For The Present

12 x 24, acrylic on canvas

2013 is a year of new beginnings for me... In a few months, I'll be in a new city, looking for a new job, a new apartment, a new community, with possibly a new school... In light of the incessant planning gene I've inherited and all of this crazy upcoming life activity, I've decided that my resolution for the year is just simply to live more in the present. To spend less energy worrying / planning / obsessing / having the craze. This is difficult in transition periods especially, but so important. 

I'm currently reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche (again a graduate school reading list pick).  Also another Tibetan guide to living well... Reading this book is like a breath of fresh air. Very relaxing. 

"There is a famous saying: 'If the mind is not contrived, it is spontaneously blissful, just as water, when not agitated, is by nature transparent and clear.'"

               -Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

So, in this spirit, here are a few new paintings for the New Year and a couple other quotes I've stumbled upon. 

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16x20, oil on canvas

"To lovers of the wild, these mountains are not a hundred miles away.  Their spiritual power and the goodness of the sky make them near, as a circle of friends. ... You cannot feel yourself out of doors; plain, sky, and mountains ray beauty which you feel.  You bathe in these spirit-beams, turning round and round, as if warming at a camp-fire.  Presently you lose consciousness of your own separate existence: you blend with the landscape, and become part and parcel of nature."

                                                                                                                       -John Muir

16x20, acrylic on canvas

"Every human being should keep alive within them the sacred flame of madness, but should behave as a normal person."
                                                                                                                  -Paul Coehlo



-SK