Selling Paintings for a Floor

17 paintings sold so far with three days left in exhibition/fundraiser!
I think we hit our goal ($4,000). The community came out in full force on opening night for “The Pleasure at Being the Cause”. I am the sole worker of the show—painter, framer, hanger, promoter, caterer, humble host and cashier (the latter has help from wife, Rose).
Here are some sleepy set-up gallery photos followed by an essay from the book, which is also for sale to raise money for the Art Association in my artsy-smartsy town.

It Frightens Me, the Awful Truth, of How Sweet Life Can Be

Title quote from Bob Dylan in the song, “Up to Me”.
I think I live inside my head more than others do. Who can know for sure? But I am ready to give up illusions of security to gain an image or a “feel” after an afternoon saunter in cool, gray September. I imagine a world and make it happen, with or without the help of a steady income not earned by my labor. I dream a bohemian lifestyle with my lover, or pretend homelessness for a month, sleeping on a rock bed at the lake shore, collecting cans and turning them into bananas. All in my head. When I sense that sweet dose of youth corrupting, I become the fool in love with love. At this late stage of life is it absurd to nurture my youthful desires? Or is it crazier to stubbornly get old, living just to exist another day? Futile questions. Life is revolutions around the sun and circles of seasons. If I am in the autumn of my existence, and it takes a mere 8 minutes to die, then I am as young or old as I expect. It is up to me to color a life. No one looks at a blazing scarlet maple tree in October and says “too old”. A life worth living will not deny the sun, turning the head and putting a hand out to say, “that’s not for me”. The grandfather squirrel hasn’t abandoned his dreams because it’s bad form to chase nuts after fifty.
Over the summer I was steady into breathing exercises, thoughts on Zen Buddhism, and whatever my mind could grasp about Vedanta philosophy. After three decades of care giving, holding back desire to nurture loved ones, I discovered new freedoms in gardening, painting, beachcombing, meditation, (sitting on a pillow, or walking to nowhere)—things I have always done to pass the time, however, this round managed to take time out of it as best I could, and successfully let go of the 10,000 things. I learned how to breathe in the air and feel free, to cut back, and to be less.
The first realization that life is an invitation from nature to never get old.
No thought, no reflection, no analysis,
No cultivation, no intention,
Let it settle itself...
This was good, but I mistook freedom as the feeling of invincibility that appears when maturity, security and good health align to trick mortality in vain. I actually said to my wife during these highs that all my ducks are in a row and now I am ready to die.
What arrogance and delusion!
I was closing, not opening. Descending to the dark safety below the active volcano, getting old with what I pretended was some gnostic philosophy toward enlightenment, but was just part of a creative act that all old men play to fool themselves into thinking life is a progressive timeline ending in obituary—from out of nothing to some thing stable, good and justifiable.
And I would have stayed there, subterranean, biding my time, denying the sun, if I wasn’t reintroduced to my youth—my reminder of spring in September. Three international students came to our art opening last Saturday night—two, who stayed into the early morning, one of them, I believe, on purpose. A young woman, Fatemeh, nearly the same age as my eldest daughter, eager to live and let it be known, captivated our attention like a wide-eyed street poet. For several years I have opened my house up to exhibit art, and I am always thankful for the turnout, which is predictable, in that usually no one under 40 attends, and not from my lack of trying. Ageism is a practiced anti-art in my culture, which pretends to be a youth-dominated one, but is really a terrified-of-aging-in-quietude society, lifting any undeserved youth up to the mountaintop with the only prerequisite being to have landed within a specified range of summers completed.
We live on the border of a university campus. Its 8,000 students and even the art professors have avoided our local exhibitions year after year. Disheartening after the first few rounds, but gradually accepted and expected from a culture which suffers a generation gap like no other. Fatemeh and her colleagues were gracious guests, their first time invited into an American home. Not a typical one mind you, though I am glad that ours was the first. Although non-conformist, it is genuine, and shows both privately and publicly the outward expression of an inward grace.
I can relate that at 3 a.m., after recounting the night, I hitched onto some wavelength and would not let go. The life energy that I feel daily, and strive to seek in others, was reflected in the personalities of these students, but especially Fatemeh. From my place, in a land at the corner of nowhere, strafed with the agonizing repetition of dollar stores, life is in desperate need of a youth undaunted. I feel drawn to her energy mostly because it breaks through the generational barriers that block our oneness. I recognize and suffer the loss wrought by generational separation. Young people in America are afraid of the old, and sadly vice-versa, since the latter desperately need regular reminder of eternal youth. To be inquisitive, opinionated, and passionate cannot end at thirty, though every marker in America is trying to draw that line in indelible ink. The freedom to know who you are is the true freedom, even if in weaker moments I feel it’s only a scarlet maple tree and me who “get” this realization.
Each generation is lost to the last because of a fear of freedom. In America old men buy classic cars to “relive” a youth that should never have parted. And the youth culture gains nothing from the old because the old stopped dead in its tracks while longing for twenty.

We live for just these twenty years
Do we have to die for the fifty more?

—David Bowie “Young Americans”

The religion of my nation is appearance of youth at all costs, or be cast out. A changing integumentary will not become my shame. Age is never success, but to die inside is the only failure. I realize now that the summer spiritual exercises were chimera. I should have seen this coming. Eventually everyone in my neighborhood looks for some excuse to get old, and I was not immune. But I’ve had enough of that. I want to talk to people, to the young and the old, in order to learn, and to educate. Thank you kind visitors for attending an art exhibition in my home. I swear to continue my walks to the lake with eyes wide open, to sit on the rocks in summer and slow my breathing. But enough of this death talk. It takes only eight minutes to die, and I don’t have time for that. There’s the next exhibition to paint and plan.