PLATFORM : Epicenter: the Soul

You sit in the dark waiting for the cataclysm. When you have spent so much time and invested so much passion creating a room--waxing wood, putting tulips in a vase, setting turquoise bowls just so, vacuuming until the lines of furniture leap out from their place--how do you feel when this work is nullified by destruction?

Maybe a disaster is really just the compression of minute eruptions you experience over weeks, months and years into one intense moment. Absent the dramatic catastrophe, how do you look at the small day-to-day ruin--the earthquake that occurs when you lie; the mudslide when you are petty or gossip or treat someone with contempt; the fire when you are silent in the face of someone else’s humiliation, or worse, when you are the instrument of that humiliation; the flood of meaningless, mindless chatter, empty activity.

These disasters strike with the relentlessness of nature--human nature. We are blind to what is important until, in our darkest hour, our own 4:31 a.m., we are shaken awake and, realizing the great catastrophe unfolding, cry out, “I am not prepared,” or “I am afraid,” or “I do not have the tools to survive this.”

I have surrounded myself with objects from the past that hold more than a passing fascination for me, yet I have failed to investigate this fascination. I have been delighted with the play of light on a table, yet have failed to learn deeply about light and shadow and why light rules moods. I have spent time with people who suffocate me and have returned to them again and again. I have not questioned who I am or what I want, and yet this 4:31 a.m. approaches, more rapidly now. The shuddering and shaking and wrenching begins. The structure is moving off its foundation.