Art in Ed

Anyway, I am painting the canoe background colours so I can add layers and layers to give a sense of rocks but I was feeling I wasn't getting the shades and ambience I wanted... something between canoing down a river and in the sea under cliffs... I really hadn't thought it through... so was feeling a little bemused about what was resulting. I decided to paint around the canoe so I could get a sense of contrast and stood back...

The canoe hit me.... it seemed aeons old... layers of time. Before time. I had a sense that stepping into the canoe would be stepping into the prehistory of the earth... far more than just a nice connecting to nature or stillness/serenity. I have a face in the canoe in ripples of water and as I looked at it I wondered was it my face... or the face of the archetypal goddess.... creator/destroyer?

I have fish moving up the canoe and they seemed like they were on a journey through time.... were they seeds of evolution? Potentials realised or to be realised.

I was reminded of Future Studies, which I have been delving into... a particular technique for helping us to make decisions for the future is to consider the 200 year present - 100 years back in time and 100 years into the future. We can only understand where we are going if we understand who we are now and how that came about. But I am also interested in cultural models of evolution - Spiral Dynamics (Beck and Cowan) and The Narrative Universe (Bocchi and Ceruti). To really understand where we are we need long term sense of the evolution of humanity... considering the 10,000 year past?

So now I wonder about my title.... can we can only negotiate the rapids of the future because of a sense of historic connection... to evolution of the earth, evolution of species and evolution of humanity.

This lady also represents a dialectic - a contradiction - how to live sanely in an insane world.... and the solution initially seems to be to find a space for peace and serenity to make her busy life sane. But with dialectics when we enter deeper into the cultural/historical/environmental aspects we can see there are deeper questions, deeper contradictions... and we need to go deep into understanding humanity to negotiate the rapids of the future.

So rather than looking for simple solutions to climate change, poverty, materialistic world... perhaps we need to look for complexity... excavate the depth... and this allows us to reinterpret our current reality so we can make a new one.