A reader asks Matt whether he paints self-portraits.

Matt responds:

Thanks for asking.

I do many self-portraits.  They don’t look anything like me in this particular material world.  They’re all about my spirit.

My favorite one, which I put right next to a phone I never use, mounted in my studio, is a long, narrow, stupid-looking face with my tongue sticking out, razzing whoever’s calling me.  It’s probably somebody trying to sell me something, and I’m telling them to stick it where the sun don’t shine.

I have another that hangs in my studio on a big, old post.  I look like something the cat dragged in, looked at, and then dragged out again.

I have another on a rugged post, and I look smiley, almost like a happy, mentally retarded person with no cares and a big smile, like I’m on my way to see the Wizard of Oz.  That’s probably who I really am.

All three of them knock me every day when I walk in.  I don’t call them Lamb; I just look at them and absorb their spirit.

If you want to see what I really look like, Richard Speer is always putting my puss on the Blog.

A couple months ago, a fortune teller told me:  “You’re sitting here, but most of the time your spirit is somewhere else...  You ought to get them together and let them talk sometime.”

Maybe I’ll take that advice if I live long enough.

Matt

Painter Tamara English...

of www.tamaraenglishstudio.com

...comments that floral imagery continues to assert itself in her work.

She concludes:  “Perhaps if each of us can experience the majesty of a flower just a little more, we can also experience the majesty within ourselves.”

Matt responds:

Tamara, thank you for your insight!

Exploring the majesty within ourselves is a scary process for most people, because we tend to marginalize ourselves and look on ourselves as unfinished creatures.  The reality is that we are unfinished creatures as long as we’re on this earth, either perceptually or in reality.  We’re changing, growing, becoming, and evolving.

Our lives are much more randomized and complicated than any car, plane, or machine.  If we look at ourselves, we see ourselves as deficient and unfinished.  Whatever we’ve been in the past, we can’t do a damn thing about now—so if you were a fallin’-down, pukin’ drunk, maybe you were the best drunk on the street...

What are we now?  That’s the question.  Are we a Nobel laureate, a grand scientist, a very proficient dog catcher who returns stray dogs to their rightful owners?

Being in the funeral business was a great learning experience, because periodically we had to go into a person’s house or hospital and talk to them about their death:  how to memorialize it, how to celebrate and mourn at the same time.  We would talk with people who were really down and out, and in other cases with captains of industry and political leaders.

But in reality, in their mortal life, their inconsequentiality or their power was immaterial at that point, because they were going into a different plane.  We take with us only what we have earned.

There is a theory that all the things we do in life are like ripples that keep going on and on and on.  The scary thing about that philosophy is that all the things we didn’t do will also be revealed to us.  That’s a great challenge.

So wherever we are, if we don’t like it, then possibly we should change it.  We are much more powerful and relevant than we ever think we are.

Just remember:  Our actions are universal and go on forever.  That’s a scary thought when you’re doing something stupid, and a noble thought when you’re doing something above your pay grade.

So be at it!  And if people don’t like it, tough shit.

Matt

A reader recently asked Matt whether he has ever painted baskets of fruit.

Matt responded that he enjoys painting flowers, because they feed his soul, whereas fruit feeds only his stomach.

Following this post, another reader fancifully commented that any human being would naturally prefer fruit to flowers, but animals would prefer flowers to fruit.

Matt responds:

I can see where fruit would win the day with humans, because we could eat it and it would sustain us as a life-saving part of our material world.

But I also see where flowers would sustain the spiritual side of our souls.As an undertaker, I find that people in our culture express love and grief by sending flowers.  Flowers have a great manifestation to the spirit.

Animals, having a great magnetism towards flowers, remind me of my Great Dane.  We had Great Danes as kids growing up for many decades, and they all loved to go into the fields and run like crazy, wild horses, enjoying all the flowers, the grass, the greenery...  It seemed like they were in their element.

In Ireland, I’m surrounded by farms, so my neighbors are the cows, the sheep, and the horses, the foxes, the birds, all kinds of insects and crawling creatures and other animals of every sort.

So the flowering earth probably does appeal much more to the animals that a paved street or a concrete driveway.  In that way I can see why one would be more attractive to an individual of our species, and another would be more attractive to the other species that inhabit this planet.

Thanks for your observation.  I’m sure many of us will keep painting flowers, and many of us will keep painting fruit.  Thank God there aren’t contests where we have to declare ourselves for one or the other!

Matt

A reader suggests that economics, which is often seen as a dry, mathematical field of study, is actually a riveting social science which tells us what the people in a society value, purchase, and save.

Matt responds:

I think you’re absolutely correct in your portrayal of economics and how it identifies a generation, a society, a civilization.  What is important?

I love to watch the various TV series that look at ancient histories, writings, and philosophies.  The learned among us are able to decipher what looks to me like scratches and squiggly lines on the walls of caves and burial chambers, and come up with a whole portfolio of what a particular group of people found important and unimportant, even though there aren’t any buildings, skeletons, or books lying around.

There was a very educated English philosopher when I was in the undertaking business who said:  Show me the method that a culture buries its dead, and I will show you a high mathematical probability of what their culture thought of love, peace, tolerance, and all things that have to do with the spirit.  That’s a very loose interpretation of what he said.

We can also see that when we have economics only for economics’ sake, that greed and envy take over.  “Hurray for me, and the hell with everyone else...”  It’s the old situation of too much of a good thing.  It’ll kill ya.

Your portrayal of the true meaning of economics is very germane.  I think it could teach us all a lesson as we go through these hard economic times—maybe to examine our education system and see if we are turning out people who are rounded not only with economic tools, but also with the culture of a caring, democratic, all-encompassing person, who knows that as part of a group that we call “the species of the human being,” that we have responsibilities other than creating a large bank account.

Thanks for your insight,
Matt

Hello, bloggers, and greetings from beautiful green Ireland!

I have come to the conclusion that I definitely am a wanderer, a restless soul almost like the bees going from flower to flower to flower.  The great thing is, all the flowers have nectar, and they all nourish and re-nourish me.

The anticipation of leaving one of our homes, and then the sadness of departure, are always bittersweet, but when I arrive at the next place, no matter where I am, it’s always a homecoming.  I never go anywhere as a stranger.  I’m met by friends who are really family—and the newness, the revisiting, the excitement of coming back are refreshing and uplifting.

When I arrived in my place in West Cork, I did my usual routine, which is to go out and greet the birds and see if they remember me, and this time again I was not disappointed.  I always go to the cliff and bring them food while I’m here.  I see if they come up, because below me are hundreds of black birds and sea birds, and right on cue they’re all screaming and hollering and flying over my head wondering, “Where the hell is the food?!  Feed me, you idiot!”

So I greet them all and then lament that I forgot to bring the bread, and leave as they all follow me.

And then I come to my pond where I have my fish.  One of our friends feeds them during the year, so they’re all waiting for their bread, and our neighbors across on an island come up regularly and visit our property...

They noticed that a heron was eating our fish, so they got a decoy heron, because herons are very territorial...  They put it in the pool, and this then keeps the other heron away, but I noticed while I was here that the heron still comes and stands on one end of the pool, and lo and behold, the other fish are huddled around the decoy heron, knowing they’re safe.

When I saw these paintings, I said to myself, “Ah, let’s see who you all are!”

I started to take the packing off, and encountered these wonderful paintings that I had sent out on their mission many years ago.  The more I looked at them, the more I thought:  I’ve got to dress up your clothes or wash your shirts or do something, because there’s so much more there that’s unrevealed...

Over the last years I have developed a new varnishing technique, so I decided to revarnish them the second day I was here.  It was eerie, because all of my friendly spirits started coming out of the background, greeting me.

I looked at them and sat by my outlook at the sea, and thought long and hard about it, and came to the conclusion that they were there all the time—I just didn’t have the capacity to notice them.

Isn’t that the way it is many times?  We’re in paradise and we don’t even know it.  We can’t see the length of our nose; we can’t see it until we become older; and all of a sudden it dawns on us that something that we thought was a problem, is really great.  I like to put that in the catagory of Opportunity Lost.  It’s like having a great treasure and not realizing it until it’s too late.

From there, looking at the sea, I started thinking about my own funeral.  As a former undertaker, this is something I think about a lot.  And I thought:  Wouldn’t it be nice to be cremated and distributed to different places around the world?  They could mail me from place to place, and I could then be scattered or put into the ground, and only part of me would be in the old cemetery in Chicago where I’m going to be buried.

But then, because of my education with the nuns, I start thinking about the Last Day.  Where am I going to be, scattered all over the world?  The latter part of my life, that’s where I have been.  So why not?  Maybe my ass would be chasing my elbow, or one of my legs would be going in the opposite direction of the other leg!

I envisioned that maybe I would turn into a little mini-tornado, swirling around through space!

When I get up to heaven (if I ever do), St. Peter would be trying to explain to the Holy Father that this is really a friend of the Spirit:  “This is the idiot with the Umbrellas!  We should really let him in, but he’s having such a great time!”

I’m sure that in the inifinte power of the Father, He would say, “Well, let him spin around some more...  Just give him the key and leave the door open for him...”

So I was thinking I need to talk to Rose about that.  She’ll probably just bury me whole.  But I’ll still have the dream of a mini-tornado.

These are ravings I think about from the side of an ocean, watching the world go ’round, surrounded by my birds, my fish, my wife, and my paintings.

Hello bloggers.

I wanted to share some thoughts with you that I’ve recently had about the manifestations of happiness.

I believe that happiness is a state of mind.  The porest people live in the most beautiful places:  They live on the ocean, they take food from the sea and use the land to grow food agriculturally.  In some societies, they would be considered downtrodden, but in my view, they are the kings and queens of the world.

Contentment is a very scarce anomaly among the human species.  Being content, happy, and loved—all those, I find, are probably more apparent in places that we consider remote.

Rose and I visited the Amazon and encountered a tribe of Indians, whose lifestyle we in industrialized society would think was very minimal:  sleeping on reed beds, living in huts with thatched roofs and mud walls, hunting with blow guns...  They seemed very content and happier than a lot of people I know who own mansions and Rolls-Royces.

My general observation is that the more urban and industrialized, the more frantic the pace, and the harder it is to carve out time for reflection and contentment.  In other societies, they carve out time for work, but the contentment and loving aspects of their lives seem to be the driving force, not the anomaly.  Maybe that’s just my perception.

But like anything else, all of these things exist between our ears.  One person’s chaos is another person’s calm.  How we look at things and perceive the world could be very much dictated by our culture and perception of what’s good and bad.

It always intrigues and bothers me when the pundits talk about the cartels in other countries sending all the drugs over our borders.  Who the hell is taking it?  There wouldn’t be the problem if our people weren’t partaking in that forbidden fruit.  Are drugs our society’s way of looking for spirituality in a foreign, artificial way?

Thank God in my most alcoholic days I never did experiment with drugs.  I’ll put a gold star on my forehead for that, next to the idiot sign for the alcoholism and smoking.

The bottom line is that it’s hard to create happiness—but as they say, you know it when you see it.

Matt

In response to Matt’s plans for a two-year project in which he would melt and burn objects within a complex multi-media sculptural installation, a reader asks Matt whether he is worried the piece will give off a rancid stench, like a burned-down house.

Matt responds:

The exploration of this two-year project is foreign territory for me.  I have no idea what’s going to happen.

But your idea that it will stink to high heaven is intriguing to me.  The ramifications are endless!

Maybe we’ll have to hold handkerchiefs to our face or put on gas masks when we look at it.

I suppose some government official will take 10 years to figure out how to display it!

A hundred years from now, they’ll be still figuring out how to get rid of the Lamb stench, which continues to stink up and agitate the world.  It could be my crowning joy.

Maybe they could bury me inside it.  It could be my mausoleum, and inside would be my skeleton.  Wouldn’t that be great?

Your comment has opened up a whole other world of possibilities.

Thank you immensely.

Matt

A reader asks Matt whether he has considered adapting his Umbrellas for Peace workshops for U.S. soldiers injured during combat duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Matt responds:

The umbrella is a unversal tool.  It can be used in many innovative and unusual circumstances.

I think to be able to use the umbrella as a tool of acceptance for returning soldiers is an excellent idea.  I personally have never lost a limb or any part of my body, but I would imagine there would be a lot of self-examination for people that happens to:  “Was it really worth it, why did I go there, is the world a better place because of what happened to me, do people really give a damn, am I the same person coming back as I was going over?”

The acceptance of who and what you are, the reason why things happen, all have to be examined and dug out of the self.  In my education as a funeral director, I saw how important it was to put these kinds of questions into the right mode and perspective.  It’s something we have to answer for ourselves, not for the collective.  The answers are different and unique to each person, even though they might have a commonality.

The umbrella embodies that concept.  It is what it is to the person standing underneath it.  There can be ten people thinking ten different things, and all ten are accepted under the geographic area of the umbrella.

The problem we have with the universality of the umbrella is that it has so many different forms.  Before I left Chicago I met with people I had an Umbrella Project with in the state of Illinois.  It has moved from town to town to libraries to schools to all different places.  They asked, “Should we write a book about this?”

Of course the answer is yes, but the other question is, “Who’s going to do it?”

When I arrive on the scene of an Umbrellas for Peace, I look on myself as carrying a little plant.  I dance around it, put some water on it, and say, “Either nurture this or don’t nurture it, and if I come back in a year, it’s either a tree or a dead twig.”

Personal responsibility to the idea is wonderful.  When I was with the Papal Knights, working for peace in the Holy Land, someone made a big speech saying we should go over there for six months at a time, and do this and do that, and involve these people and create committees to handle these tasks—and finally, I said to him, “I think that’s a marvelous idea.  Why don’t you become chairman?”

He said to me, “How the hell do you think I have the time to do that?”

There are so many manifestations that can be thought of and implemented, but it takes people, time, effort, and money to turn the dream into reality.

I think that your idea of working with people coming back from wars is wonderful, and it really ties in with the first group that I worked with, who were the survivors of 9/11.

Thank you for the idea.

Matt

Hello, bloggers!

Matt is freshly arrived on the old sod of the Emerald Isle.  Look for an update from him this coming week on his thoughts and feelings on being back in his beloved Ireland.

Meantime, here’s a photo taken on June 6 of Matt attending the Athletics Against Drugs fundraiser in Chicago.  Motivational speaker and entrepreneur Stedman Graham, also known as the long-time companion of television host and social activist Oprah Winfrey, poses alongside Matt at this important charitable event.

Have a great weekend,
Richard
Blog editor

A reader writes with disappointment that California’s Proposition 8 was passed last November, amending the state constitution to recognize only marriages between a man and a woman.

The reader also expresses disappointment that Matt, when asked about the Proposition here on the Blog, chose neither to support nor repudiate the measure, but, as the reader put it, "tap-danced around the issue."

Matt responds:

I have a universal stand on very simplistic words:  Peace, tolerance, understanding, hope, and love.

Within that mantra is the complete rendering of all elements in the human condition.  I believe that some people are destined to live and die by particular philosophies, words, notions, beliefs, religions, colors, nationalities, and creeds.

Many fine people have died for what they believe.  Others think theirs is a stupid way of dying, that nothing is worth dying over.  These are all aspects of the debate, the conversation, the taking sides, the not taking sides.

But the ultimate destruction of our species is for someone to be killed because they debated one side of a conflict or the other, whether it be right or left, for or against abortion or whatever the issue is.

Does the fact that I didn’t come down on one side or another of Proposition 8 make me a tap dancer?

As far as I’m concerned, probably I am a tap dancer, because we must have, as artists, a manifestation of who and what we are.  With that, to me, comes a stop sign—where, instead of being a screaming whatever for a particular side of anything, I can have my own private opinion and ask:  How does it fit within my peace, tolerance, understanding, hope, and love philosophy, which is a child’s philosopy of life?

I take great pains not to be prescriptive of what people should do.  Everybody has their own conscience, their own way of manifesting and dealing with conflicts with others.  That’s why we have petitions.  Anybody can sign a petition, including the Pope, the King, the accountant, the dog catcher, the pukin’ idiot...

It’s not going to change my opinion if I’ve really thought about it and come to some rational or irrational judgment.I imagine there could be hundreds or thousands of issues that could be brought up on the Blog that people would want me to pronounce judgment on, so that half of the people would proclaim what a genius I am, and the other half would come with knives to cut my throat.

My lot in life is to ask how we can become a better species, and that comes down to acceptance.  I accept that people can do whatever they want to do sexually as long as it doesn’t violate a child or someone who is mentally incompetent, or it doesn’t involve someone of greater power taking advantage of someone of lesser power.

As far as how people marry, how they live, those, to me, are important, but they are subtexts to how we can rationalize throwing millions of people into ovens, how we can kill over 500 people on the streets of our cities by handguns or knives or strangulation, how we treat each other as a species as if we’re thrown-away people.  There aren’t any thrown-away people; there are just people.

And whether I or anybody else am going to get in the picket line to go marching through a city, is immaterial and isn’t going to give the rest of the people any greater lesson or honor for doing what they believe is best.

Thank you for your comment, which is part of the great conversation of who and what we are.  I think I’ve danced around enough by this point, so you can either flunk me or give me a commendation certificate for tap dancing.  After all that ranting, I should be be a ballerina.

Matt