Power and Love

This is one of the drawings produced especially for the book Power and Love, by Adam Kahane, one of my partners in Reos.  

In my experience, while it's healthy to get in touch with one's feelings and emotions, it can also be toxic to dwell there extensively.  It's easy to become so focused our own feelings and emotions that we by-pass the possibility to perceive and experience the outside world through our feeling life.  Do you use your feelings as an organ of perception, for the moods in nature, for subtleties in art and culture and language, as a means of understanding history, as a way of getting to know someone?  Are you unfeeling, or caught up in your own need to feel a certain way?

This drawing is based on a sculpture I made of a roughly carved redwood post with a hammered copper bowl suspended above it.  The context in the book is to exert both power and love in a dynamic balance.  The post stands upright powerfully; the bowl is receptive and open, and defies gravity.  

Walking in another person's shoes, putting yourself in another's position - we can literally shape shift, inwardly speaking.  This is a very useful ability when building social bridges.  In the book, this picture illustrates the moment when all people in a room put themselves in each other's shoes, collectively sensing the whole that is greater than the sum of the parts - an essential step in healing social rifts and building cohesion for the way forward.

Martin Luther King calls "sentimental and anaemic" love the kind of love that consists of gestures towards connection instead of true shared understanding and mutual commitment to the other.  This picture is a different kind of rose: the rose won from the thorns, the one that is offered in spite of, and alongside, friction and turbulence. I drew this especially for the book Power and Love. 

In order to do creative work, one must establish the conditions for creativity.  For some, that's a studio or a guitar and a street.  For social co-creation, the forms vary, but the container is essential.  The container is a set of relationships and agreements that enable people to do creative work together.

My friend and mentor Dennis Klocek told me, your wound is your gift.  Joseph Beuys said, show your wound.  Saint Paul: My strength is perfected in my weakness.  

The wound in this sense is the weakness, the soul weakness, the inner failure.  Where we are inwardly weak, in our shadow and our shortcomings, is where we can grow, and where we grow, we become capable, even masterful.  The alchemists turned the shadow (lead) into the higher human potential (gold).  The psychic wound is a door to finding our true potential.

In my experience, taking one's wound in hand transforms it into a powerful teacher and a doorway to freedom and to creative consciousness.

The creative process requires one to enter a state of not knowing and act in the moment according to what emerges.  It requires a profound inner commitment and surrender.  This drawing is about that threshold, and is the final drawing in the book.