[8 November 2022] Incomplete painting. Externality, the unencompassed subjectivity, the unencompassed light, the individual uniqueness in you that part [of] me [and] me is that grows and evolves in you that loves in you that grows and matures and is able to see me better and therefore others. I want you to love others, [d]on't chop them down, but enjoy their shade, be blessed by their shade and their fruit. I am like a tree [that] provides blessing in the form of shade and fruit. I invite you to come and experience this blessing, to rest in the shade and eat of the fruit, experience that part which God has bestowed upon me, that you will not find anywhere else. Assume the shade and the fruit exists, and if you cannot see it, assume that it is your perception [that] needs altering. How does one alter it? By staying awhile patiently, by asking grace from God, keep trying, be persistent, be hungry, come back again if you decide to leave the leaves of abundant shade. All I can say [is] this, all I can do is say this, I cannot open your mouth and stuff my fruit into it and make you swallow, though God might [maybe] do so through pain. A suspension of normative expectations, a bewildered subject transgressing its boundaries. A waterfall. Everything has a crack, that's how the light gets in. Tree of life. [Incomplete] tree of life, a work in progress, that gets hungry and tired, hot and cold, that flickers and snows, bubbles and boils and blazes.

[9 November 2022] Completed painting. Shamanism, communing with the spirits, an evil thing if done with the [wrong] spirits. [S]hamanism means communion with the wrong [spirits], that is how we understand or what is understood by the word shamanism today from a Christian point of view, so I cannot call what I am doing shamanism because it [I am] communing with the holy spirit, but it is a similar thing in concept, it is just the spirit that is different. So I call [it] contemplation, and the results are or remind me of shamanism, a shamanistic practice, and the objects produced by this process are filled [with] the wonder and terror and surprise of shamanism. It looks like shamanism. If the word shamanism indicated communion with the holy spirit, I would call it shamanism, because it is a similar process. Forgetting oneself and one's burdens, overcoming externality, becoming selfless, and engaging in a union with something larger than oneself, whatever it is called, druidism maybe too. It is the spirit that is being communed with that determines the practice as something good or something evil. The unbound decentered subjectivity, the suspension of normative expectations, the learning process that accompanies and runs parallel to this activity, and that constitutes real art, autonomous art, art for art's sake, so to speak, though it is art for God's sake, and therefore art for our sake, being led and guided by God and not ourselves as much as possible. The free construction of something with God, the experimental artistic space which needs to be opened, disclosed for those 'things' to appear, the golden fleece to be retrieved and brought to human knowledge, to human remembrance. Because it seems to me that this process often involves or mostly involves remembering things that are forgotten, and seeing and perceiving, remembering to see and perceive in forgotten ways. If our ancestors once perceived reality in waves and we have come to perceive things in pixels, a different perception is at play in us that cannot overcome its own function when looking into the past. If they had a continuous wave-like perception, and we now have a discrete digital pixel-like perception that can be repeated at high frequency to give the impression of a stable coherent continuous existence, then we can't see in same way as those that lived in the past. Furthermore, repetition becomes a primary constitutive part of our present human condition. An open-matured cognizance can perceive the simultaneous narratives that run through an artwork. Some narratives can be put into words, transformed into words, but not without distortion, and some narratives cannot be [put into] words, the ineffable interactions with reality [are] what art pursues and opens to, disclosing and making a space and filtering and guiding into worlds and atmospheres conducive to manifestations and the disclosing and assimilation and comensuration with the field of reality. Is there a philosophical system or something, a philosophical or theological something developing here, an aesthetic discourse or theory? Something [that] has not manifested yet, am I destined to write a book about it, I wonder, or maybe my legacy is the artwork and writings I leave behind, and will there be some who position themselves for [a] this blessing, for the blessing that they will only be able to find through me, or will they [shore] up and resist and rebel, afraid to be poisoned, manipulated, traumatized? I am a tree. Am I like a tree that provides shade and fruit? Will you encounter me? Will you avoid me? Will you chop me down? Will you lay down for a while and rest in the shade? Will you reach out for the fruit? Will you at least eat of the low-hanging fruit and then will you strive for the high fruit and find God, that surprising, terrible, awesome, loving God, that part of him that is in me, that all of him that is in me, that union-communion experience that I was made for, to manifest, to cause to appear and come to knowledge for other humans? Will you be able to navigate the weak branches, the cracks, and imperfections? [Infections.]