from Faridah...

Art is the inheritor of the sacred. Perplexity is both the ancestor and the descendant of enlightenment. To put away childish things is to eschew the systems that order, that determine, that assess, that approve, that disapprove, that permit, that disallow, that require, that compare, that validate, that exclude, that critique, that label, that define, that provide criteria.

I reject external criteria: I have faith in my own ability to think.

I avoid the conditioned air of the arts bureaucracy: I mix my breath with the inhalations and exhalations of my fellow creatures, unconditioned, and unconditionally. I breathe the wide air of place and being.

I do not hold out a begging bowl to be filled with governmental leavings: I fill my bowl with earth from which all things grow. I drink from the stream of consciousness: it cannot be contained; it flows through us and around us; it exists for all.

An artist must work with the integrity of being. There is no replacement for this, and no disguise. Art is not an industry. I give myself up, not to the forces of commerce but to the life force which drives forward the evolution of human thought; not to economic survival but to the survival of the principle of sanctity.

Art is intent.

Perplexity is both the ancestor and the descendant of enlightenment. Art is the inheritor of the sacred.