Hello, bloggers.

I’ve been working very hard in the studio, and therefore I’ve also been on an extremely tight schedule of physical workouts.

To some extent that means that I must schedule the time that I spend resting and meditating.  And I like that.

I’ve been using music as my friend when I meditate, and I love to watch the sky and the clouds and the planes go by.

So last week, as I was doing my mental meandering through the jungle we call life, I began to think about where are we going as a species.

Have we learned things that we forgot?  Have we forgotten things we had learned?

Through all the debates and proclamations, is this planet—and are we who ride around the sun on it—better or worse off than we were back when we were hunter-gatherers, when we wandered around without a place to take care of, when we lived in a family unit, then a tribe, then a loose federation, then a nation, then the United Nations and the European Union, and now a world linked by the Internet?

Which way are we going?  And especially, where does art fit into all this?  What’s the artist’s role?  Is the artist just an observer, or are we also a doer, a chronicler of the culture, or possibly the teacher of the culture?

What I came up with was more questions than answers.

I love to watch the History channel and the Animal Planet channel, because they teach me where the civilizations of the past and the other species of life got to where they were, or where they are now.  It informs me about all sorts of things—kingdoms, tectonics, the birth of the universe...

When you watch the animals, you realize they’re very predictable.  They’re always going to eat you!  Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!  They’re consistent.

When we look at the circle of life, the rebirth of the plants, we can, within days if not hours or weeks, tell when the spring and the fall are coming, when it’s going to snow, when it’s going to rain.

There are a lot of known quantities on this earth in terms of products, events, animals, birds, and fish...  but as far as I can make out, there’s really one inconsistency, and it’s called “mankind.”

You never know what mankind’s going to do:  make you fat, starve you to death, love you, kill you...

Where are we going, what are we doing?

I believe that we are made in the image and likeness of God.  I’m from the Judeo-Christian tradition, which has a dogma that made sense to me as a child and still does as an adult.

The thing that is inconsistent to me is our ability to do almost anything in the name of almost anything.

I’m sure that Hitler was able to convince people that throwing Jews into the ovens made them better people.  The priests abusing children in the Church, how inconsistent is that?  The debate about the death penalty...

But we have to look back to the origins, if we truly believe in God—or if not God, then the universe—and after that I don’t know where else we could say we came from—I don’t think anyone’s come up with a third idea!  But we came from somewhere!

The universe acts in a known way.  I saw an in-depth program about black holes and how every galaxy may have a black hole in the center of it, and how eventually we’re all going to get sucked into one and get chewed up and come out the other side.

(Being a former undertaker, when I heard about this, I thought maybe I should be cremated when I die, because I’m going to be anyway!  Why put it off a billion years?)

When we look at the world and the place of human beings in the world, and the role of morality, we look to the Ten Commandments if we belong to the Christian tradition.  Or, we may look to the laws that are made that govern our comings and goings.

We have untold millions of people sitting in rooms, making laws about everything from what we should wear, to what should we eat, to how we should sit on a toilet.

I know the government recently dictated how many gallons of water we can have in our toilets.  I never heard of anything like that coming down from Mount Sinai!

With all those laws, with the inconsistency and the consistency of man, with our inhumanity to one another and the breakdown of the family, and all the other topics we keep endlessly debating—I kept going through all these things, beating myself up and screwing up my mind—and I thought:  Art is the place of sanity in the middle of all of this debate and chaos.

To me, art is the open door between this world and the next, which some people call heaven, other people call hell, and other people call eternity.

Art gives me the opportunity to become at peace with myself and with the inconsistency of myself, my surroundings, and my world.  It enables me to try, through whatever means I can muster, to point to the magnitude, the wonderful, the vicious, the mundane, the fascinating parts of the world—and how I can make a difference.

One of our readers on the blog asked me what was the best thing ever said about my art.  I thought about it and remembered a number of people who told me it had made a difference in their lives.

The reality is that it wasn’t the art that changed their life, and it wasn’t I personally who changed their life, it was they who made a difference by considering the possibility of doing something or thinking about something in a different way.

I also had the realization of how great it is today, unlike in times past, to be able to speak about issues like this on a world-wide scale—assuming that this particular ramble can be read anywhere from Chicago to Africa to Asia to anywhere else in the world.

In other centuries, if I had talked about things like this, the Inquisitors would have come and cut my tongue out!

I believe that as a species, we are going forward.But it reminds me of the story I heard many years ago of the two butterflies sitting on a giant sequoia tree.  One butterfly asked the other, “Is this thing that we’re sitting on alive?”  The other said, “No, I don’t think so.  I’ve never seen it move in my entire life.”

So maybe we as human beings just don’t have the long-term perspective about where we’re going.

I know that after almost the whole week of wandering through this jungle and meeting with the young people with the Umbrellas for Peace, it really has left me with great hope.

When you look at the history of the world and the universe, in one way, shape, or form, no matter what happens, it’s a learning process—and we always see that there is someone hiding somewhere that learns something they didn’t know before, and we as a species are better off.

It is truly mind-boggling how much power the human species has.  If sheer power and force were the great equalizer and the way that we should manage ourselves, then the elephants should be the ones in charge...  but I’ve never seen an elephant make a vaccine, send someone to the moon, and conceive of the Hubble telescope.

We—we little, whimsical, goofy, scrawny, fat, dumb, smart people—have done all of that and more.

So when God or the universe made us, he or she didn’t really screw up; they made a complex, noble, egomaniacal, loving, wonderful, hateful, surviving being that’s going to be around for a long time, either making this world a better place or someplace that isn’t as good as it once was.

It’s up to all of us.

We all have a task.

As Nike says, “Just do it.”

LAMB