Painting and poetry

To see is to reflect—

to gather knowledge,

to approach an understanding

of the other.

Trees,

birds in flight,

flora and fauna:

all stand beyond us,

more than our names for them.

Social structures,

concepts,

and inherited certainties

cannot fully account

for how or why things are.

The ego seeks identity,

a fixed and certain world.

Yet greed,

ignorance,

dissonance,

and bias

leave us perpetually incomplete.

Poetry,

music,

and painting

open another way of seeing.

Ink and water

moving across ragged rice paper

become a lyrical field,

teaching us the materiality of things,

the conundrums and dialectics

of a cosmos forever becoming.

We stand within it

and at its threshold—

seeing,

becoming,

and seeing again.