This month I was part of an exhibition called Indelible Imprints the Edinburgh Printmakers had organised with the Festival of Spirituality and Peace.
This experience made me realise that spirituality and peace don't necessarily always come together. Despite the fact that we are part of their festival programme , it felt that I spent most part of the day I was invigilating the show to defend to the administration of the church hall why I had to be there in the first place. This got pretty well summed up by their question (quote): "Did you bring a good book with you? Good, cause you'll be sitting here all day doing absolutely nothing!" To be fair, I had a great book with me ( Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami), but was it not my mission to represent an arts institution and talk to people about printmaking? Was the purpose of our exhibition not to make the connection between a spiritual attitude and being creative? And did they as our hosts not support us in that? This slight uncomfortable feeling I had about being there finally got confirmed when I was then asked to instantaneously leave the building (or shall I say spontaneously evaporate into thin air?) by a couple of meditation tutors. Somehow ( and my guess is that this was the moment where I was expected to have achieved infinite wisdom...) their class was booked to take place in the same space at the same time and geee, I gotta start with meditation! I always wanted to learn more about it, but it went right past me that you have to get verbally aggressive, totally unreasonable and pretty rude just before you then start meditating. I guess it helps you to relax to work yourself up to exhaustion beforehand... however, is it not the purpose of meditation to achieve a more peaceful relationship to yourself and therefore to other human beings? God knows,eh?
