Carol Mackay Mertz

and my one idea.

Cognition – the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.

Is this a picture of a forest fire or a sunset ?

The picture represents how we get most of our knowledge these days…from some other source. Often-times the true circumstances are not revealed in a photo.

First impression might lead you to immediately perceive that it was a fire. Smoke rising, tree tops burning, bursting with sustained explosions. But in this instance, you have an eye witness, I took the picture. So I’m able to tell you what conditions were present at that moment. It is a picture of a sunset in Fort Valley, Virginia.

Fort Valley is a valley within a valley. We are a small 26 mile long valley within the designated Shenandoah Valley. Our farm is 1100 feet and the top of the mountain is about 2000. What happens at sunset is that the sun sets behind our 2000 foot mountain but has not set fully, so if there are high clouds the sun is still shining on them and we see the show of color in the clouds at sunset in sort of a reverse order, the sun is at our back and behind a mountain but we see the colors in the reflected clouds to our east, not the west.

What does this have to do with source and my one idea?

I have recently realized, that sometimes what I see and experience will make sense only in the fullness of its time, or until I get more information. If it is a large concept it may take a long time…like a lifetime. Huh.

Thanks to maintaining this blog and reviewing my art so often for shows, I only understand NOW that I have been receiving the same idea for perhaps my entire life from source, stepped down by my soul, and all of it has to do with this moment in time.

Pretty dramatic, but true.

Those of us that work with a large, but laser sharp idea are called artists. You have perhaps heard that artists are given a theme or subject and they spend their lifetime expressing that one idea. Sounds a little bit boring unless you get handed your one idea, and through a process called long term amnesia you are compelled to explore it over and over again. Through the years you build on your idea’s meaning and shift its perspective until one day you wake up and understand your body of work in an entirely whole way. It’s also called a moment of mastery.

I just became an artist in this chaotic, hellish time in history. Or rather I have been that artist my entire life and did not know it.

Today I know it.

Today I have more information. I have more knowledge, understanding and experience to declare my one idea. Where did this “new” information come from if I have been expressing this idea for most of my life?

The new experience is of living in this time of a global pandemic.

All of my work points to this moment. My work has evolved, yes, but it has stemmed from that one consistent message.

Life on Earth is in the process of changing. Help them see the change.

Help them see that change is ever present and unstoppable.

Life on Earth is being restructured by its inhabitants.

Help them trust their own creative powers.

Read my posts, read my Little Book of Creativity on the Home page, read my 5 unpublished novels (OK, I need to work on that), look at both my sculpture and the paintings on this website and the through line …the idea is about helping humanity understand this moment in history, which many futurists believe is the end of civilization as we know it…picture Nero playing his fiddle while Rome burns.

You never know you are in a moment in history until it is long over. Chaos is always present in the moment. Change of this magnitude is ALWAYS painful, disorienting, mind blowing, ego shredding, and catastrophic to all of the systems you are used to calling normal and functional. I came to that conclusion from personal experience and my intuition which comes from source, and a slew of other artists who express the same.

So there is more to the one idea. This change is NOT THE END of Life.

IT IS THE BEGINNING OF A WORLD STRUCTURED VERY DIFFERENTLY THAN THE LAST.

To be continued.