Saturday, March 17, 2012

Strive

"There will be times when you're at your lowest point.  You are the ash of a phoenix with clipped wings that will never rise.  You are a broken levy unable to control the drowning of your household.  STRIVE."


I can't say enough good things about this performance. Miles and Carven effectively clench at your soul by grabbing your shame and taking it on ride through hope, joy and inspiration.  The cure to shame is empathy: the willingness to listen, and to go with people to their darkest places and to feel suffering with them.  Then, once you're there, you can inspire, but you can't do that of you're simply talking down.  You have to be willing to go there, to understand that all places of darkness are places where all humans are capable of going and even living for long periods of time.  You have to replace the otherness mentality with one of oneness.  If you're suffering, I am not separate, I can feel that too, I have felt that too.  Then we can grow together.

These fine gentlemen do just that.  They move, they inspire, they make suffering a common place - a place shared by all human beings only to remind us we all have the potential to STRIVE anyway.

And just a note on the performance: I am loving the blue lighting.  It reminds me of Picasso's blue period, a very dark and somber period of his life.  Many of the paintings from that period make you feel a sense of solidarity with the people he painted and with Picasso himself.  Most people look at the art and think, "Oh, that's not very pleasant, that makes me sad," and move on, but another powerful feeling the art evokes it empathy.  When artists paint scenes of sadness, they have found common ground with their subjects, and want to take you there too.



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