¡Hace Lo!

The inimitable one and only original Antonio Garcia Villarán, this week, answered 100 questions in seven minutes (hoping to do so in five, hence the title of his video); and to the one posed by zluch0 in the photo below, he replies

“It is never to late to do anything. If you want to do something: DO IT!”

^{The Q. is: Do you think there comes a point when it is too late to learn how to make art?}

Commitment is 50% of doing anything. Ability is the other half.
Only by doing it you will discover if either are optimally invested in the thing you have planned, and whether the two can pull off your success (measured by your own standards, naturally).

Are you on a mission (yet)?

Sometimes it takes years before we are in a position to measure our own success. We might have thought we married the right gal at 26 and then by 36 we look again and find the goal posts several soccer fields over from the one in which we have been lazily kicking a ball around. We might have set our sights too high, too low, or just too willy-nilly. Plus there is always that second thought: when you decide a new course which is valid any which way, but especially so if it decides to cater to the soul's mission.

Growing into what we do best

Once upon a time, before he grew and plaited his famous goatee, Mr. Hamparte (as I like to call my dear warm-hearated and mildly maverick friend, Villarán, who wrote a book on "Hamparte", or bad art) also gave painting tutorials on YouTube. It is actually fascinating to watch a portrait develop under his very well placed brushstrokes, always intending to follow closely what is visible (and not imagined) and above all to capture the soul of his subject.

The river may be dry, but still we drive down to it

After all, the rain might have filled its cracked and caked bed up in the meantime. Or there is the memory we can keep alive. For all that it can still run.

It’s what man does best: hope and pray and keep on looking out for something better. And so he has to keep going back to something that worked for him, until he gets what it is that he could otherwise be doing. Ultimately we ought to end up being ourselves and the only doing-willing-act that needs to be done is found in the verb to love. No longer fixing anything or making anything better, but just being enough.

Small-time heroes

What do I like so much about this humble YouTuber? What do I like about the biography so far of, say, a @samstonehill (whom I know a lot less well)? Both these men simply have one thing to say: that we are born creative; and as such must and can change and embrace only but all that we need to do to become.

And there are others who do so too. Bruce Springsteen, let's pick a random but relevant example, is haunted, too, by that one song he feels he has to sing (it’s why all his music eventually sounds somewhat the same to my European ear). Men are very good at that: repeating a successful formula till it loses its potential. War always works: always something around to kill or maim or destroy. Self-gratifying sex also tantilises the parts other things can't reach in many a male for half a century or so. Women are better at suffering the long run and picking up a dozen things at a time and making the most of a just barely workable situation: equally as stuffed at not getting down with what we humans could be getting down to.

And yet, this is too abstract, generic and nonsensical.

^{photo by Robert Collins on Unsplash.}

Keep on dancing

Souls, inspired by Spirit live in persons for temples. These are built as men or women (or a mix of both or something other than one or the other). Individuals can only do well (and make better, that is: make whole, or improve) what they know how to do as they have learned what it is that they know. Sound complicated? A soul-twister? Paint a picture of it and it will make sense to you, too.

Or put in Mr Hamparte’s own words: to render alive we can only indicate. Who needs life-like? Creativity has to be alive: on your life-support system of heart and soul. Communication is fairly futile in this practice; we have to trust in communion: gently placing our creative endeavour in a receptive midst, freely, in trust and without expectation.

The rest is death, is record, repetion, routine, recovered (a remake), reproduction and lacks the vitality that is originial and authentic and genuine and indescribably precious. Really: there are no words for it. To speak about such royal treasure, jewel in the lotus crown, stops here.