Facing the Unknown Imagination in the Time of Pandemic Lightforms Art Center, Hudson, NY, Jan 8–Apr 3, 2021 Lily Morris, Millicent Young, Osi Audu, Martina Angela Müller, Patrick Stolfo, Laura Summer, Elmer Orobio & Richard Neal
The pandemic with its great loss of life has created a new inner and outer environment: mourning those we have lost; disappearance of livelihoods, homes, and close interactions with others. Great shortcomings in our society have been uncovered. We have been seismically shifted into isolation and experience a stymied cultural life that usually sustains our well-being. Some families have also spent more time with each other, people have drawn more within, found sustenance turning to meditation, nature, reading and artistic pursuits, turning pandemic into a vessel for positive change. How are artists finding a way to grow through these times of isolation, uncertainty, death and new perceptions
of our social connections and issues? Are there channels of light that have opened up? Wings of hope that lift us out and above the current situation for a distanced survey? The work in this show, created in 2020, allows for a glimpse into the imaginative process of the artists and how it serves as a much-needed refuge within which to weave a new web of spiritual, inner and outer connection.
Maintaining our inner initiative by Adam Blanning, MD Note: Recent posts by Dr. Blanning were seen at the Faculdade Rudolf Steiner (frs.edu.br) in São Paulo, Brazil, and he was interviewed by Paula Franciulli for their Revista Jataí. We share his observations on the source of initiative—the will.
Long periods of isolation and virtual (online) education are a major challenge to the will. In terms of the fourfold constitution of the human being it is the working together of the I into the astral body, into the etheric body, into the physical body that allows us to have will activity. They interweave whenever we unfold our will. They must all work together. They can act separately too,
but that is a different kind of activity which is much more related to our breathing or to our thinking. When we engage in any kind of virtual experience we mostly bypass that interweaving. If you are looking at a screen—say watching a movie, playing a video game, even typing on a computer—we see many fast visual changes which make us believe that the world outside us is changing because of our activity. But that is mostly a false perception. It can make me believe that I only need to do very small things in order to make a big change. Think of handwriting a letter and then delivering it winter-spring issue 2021 • 21