It's Okay -- Normal, and Healthy -- to Escape

A major focus of what I paint is peace -- calm, tranquility, stillness, quiet, and serenity. One of my goals is to invite people into such places so that they can think, breathe, rest, slow down, and find goodness and joy.

Not everyone is fortunate enough to walk outside their door and step onto actual ground, be surrounded by trees, "listen" to the silence -- but we all need this. We all need escape from the noise and ugliness of what we call modern civilization: phones that track our every move; TV announcers who drone into our psyche; crowded parking lots without a space for our car; sirens; nosy neighbors who gleefully and anonymously report what they consider to be our infractions; inane YouTube videos; traffic; the unending pressure from Corporate Culture and political propaganda to be "original" by copying someone else, to fit in, to subordinate who we actually are to what they say we should be.

We need time and space to think -- and think deeply. To question everything we've ever been told and are constantly being told. To figure out who we really are, what kind of person we'd like to be, and how to get there without excessive interference from The Authorities.

In places like Mountain Refuge, there is in this silence, this space, this sky that isn't falling but staying up in the heavens (free from the latest billionaire thrusting through it, please God) where it belongs, the calmness and quiet that our hearts and minds need to do this serious thinking. If you can find a place like this, away from "modern" civilization, then do whatever you can to get out in it. If you can't -- if you're stuck in the city and surrounded by noise -- turn off as much of that noise as you can. Brew a cup of tea. Sit in a chair. Find a painting that has an image of peaceful tranquility on it and just let yourself go there.

It is right, and normal, and healthy, and good to get away from the noise, to a place where fear isn't promoted -- marketed, actually -- as a normal thing. Escape the Abnormal.