Here is a link to a 10-minute-long video on YouTube from our June 29, 2010 “Umbrellas for Peace” parade at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany.

Thank you to everyone who made this event such a wonderful expression of peace, tolerance, understanding, hope, and love!

This past week I had finished all my stretched canvases, and they were on the racks drying.  I have two huge rolls of unstretched canvas, so I took them out and rolled them out on the tables and cut them up into about 24 different pieces.

Then I did the process of manipulation of color and materials, melding them together, introducing them to each other...

The weather forecast predicted really bright, sunny morning and early afternoons, which to the Irish is around 4 o’clock in the afternoon, since it stays light till about 10 at night in the summertime...

For two days I was able to prepare them all for their planning and marry them together like an Oreo cookie.  Then on the second day I pulled them out and laid them all over the cliff and weighed down with all these big stones from the property, because I knew the gales were coming and the storms.  And they really came.

I had taken refuge in the house, drinking tea and watching the gales and the rain come straight by the window.  After 5 or 6 hours I went out and looked at the canvases, and they all seemed to be taking a great bath.

The wind and rain and nearly hurricane-force winds and little tornados of wind hitting the building and creating whirlpools, were all having their way with the canvases on the ground.  They were pooling, and all kinds of great things were happening.

As soon as it gets bright enough today and I get myself stirred up to walk among them, I will be eager to see how they weathered the storm, although I know that the storm will give them new life; it will not detract from their wellness.

The other thing in this preparation that I did, a sweep the house concept, looking at every nook and cranny of all my buildings of paint that may have been there for 10 years, with a crust of linseed oil on top, but digging that out into clumps, throwing it onto the canvas...

We had the greatest array of colors that you’d ever want to encounter, some of which had been gestating for 3, 5, 7, 15, 18 years.  I characterize that old paint as fertilizer.  It might be shit, but if it’s put in the right conditions, it gives great power to its surroundings.  Nothing is worthless; everything has its own power and dignity, even though you might not know it at the time.

So then I put solvent on them to help them in their migration and then encased it in these different concretes, and let the wind and rain see what they can do to help it along or blast it away.  It’s like having a voyage but you don’t really have to go anywhere!

Matt

It seems as though our culture fosters the idea that we are clones, that we are all the same.

But after you get past baby/child/teenager, adult/middle-aged/old/elderly, male/female, color, religion, right/left-handed, then we seem to stop and debate every idiosyncracy:  whether we work day or night, whether we sleep on the right or left side, whether we have the TV on when we sleep or don’t...

Now there’s a great debate going on in the athletic world about who is a man and who is a woman.  Like anything else in the species, everything is very confusing, and nothing is as it seems.As we become more open to possibilities, we can either think we’re progressing or becoming more confused.

That’s why I talk about peace, tolerance, understanding, hope, and love.  If we stay on those courses, at least there’s a guidepost of where we’re going, and we don’t get lost in preconceived notions.

If we didn’t take risks and grow, we’d all be sitting in a cave, wearing bearskins eating gruel, wondering what the sun is, and how do kids come about?

I believe the biggest problems in the world happen when we put decisions on hold for the next generation to solve.

Problems usually do not solve themselves.  Some groups institutionalize it to make sure nothing gets done for at least 25 or 50 years so that people who were worried about the problems are resting peacefully or unpeacefully in their graves and can’t muddy the waters with their perceptions.

I believe history is always written by the victor.  In my philosophy, that must be taken with a pound of salt and a gallon of water.

To me, a problem perceived is a problem had.  When we’re presented with a problem, we have to study, test, and then do.

Afterwards we can either rejoice or lament.  But sitting and looking at it forever won’t do anything but get our eyes bulged and our ass big!

Matt

If it’s too good to be true, are we only kidding ourselves, or are we being conned?

In my last two posts I talked about Dr. Martin Luther King’s great “I have a dream” speech and the art show I participated in back in February.

That show asked the question:  What difference did Dr. King's speech make around the world?

Decades after Dr. King delivered it, the speech has been taken on by artists around the world—which tells me that the spirit of the speech is still interwoven in every culture.  To this day, it changes lives.

Dr. King had a dream, a dream that I share, that not only African-American children, but white children, Islamic children, Jewish children, atheist children, and so on, can all walk in peace from their home to school without being beaten up or killed because of what books they read or who their parents are—that we as a people will accept each other as we are, still arguing our points of view, still being who we are, but not making fun of or killing people who do not agree with us.

All of these principles live within the fabric, the history, and the memory of the culture.  It is part of who and what we are.

Matt

Following up on my last post about Martin Luther King, Jr., I am happy to share this video, which is posted on YouTube.

It is a short, very well-done documentary about the “I have a dream” art show, which I was honored to be part of this past February.

Enjoy!

Matt

Someone recently asked me if I remember where I was when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech.

To tell the truth, I don’t.

I know how it has affected me since:  It’s given me great hope, great reason to be optimistic, and the ability to accept the possibility of change.

That speech happened during what I call “my first life,” when I was a funeral director.  Our whole focus was on a family that had lost a loved one.  A ship could have been torpedoed, an entire country could have been blown up, and I’d have been oblivious to it as I ran around looking for church candles and hearses and limousines.

I’ll never forget when I was a kid, and we lived above a little funeral home.  My mother had a miscarriage, and her brothers, who were all doctors, rushed over to our apartment and were tending to her.

In the middle of everything, the phone rang, and my father was on the phone for half an hour.

One of the brothers said, “How could leave her side to talk on the phone for half an hour?”

My father’s answer was very direct:  “Those people have just lost their father; a woman has lost her husband.  They didn’t give a damn about me and my problems.”

I always remember that.

As the instrument of studying the ritualization of the proper way of to bury someone, the funeral director is the beaming light that enters the darkness.  That’s the world I existed in.

So when Dr. King gave his great speech, I have to admit that it wasn’t until I was watching the replay, probably in a bar, that I paid attention to it.

Since that time, it has become one of the real guiding points of my life.

Matt

In my update from County Cork I mentioned a process of mine called “the dip.”

The dip is the bringing together of many different materials that ordinarily would not be thrown into the same game.  It would be like taking athletes who normally play tennis, rugby, pingpong, and handball, and throwing them all into a space and saying, “Okay, let’s play the game!”

One of them might ask, “Where’s the goal post?”

Somebody else would say, “Where’s the table?”

And the answer is:  You have the talent; you have strengths that are known and unknown; just do it.

The dip is an exploratory laboratory that puts all of the materials’ strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncracies into the same plane.  I am a ringmaster, stirring them all up and watching them play.

It’s a very exciting, fascinating, scary, unpredictable place to be, but I think it mirrors the world that we live in.  From one day to the next, we don’t know whether we’re going to get killed or kissed.  We may be happy, we may be sad, but it’s all in the game.

In life we control very little.  We make the assumption that we control a lot.  That’s why we’re a very mad society.  My basic assumption is, I control very little; I know even less.

At 78, I can’t wait to get up and find out what the hell I just learned in my sleep!  I still have a long, long, long way to go, and I will die trying, but I love the game, I love the adventure, the inconsistency, and I absolutely love the outcome:  the coming together of all of these forces to make something unique and new, which may not be accepted by anybody but me, and frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.

That’s what “the dip” is.

Matt

A reader asks Matt what we as individuals can do to move the world closer to the ideal of world peace.

Matt responds:

We have been so indoctrinated to believe that nothing can be done.  If we believe that nothing can be done, then whatever happens in the world is completely out of our control.  Well, in whose control is it in?

I believe that nothing happens by happenstance; things happen by design.

The people who rule the world, in many cases, want to keep us hating each other because of our color, creed, or religion.  It’s detrimental to their power to see people accepting each other and becoming one as a species that is caring, loving, peaceful, and tolerant of each other.  They would rather us be mindless mass, constantly stirred up, irate, selfish, envious, intolerant, milling around looking for people we can beat the hell out of.

We might start down the road to peace with being more tolerant of the cat or the dog, and work yourself up to the canary, and then graduate to the human race.  Maybe we can be kind to someone we work with, even if they’re a fool.  Maybe we can be kind to somebody who sits alone all the time because nobody pays any attention to him unless he buys a gun and kills 40 people.

Little acts of comfort and accceptance, which might be insignificant to us, might be the greatest thing that ever happened to another person.

A friend of mine, long dead now, used to have on his desk a telephone directory.  Every day at some point he would call someone and congratulate them on their great work.  He may or may not have known what they had been doing, but they were so honored that he’d called them.

I like Nike’s rallying cry, “Just Do It.”  In the quest for peace, there are no victories, there are no defeats, there is just the journey.

We can opt to sit on the side of the road and watch everybody go by, but if we’re going to get to peace, we’re going to get there by loving, caring, expressing, and showing gratitude.  If not to people, then maybe to the canary.

Matt