Snake Dance – Original Painting

About This Painting

I think about duality a lot. Yin and yang, light and dark, the world of opposites and dichotomies.

It's been an obsession since I was 18. I had a deep inner experience during this time: I felt the "everything-ness" of our existence dissolve into "nothing" ... and then the "nothing-ness" expand into "everything." On and on, endlessly. I felt these two things intimately connected and intertwined.

For years, I longed to unite and balance these poles. It was a strong inner drive. I didn't want to live in a world of duality.

Because where there is duality, there is up, and there is down. And in my own life, I would go through seasons of joy, and seasons of immense inner sadness and pain.

You might think the conclusion to this story is that I overcame my ups and downs. That I now live in a state of mature, non-dual calm and peace.

The reality is that I still have seasons of joy and seasons of sadness and pain. But what I've come to learn is that the two, together, create the cord of my life. And there is a strange beauty in that.

You can't have joy without pain. Light without dark. To seek the one while rejecting the other is to be in a state of imbalance. When I sought only joy and fled from my pain, the pain found ways to fight its way in. When I allowed the pain to be, and to teach me, I was able to heal, and grow. There must be balance.

I must accept my own darkness, as well as my own light.

I can hold space for both.

And in doing so, I feel I am able to appreciate the beautiful dance between the two. It's a dance of acceptance, and of allowing my inner duality to be.

"Snake Dance"