Healing Is Low Tech

This sounds like a familiar quote, but the words actually flowed from my fingers the other day. Jane commented that the phrase has bumper sticker potential. The artist, Jenny Holzer, might place such a truism on a billboard, Las Vegas neon sign, stone bench. I was a big fan when she began using words as visual art.

Certain ideas and creative trends seem to bubble up in a multiples...universal unconscious as Carl Jung would say. Healing is low-tech could show up as the slogan for some campaign or commercial without any involvement from me. I have seen evidence of this over-and-over in the world of art and media.

Charlie and I once recorded a really bad little song about this idea. Everybody in the world's got their collar up...Everybody in the world's got their collar up...Must have seen it in a magazine...I don't know...I don't know. Somewhere about 1982 this quirky turned-up-collar phenomenon happened for a few months. Now there are too many trends and media to track them that they all blend together.

I recently noticed a curious comment attached to a blogger's rant...No quoters, please. I agree that quotes have been Hallmarkized to death, but bytes of wisdom are shortcuts to a larger world view. Perhaps our possibility for true wisdom has been reduced to the one-line quote.

I admit to this strange habit. I collect these seeds of truth. Just the other day I found myself telling my sister...You can't stop progress. We hear that all the time, but who said it for the first time? It reminds me of another by Albert Einstein...Nothing happens until something moves.

I understand the anti-quoter's sentiment. Be original. Be creative. Be smart. Is that even possible with so many reference points to borrow from. I believe it is in the collage of found parts that true art emerges. The universal unconscious belongs to us all. Picasso said it best back in the early twentieth century...Good artists borrow--great artists steal.

Healing IS low-tech...Breathe.