What Does a Guerilla Love Artist Do?

I remember listening to Osho speak about life and whether you want to live your truth? I was in a rental house with a film crew, in San Cristobal de Las Casas, Mexico eating cacao beans lightly toasted and dipped in honey. While I listened, I reflected on a moment with a fiery, talented lover of Chinese/Trinidad decent from the year before whom I will call AOI. She proclaimed with vehemence, "I have to live my truth". This came out of the dynamic of AOI breaking her engagement to be married in the process of our becoming lovers. Lying in bed with me, looking for some way to feel OK with everything. Probably I offered my light, but still useful sentiment like, "If you're not committed with everything you've got now, you've just saved yourself and him a lot of heartache later by jumping ship."

My My, I love how our own words can become so prophetic with a little bit of fermentation. But, her words at that moment sounded so forced and built up. They were covering pain and disbelief in an attempt to find some truth out there, which in my observation, like closure, we create for ourselves in here. Looking for it and trying to weave masks of it seems like a way of driving ourselves into cycles of self-torture. And so Osho came with the idea, "live your truth? Why do you want to do that? If you think you have truth, then you have to protect it, defend it, get other people to believe it so it doesn't fall apart... Live your art instead". What a moment.

It was the quintessential element of what I felt when I saw AOI pushing so hard while I felt so at ease. I saw it again in my own life as questions arose while I exited my marriage to SG (Sleeping Guru). Maybe if AOI had shown up at the right time I never would have been married? Perhaps. And perhaps, one incredible series of learning and transformation would not have had its vehicle? Perhaps I did AOI a favor by creating that clarity in her life, while I needed to go through my marriage to learn what I did? My perspective informs me that we've each gotten the medicine we need and it is up to us to be sure it is integrated. There won't be truth, there will be ongoing unfoldment, artful evolution of life and learning.

One of the things that has been fascinating to me throughout this and so many of my previous experiences is the intractable nature of the continuum that to me is heart, art and will. Once my heart informs me there is nothing that can be done to edit it or uninterpret. The art will come in an act of will and things will happen. It is almost terrifying until I realize that it is simply various aspects of my own "only partially knowable at any given moment" Self making themselves apparent in different ways at different times.

The important questions in my perspective are: How do I really feel deep down? How long will it take for me to correct course? How can I do this with best results for myself and people I'm connected to?

I see that an AOI did come for me in the form of Miss Guerilla. I call it, "waking me more fully to myself". The seed of an entirely new life was planted in a single moment of eyes locking and penetrating each other without fear or veils, or words.

This incubated itself for months while simultaneously my marriage dismantled itself. My feeling is that there wasn't a failure but a great success. It may seem counter, but here is Voltaire, "if Columbus in an island of America had not caught the disease, which poisons the source of generation, and often indeed prevents generation, we should not have chocolate and cochineal". I ask myself the question, "how long should we suffer over perceived missteps before we look at what we've gained from any experience?", "and reap the benefits?".

An aside I've been chewing on this morning; What is the name, in any language, for a gift that is given with love and intention and that can not be received, perhaps not understood or identifiable to the recipient? Yet it is still there, still imparted and still working. What if the giver does not know what they've given?

If you have a word for this, please send it!

Love and Light,
J.W. Starr - Henshin Operator

Guerilla Love | Genesis

Art imitates life, Life imitates art. After I saw this rotation occur a few thousand-million times from the eyes of a gaggle of lifetimes on miriad planets in different galaxies inhabiting sundry bodies equiped with all kinds of bizarre mouths, appendages and genitalia, while taking pleasure from things I have no definitions for... I've realized that the imitation part can be reflected upon, fermented and evolved into something more authentic. Life can become an art form in itself. I am my own greatest work. Only the carcass-strewn road behind and the untouched canvas ahead.

I'm writing this from a restaurant and hotel called Ngoc Hoa owned by a Mr. Tuan. I'm sitting in a blue plastic lawn chair beside a laminate table with blue/red plaid cloth. A tourist joint, it is my Starbucks of the northern Vietnamese, Cat Ba island beach. There is a flat screen TV over where Tuan, his staff and presumably his daughter or young lover are have lunch. The TV is airing some fashion catwalk bathing suit models to a repetitive loop of the jazzy "Hey Mambo" song from I think... 50's.

Tuan is a native of the island and speaks very functional if narrow english. Tuan also seems to have some perspective which many I've met in my travels seem to be missing. I wouldn't describe him as an artist, but he has a quality of authenticity that he delivers consistently. His daughter sings what I would consider crappy pop song (singular) over and over again in the restaurant. I find this distracting, but it does not agrivate me nor prompt me to leave. She sings a song I don't appreciate, but she sings it very well and the repetition, which I find maddening, bespeaks passion of an artist. I've met artists whose lives seem devoid of art. I've met people who don't paint but who live their lives with vision.

If I were feeling dialectic I might say that the one who lives the vision has some artifact of achievement in hand which the struggling artist, whose life is a seeming series of misdirections, is indeed searching for through his painting process which is really an aspect of his soul which has been severed from the rest of his life. I might say that, but it's just a convolution to swim through and consider. I don't believe it. Both are experiences I feel I've had at different times and both are highly instructive.

Instructive of what? What do we want as individuals? To me the gold is taking the visionary process of painting or designing a thing out of the isolate box of creating just that one thing and seeing how everything in our experience is a seamless canvas upon which we can create. Keep expanding the vision and include ourselves within it. As our painting blends with those around us we give birth to a thrilling collaborative vision. Poof Eden!