The Koan of Everyday Life
The same hands.
The ones that shape the earth.
The ones that spread colour.
The ones that wash, gather, prepare, and move through everyday life.
Not two.
A single presence.
For a long time, I observed the distance that seemed to exist between the creative gesture and the necessary gestures of life.
On one side, the time of art, research, contemplation.
On the other, the time of things to be done, of the small actions that sustain existence.
Then, slowly, something began to reveal itself.
Perhaps that distance was only an idea.
Not two
The hands that shape clay are the same hands that turn on the tap, arrange a room, prepare a meal.
Matter knows no hierarchy.
The water flowing over our hands belongs to the same world as the earth taking form beneath our fingers.
Colour, graphite, clay do not ask to be separated from life.
They simply happen.
The creative gesture does not begin when we leave everyday life behind.
Perhaps it begins when we are fully present in what we are doing.
The gesture
One day I was working on the poems I had illustrated.
I was immersed in those rarefied atmospheres belonging to reading, painting, and thought.
I was reading Montale.
“and walking into the blinding sun
discover with sad amazement
what all of life and its labour truly is”
It was precisely on that word — labour — that life called me back.
The dishwasher had decided to reach the end of its journey.
In front of me: dishes.
Many dishes.
And in that moment, with a certain irony, everyday life revealed its teaching once again.
There was no fall.
There was no forced return to reality.
There was simply another gesture.
Another movement of the hands.
Presence
Perhaps the koan of everyday life is not about finding a way to free ourselves from what interrupts our search.
Perhaps it is recognising that there is nothing to interrupt.
Art does not exist in a separate place.
It exists in the way we look.
In the way we touch.
In the way we move through what happens.
Even a simple gesture can contain a form of attention.
Even a repeated gesture can become presence.
The hand that paints and the hand that washes are the same hand.
Everyday life is not what takes us away from creation.
It is the place where creation exists.
