Painting the Dao

123 ak23.51 Dancing with Time Ink and watercolour on cloud-dragon paper mounted on xuan paper 181 × 97 cm, Sussex, September 2023 Three artist seals 水松石山房 Shuisongshi shanfang (Water, Pine and Stone Retreat) 攜杖老人 Xiezhang laoren (Old man who carries the staff ) 竹虛老人 Zhuxu laoren (Old man as empty inside as bamboo) inscr iption From the moment we are born we dance with time. As a child it seems endless; vague, fleeting fears about how it might end barely apply to innocence. As we grow older and the years shorten, apprehension knows we care and edges its way in as we consider how to fill the incremental hours as they accelerate past us. We begin to deal with it philosophically; time acquires both presence and absence. The absence of time touches upon both death and immortality. How we see the end of time depends upon our bandwidth of consciousness. Locked into the rational, reasoning faculties of intellect (the separate self with its ticking clock), we can fill the hours to tame our fear, reach for the skirts of immortality through what we contribute to civilisation, create a panacea for the separate self, a sticking plaster on the eternal gaping wound of ego. Death is inevitable, but insignificant if we are no longer a separate, limited fragment of the universe as defined by intellect. Step beyond the self, beyond the intellect, beyond the fragments and limits, experience the full bandwidth of consciousness, and we step off the Stage of Time. Then we become immortal in a luminous moment as we step through the Gates of Wonder. Then self, and all its concerns, all its gods, all its rules and social pretensions, evaporate into immortality in the blinking of an eye. Beyond the Stage of Time there is no separate self, no difference between a second and eternity. No doubt, nothing left to fear. Like any art form, strange stones are a portal. Religion, philosophy and science are also portals to an inexplicable way of knowing. The conclusions they come to only govern at a lower level in explaining the inexplicable. Conquering time, uniting with the realm of knowing where language has no absolute meaning, we return home to harmony. Inscribed by the Master of the Water, Pine and Stone Retreat at the Garden at the Edge of the Universe, beyond the significance of ‘edge’.