “yes”


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