Edges + Boundaries: Holding the Tension
Art Chuck Hoffman + Peg Carlson-Hoffman © Genesis+Art
St. Croix River Valley
Hudson, Wisconsin
Everywhere we look, everywhere the human mind turns is an enormous panorama of diversity; the difference that lives in everything and between everything, the fact that no two stones, no two landscapes, no two faces or no two life stories are the same. The range and intensity of this difference is quite staggering.
The difference that inhibits experience and the world is not raw chaos; it has a certain structure. There is huge differentiation in the world, and its structure often seems to be one of duality; in other words, two sides of the one object or duality. There is light and darkness, beginning and ending, inside and outside, above and below, masculine and feminine, divine and human, time and eternity, soul and sense, word and silence. Balance, in order to be authentic has to work with the notion of threshold. When the threshold atrophies’ or freezes, the two sides are cut off from each other and the result is dualism. This kind of separation has really blighted western tradition.
The oppositions that meet in this threshold, then, inform duality. An authentic life and culture is aware of and willing to engage its own oppositions, and inhabit that threshold where they meet. Creativity comes out of the spark of opposition where two different things meet. It is where each one of us is conceived. It is the two sides, the two sister oppositions that create the unity. Imagination is the faculty that gives the duality within us expression and allows its form of opposition to engage with each other. The awakened imagination is passionately interested in wholesomeness and wholeness. Humans are not meant to have perfection and purity, but are rather made of clay, striving desperately towards the light. As humans we belong neither of the earth out of which we came, nor of the heavens towards which we strain. We are always within the threshold. Through the imagination, we can enter more elegantly into its field of creative tensions.
At the heart of opposition or the tension being held, there is something else or new birthing. The notion of balance is really powerful, because balance is a providential thing that allows something new to emerge from the depths of the tension of crisis and contradiction. This suggests faith in a third force that often endeavors to emerge through the oppositions that are coming alive.
See more conversation in EARTH and SPIRIT.
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