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To be called an Artist is a great responsibility. For me it has been a story of confrontation with my self, my demons, to pull my way through life. Art is difficult, most times it is the endurance of one’s own suffering and sometimes other’s. Stirring my soul out when something moves me, personal memories or stories of other people and doing this without destroying myself.

I live in Meraki (when one leaves a piece of their self (their soul, creativity, or love in one’s work). Everything I make is a reflection of my inner self (good or bad), it is me, a part of my soul goes into my creations. Even though this makes me vulnerable sometimes, I still continue to live with complete passion, dedication and remain present in service to what I believe in.

At the core of who we are, lies a realization, a light, a purpose to just ‘BE’, true to our self and others. By letting LOVE work through our being we can let our light shine and reveal a higher version of our self into the world. To witness this light without letting it shine through our BEing would mean denying our self from union with all that is.

We have a fountain of light within us, all we need to do is let it flow and illuminate our life as well as others lives we encounter in our journey.
Quoting Maya Angelou “Nothing can dim the light that shines from within”.
So, let LOVE work through our being, liberate our self and our dear ones.

Appearance of a Rose is so captivating, so unique, a spectacular manifestation of arcs and trajectories. The form’s natural impulse is to move in circles, layered in petals, unfolding to reveal its eternal beauty.

As I embrace the idea of the Rose, its beauty inspires me. My response to the potential of this Rose allows new questions to surface within me. Where does beauty begin? With an object or subject? Is it sensory or is it a cerebral phenomena? Is a Rose eternal? Is beauty eternal?

What is beautiful and infinite for me may not be the same for another for many social, cultural and psychological reasons. As I think about the questions, I realize that to me even a dead rose is beautiful and powerful. It still radiates the beauty, which transmits all the qualities it possesses.

As I open myself to this idea of the ‘Rose’, it is being forever planted in my imagination, it grows in me, till it blossoms into a garden of roses, as the joy of possibilities, of seeing and feeling and being drawn into a world that is emerging, in the present moment, in the now.

I thank my guru Professor Shelley Sacks for gifting me this Rose. I shall cherish the idea of the ‘Eternal Rose’.

Thank you dear sister Dianne Regisford for capturing this significant moment for me. Gratitude.

What started as mere exploration of longings and questions a year ago has become the starting point of a significant journey for me. We go through many changes and transformations in life and it helps to reflect on our experiences and their impacts on self and our outer world. I have learnt that ‘Imagination is the key to change’ and this capacity is infinite in us human beings. We can teach ourselves to focus on our imagination. We can work on our inner drawing boards, draw, write, erase and re-write and keep on working on the ideal image of future self. This process of visualization allows the creations from our mind to meet us in our outer reality into the living world. We can become the image we create. We need to remind ourselves about this miracle of manifestation. Quoting Mahatma Gandhi, “We must be the change we wish to see in the world”.*The image is a part of an exhibit for my Masters program, an ongoing research work and understanding in the field of Social Sculpture and Connective Practice, Oxford.
www.shapingcollectivepossibilities.com

Since our birth we are made aware of what foods are available to us for our consumption and what must be avoided. Some times we made the choices and some times the choices were made for us.

Food is our basic necessity, it is a celebration of culture, love, compassion, generosity, pleasure and consumption. If food is all of this then how do we participate in the act of control, domination, cruelty and death, because we often kill to eat. So, is food a matter of conditioning?

“The cycle of violence that starts at our dinner tables reverberates through our families, our communities, and through our relations, rippling into the field of our shared awareness” – Will Tuttle – The World Peace Diet

We are all creations of mother nature who births and sustains everything in this universe. Like us human beings, animals have feelings and longings; they nest, mate, crave, and are the conscious subjects of their lives. They make every effort to avoid pain or death and engage in what makes them happy and fulfilled.By commodifying animals for food we choose to be blind to our very routine actions that cause immense suffering to millions of living beings. This inability to respect and appreciate other life forms in this universe is allowing us to ravage forests, oceans and destroy nature. By refusing to witness, confront, and take responsibility for this realm of horror that our actions cause to those who are as sentient and vulnerable as us, we continue to violate the natural order in ways that cause enormous suffering to us and to animals as well. So, I request the people of the world to reflect on a few questions that are now an essential part of my journey –
*Can we make an effort to cultivate our awareness, understand and embrace our responsibility of reconnecting with the natural order?
*Is it possible that our routine violence against animals for our personal need to feed ourself could be one of the primary reasons behind human suffering and war?
*Can we become a force for blessing the world with our lives, rather than perpetuating disconnectedness and cruelty?
*With a conscious awareness and changes in our behaviour and attitudes, can we bring social transformation, explore new dimensions of freedom and creativity?
*Can we begin by observing our most important connection to sustainable living, our most fundamental daily ritual – OUR FOOD?

I have realized that our acts and events occurring at a particular time in life are related, even if they seem unrelated on the surface. The relation is experienced later as a physical connection between people and events. The energy we release is always returned back to us, positive for positive and negative for negative. This energy released in our act carries with it our intention, attitude and conviction hence the result depends on the quality of vibrations they carry. We know this incredible phenomenon in nature as the ’Karma and effect cycle’.

“The underlying connectedness manifests itself through meaningful coincidences that cannot be explained by cause and effect, therefore such synchronicities occur.  When a strong need arises in the psyche of an individual.” -Carl Jung

I sometimes feel we often fail to notice the subtle patterns hidden in the fabric of our life, patterns that defy our perceptions of logic, cause and effect, space and time. Perhaps an inner awareness and perception might enable us to see the world in a different way by providing us deeper insights to perceive the truth that unfolds in the atmosphere around us.

*The featured image is a part my evolving artistic research based practice ‘Safe Space for Transformation’ for my Masters Degree in Social Sculpture and Connective Practice, at Oxford.

“Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.”
― Lao Tzu, Te Tao Ching

My search for art as a way of transformation had brought me to this little village named Gorbhanga, in the borders of Bengal, India. This was a village of the ‘Bauls’ (Wandering Minstrels) who sing for the love of humanity. This was a pious place of knowledge amidst natural abundance where the folks encouraged inner growth.

They believe music enables major transformation in a human being. Their company made me recognize that everything in this universe is alive, even a kernel of rice is filled with great potential. The conversations and songs shared by the baul singers had a profound impact on me. One of the narrations shared a deep understanding of how ‘we human beings can heal wars by first getting rid of our own inner conflicts and misconducts, improve our attitudes and one of the ways of doing that could be thought art.’ These people were like Alchemists who revealed to me how every human being is an Alchemist in a continuous process of deciphering the great secret of life. I understood that by focusing on self, I could nurture empathy and love, which are major transformative agents. I live for myself as well as others and if I have the capacity to transform myself then I can do the same with others.

Credits: I sincerely thank Amitava Bhattacharya, founder and director of Banglanatak.com and his team for the support in my research.

I’ve always wondered about how one could find their calm center and remain consistently in that state without letting social forces influence the state of mind. This realm with a force field of inner energy seems like a state I would like to inhabit someday. Observing myself and more people that surround me, I realize that actually we humans pay very little attention towards our inner energy. We live our lives in acceptance of outer energy resources, as if given and our inner energy is taken for granted. We hardly question what is making this beautiful human body function. I wonder what makes this complicated mass made up of infinite networks and cells work in the first place.

“Many people are alive but don’t touch the miracle of being alive” – Thich Nhat Hanh

I fathom that our world is full of energy fields and we are a field ourselves within it. As we breathe, each inhale is energy gained and each exhale is energy spent. Our thoughts, emotions, drives, goals, they all require energy and that must be precisely why there are days when we sometimes feel super energetic and some days we feel drained. With the rising mental noise and tranquilizing ourselves with the over consumption of radiations from technological advances, fast paced social life and convenient comfort food choices we might be blocking our inner energy from surfacing. Perhaps such times make ‘Stillness’ a difficult state to inhabit. However, it might be possible to decipher ways through which we can lift our self and meet a higher version of our self by tapping into this magical reservoir of inner energy and allow transformations within self.

My reflections generate a force of questions, both personal and collective. Several images loaded with emotional quotient begin to emerge, which require entering and embracing them through empathy. Quoting Hegel, “the capacity to embrace, to enter into, to meet, encounter a place that is reflective, is the force of creativity. It is a space that connects, inhabits, it is empathy that makes it an open process and there is a potential to develop an aesthetic state. This process presents possibilities of seeing new things and trigger change.”

Each time I re-enter my questions, they transform into a passage, a channel, a carrier filled with fields of hope, longings, progressions, meanings, emotions and transformation. This pathway facilitates my travel to a place that breeds life forms which make all communications and interconnections possible. This place is the essential ‘Womb’, a space of transformation, it is ‘the universe’ and ‘I’ am but a speck in this space seeking answers.

Mother nature and a woman are both revered through civilizations as the ‘Womb’, the central source where creation of life and love are birthing. This sacred sanctuary and temple embraces and enfolds all life forms. It offers to nurture and protect us. Here the feminine essence of a woman has always been acknowledged and honored defying any possibility of abuse. I find myself trying to unearth ways of reconnecting with this womb to find answers or even unlearn what our existing world makes me believe.

“We have never arrived. We are in a constant state of becoming”. – Bob Dylan

‘Human nature’, the incoherent, diverged and unchangeable state of being is learning to change, evolving. We are more than our physical beings. The body is a vehicle constantly in the process of identifying with one’s soul, the higher self. Seeds of a new consciousness are being sown. The creative within wrestles with the lower nature, struggles to metamorphose the vigorous forces into service to the world. As a journey unfolds, shifts in consciousness are taking place.

Picture credits: Dr. Meera Gopi Kurian.