It's kind of hard get outside of your own frame of reference. To one degree or another, we all go through our breakdowns and we can recognize our lives as a path to awakening or not. We can take our breakdowns as a way to sensitize us or as an excuse to blind and dull ourselves.

In a society that tries to standardize thinking, individuality is not highly prized.

Folks who are alive today need to wake up and do what they can to stop abusing the planet, and find ways to preserve the web of life. That's where the soul is headed. It is time for us to become wounded healers.

I think that that's why artists make art - it is difficult to put into words unless you are a poet. What it takes is being open to the flow of universal creativity. The Zen artists knew this.

When we gaze into the eyes of our beloved, we're staring into the eyes of a sacred mirror, and we recognize our oneness.

The journey of the soul is a vast, interconnected web, a meshwork of beings that are all working out their individual karmas in a collective gumbo, retaining the special flavor in each bite of life. But, the mystery of where we're going, in terms of whether we're going to have a planet that's worth living on after we finish abusing it, whether we'll wake up in time and stop ruining the water, land and skies is a big question mark.

Artists are most themselves when they are out of their minds, transcending the ego skirmishes of conceptual thought, and intuitively relinquishing control to the greater Creator