A living on the street in Manila receives a heart shaped banana pancake in a decorated banana leave sleeve.
I’ve been reflecting alot on my art practice in the last year. I have been doing art (which is usually for rich people) in one of the most materially poor countries in the world.
What is poverty exactly?
When it comes right down to it, poverty is a perspective, personal or collective on one’s financial, material or existential state. Yep, that’s what I am saying: fundamentally, poverty is an idea, a label– a belief even. It is the idea you are lacking something that you should have or need.
Now, many spiritual folks will debate that this is in fact possible: Our moments are our perfect creations and we have all that we need Here in the Now. Poor people however, will urgently disagree, “I could really could use some food/money/gas right now!”
Such thoughts of lack however provide an opportunity to the other– the neighbor, you and me. It is the opportunity for generosity, magnimitty, goodness, love. Poverty is an opportunity for the you and me to provide those immersed in need, precisely what they feel they lack. The condition of poverty is the perfect correlate for it’s polar opposite to express itself: abundance and generosity!
Yet relieving another’s need can be peformed in different ways. Giving can be cold and mechanical– a welfare check from the government in the mail. Or it can be full of creativity and colour– a gift wrapped in a hand painted paper and encircled with flowers. It can be about admelioring societal statistics, or it can be about creatively embracing the unique nuances of a person or people’s existential state. The later takes time and imagination of course– like a good painting. Truly, it is not so much about the material provided, but about the way of giving– the way one expresses abundance to the other. As such, giving becomes an art. As such, I dare say, poverty becomes a blank canvas of artistic opportunity.
In this way the antiquitated verb ‘to bless’ gains relevance. In the way that The Lord would ‘bless’ a person or people with particular abundance, so too can we artfully address poverty with profound, poetic and luminous blessings of creativity.
This is even more so when we unite together to collectively and creatively express light to the shadows of lack and poverty. When two or more join together to craft and weave a blessing, the effect gains luminosity exponentially. Through socially media, an unprecedented opportunity presents itself for social co-creative blessings.
Such blessings are like a soft and colourful tapestry woven by a village to lay over a neighbour’s rough and jagged floor. The co-creative expression that is woven for poverty has the opportunity to attain the highest ideals of beauty. For this is a tapestry woven not out of threads of cotton or silk but of hands joined together in a common task. The primary colours that form the expression are not red, blues and green, but instead joy, connection and oneness.
I can see it now, one day in the not so distant future, things will be alot more harmonious here on planet Earth. The enlightened humanity ahead of us will shake their heads with envy at our era. “There was so much poverty back then!” Poverty will then be seen clearly and valued for what it is. “They had so much glorious opportunity to manifest the most beautiful things and express love so colorfully!”
I am smack dab in the field here. Drop me a line if you’d like to help co-create.
Jaffari gives the Japanese ambassador an origami lotus flower made out of his youth group’s prayer for the Japanese people after the 2011 Earthquake.
