Chris Soria’s Track 6

Everyone loses their way sometimes. Your compass gets wacked and the lodestone is off. Your tuner hits the floor and suddenly the D string cannot harmonize for shit.

For me, it is writing. It’s always the writing. If I don’t produce my work, write my mind and the world, everything goes haywire. I literally have to write. I think most people have something like that, something you need to do because it’s in you to do, and if you don’t the stuff of you just piles up all over the place, becomes a mess and a labyrinth and you’re all caught up in it. In your own head, your own heart, winding around the same tall hedges, unable to see over them, unable to breathe deep and turn around and find your way back out.

This is probably why Chris Soria’s Track 6 (ig chrissoria) resonated so deeply for me today at SpreadArt (ig spreadartnyc) in Bushwick.

It’s the antithesis of chaos. It’s organized, it’s tight, it’s balanced, it’s pretty. It’s a mandala for me. The longer you look the deeper you go – both inside yourself and outside of yourself.

Why is that important?

Chris Soria, Track 6, Brooklyn August 2016

Because.... Intuition.

Buddhists, Sufis, Desert Fathers, and Anasazis had clear and beautiful things to say about intuition well before Immanuel Kant. All the same, the old German said that intuition is all about direct contact with a thing, an idea, a piece of art, even a person.

Osho and Eckhart Tolle and the Yogis say that the intuitive – meditative state can be such a deep, profound contact that we are at once – through our deepest selves – in contact with cosmos, sometimes that particular ray of cosmos that is our most essential self, the best of each of us manifested through our practice in this moment. Even western doctors agree that the rest we get in meditation can be more restorative than hours of “sleep.”

And on the other side, there is nothing more exhilarating, nothing that makes us come alive more than moments of intuitive insight – moments when in an instant everything comes clear and we know a thing so deeply and significantly true for us, we are like a match, finally lit, light and heat everywhere… all big, fat, broken out, toothy smiles of a five-year old who has just heard the cricket he waited for all winter. There he is in a moment of contact and oneness with the cricket and cosmos and a song and the night and the streetlights. Just as he hoped and waited, there it was, and he is in the line, caught in the beauty of the world that he just knew was there.

That’s me, when I write. Ayo when he builds. Marthalicia when she paints. Rock when he runs. So why see Chris Soria’s Track 6? Why feel the mandala?

Fall into the art, dwell in its space, and I remember my most real, most spirit self. And she is a fountain and a queen. She waters me, and she leads me. She’s the one the Mandala awakens. She’s my deepest self, and the one who can walk me back out of the labyrinth when my compass is broken and my D string cannot send back echoes to show me where the walls stop.

When I write, I meet my idea so fully, so deeply, I have gone through myself out into the world, and out there was #OneLove.