Birth-Death-Sex

In art, through imagination, is the preservation of wilderness. With the preservation of wilderness (or “wildness” as Thoreau chose to write), the world is preserved; made peaceful, if you like.

“May peace prevail” is a greeting often said during the upcoming holidays.

As an artist, whose work and life are intimately wrapped up in the experiential, philosophical and spiritual understanding of the processes behind world peace, the three words that best describe, to me, what needs be in balance — to give world peace a chance — is birth, death and sex.

Not to fully understand the evolutionary history of life on earth is to mis-understand what is required to maintain it.

Whether human or insect or plant, all are driven to reproduce and will seek out the most favorable conditions to maintain genetic inheritance. Hence, refugees will risk life threatening boat voyages to seek a future potentially safer than the fear of death they left behind.

Until governments are mature enough and compassionate enough to understand the relentless evolutionary drive behind the decision-making processes of Boat People and other refugees, than no mandatory detention policy will ever work. Certainly, peace will never be attained.

Thinking deeper yet: Until the world’s major cultures look at the evolutionary underpinnings of life and create a mythic ethos — through the visual arts, song and drama — that reflects these underpinnings, then world peace will remain on turbulent waters.

With just a cursory examination of the present state of affairs, it should come as no surprise to learn that the world is top heavy with masculine virtues whilst feminine virtues are secondary and considerably reduced in importance and position. This imbalance, however, is not reflected in Nature.

World peace does not require an overthrow of the patriarchy and replacing it with a top heavy matriarchy. Rather, a re-balancing of the masculine and feminine as seen in Nature is required.

The Yoni-Lingam Dehiscing sculptures are a symbolic representation of this balance. They are phallic in their upright thrust, for sure, but imbedded at the top of each sculpture and down the slit sides is a stylized vulva.

The seeds emerging from the top are “not” the phallic sperm going forth to impregnate and make fertile the awaiting egg. Rather, the seed comes forth fully ripened and “fully balanced”. Full of potential to carry on life.

A few weeks ago I presented the above four and a half thousand year old drawing as symbolic of a mythic ethos that clearly demonstrates a balance between male and female energies.

My holiday gift request is for artists the world over to take up the challenge of bringing to the public consciousness a replacement for the current cultural paradigm; a paradigm that is consistently undermining efforts to bring forth a fruitful Peace on Earth for all.

For those people who think my Christmas wish is not very Christian, let me reassure them that as a child in a protestant Christian Science Sunday School I would recite, as part of the Lord’s Prayer, this refrain: “Our Father – Mother God all harmonious”.

Imagine the effect the inclusion of a “Mother God” into a sermon has on how little boys and girls view themselves and others of the opposite sex. It beggars belief.