Art of Meeting

There is a moment, just before you recognize what you are looking at, when something registers without a name. A color appears. A sound arrives. For just that instant, the experience is complete, and you are not separate from it.

This happens more often than we notice. Cold water on your hands in the morning. The smell of rain before it falls. For a split second, the boundary between you and what you sense simply isn't there.

We tend to move past these moments quickly, filing them away and returning to the familiar sense of being a self who has experiences. But something is revealed in that gap, however brief. The world and the one who perceives it are not two things that come together. They arise at the same instant.

In my painting, I've found that the images that carry the most life are the ones that emerged in that same quality of meeting, where neither the brush nor the hand was leading.

What if this meeting isn't a moment you pass through, but the ground that everything passes through?