taiji heartwork
forget self & become one with the dao
19 March 2024
To be alive necessitates injustice. My living requires other things – animal, vegetable, mineral – to die. My bourgeois satisfactions require others to live without. My over-consumption steals from planet and from future generations. The ethical life is simply one that strives to minimise injustice.
18 March 2024
When I was a teenager I loved browsing through the National Geographic magazine in the public library. I remember one occasion looking at a pull-out photograph of the Amazon rainforest in which two European explorers gazed proudly at the camera. As I studied the picture I suddenly became aware of numerous smaller native tribes people standing amongst the trees. I hadn't noticed them before, not because they were camoflaged but because they looked part of the scene; they didn't stand out as something alien or other; they belonged there. And whereas the Europeans seemed to come out of the photo towards me, the natives literally receded into the trees. In fact they looked exactly like the trees – as though they had extruded up from the Earth beneath their feet. At the time I was struck by how insignificant and primitive the natives looked compared to the civilized Europeans. But now, my work, which is my day, everyday, aspires to become as those natives. As naked and as natural as they.