Have you ever visited Michelangelo's famous statue David? It fascinates me how a human can create intricate details on a heartless stone that can still prevail over centuries, to tell us a story. It is not only true for Michelangelo, but there were also a plenty of talented human individuals, in the past and will be there in the future, so our lives are never monotonous.
How are sculptures made?
Building from nothing
There are two ways to build a sculpture. The more common and frequently used way is to make a mold first and pour some material. Or similarly we can build a frame and stepwise make the sculpture by adding more material and shaping it. We can call it building out of nothing. Whenever we think about building something we tend to think about this method of adding things to previous base.
Carving out of something
The opposite way of creating a sculpture is by carving. It is somewhat similar but this time you are carving out unnecessary parts of previous chunk of material. It may be a marble, a concrete or piece of rock. Chip by chip. It seems that it is more difficult and delicate procedure as you have to know exactly what to remove. Removing too much, one hammer strike too strong can destroy years of work and make it a piece of failure.
You may wonder what this has to do with mindfulness. I would say everything. This is a great analogy to understand our mindful practices. Whenever we think about mindfulness, we tend to think like a building out of nothing method of a sculpture artist. We try to create something out of whatever we have. We try to create a peace. We have high hopes. Yet, mindfulness is like creating the statue of David by Michelangelo.
Think about it. Statue of David was already in the giant piece of marble. All Michelangelo did was remove all pieces of marble which did not belong to "David".
Similarly. peace and everything we try to achieve are already inherently present within ourselves. Sadly, it is all covered by unnecessary pieces of marble. So, it is a slow process and intricate process to take out all the unwanted marble to bring out the "David" within us.
The stone was carved chip by chip,
by Skillful hands of immortal artist
It wasn't clear Until he declared,
An angel was born to averse,
the feted darkness of the city square.
Heven was hidden in a heart of a stone.
Every eye jumped in a gaiety tone.
Angel still prevails artist long gone.
Thank you for reading. Statue of David - Michelangelo- mindfulness
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