art--pushing the boundaries

"Life can seem mundane or even boring as we trudge through our daily routines. To me, art provides a way to push beyond the boundaries of the ordinary and find new ways to view life as the grand, unlikely spectacle that it is." Ben Tolman, in a statement accompanying his ink portrait of his wife, Jana, in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2009.

wonder

Here's a loooong quotation from Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire. It captures something of the value of escaping the mundane. While Pollan's focus is marijuana, I seek the same sense of wonder in simple show-stopping moments like this weekend's snowstorm
"I'm not prepared to concede that these epiphanies [being high] are as empy or false as they usually appear in the cold light of the next day....We simply don't have the words to convey the force of these perceptions to our straight selves, perhaps because they are the kinds of perceptions that precede words. They many be banal, but that doesn't mean they aren't also at the same time profound.
Marijuana dissolves this apparent contradiction, and it does so by making us temporarily forget most of the baggage we usually bring to our perception..., our acquired sense of its familiarity and banality. For what is a sense of the banality of something if not a defense against the overwhelming (or at least whelming) power of that thing experienced freshly? Banality depends on memory, as do irony and abstraction and boredom, three other defenses the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished.
It is by temporarily mislaying much of what we already know (or think we know) that cannabis restores a kind of innocence to our perceptions of the world, and innocence in adults will always flirt with embarrassment....By the grace of this forgetting, we temporarily shelve our inheritied ways of looking and see things as if for the first time....
There is another word for this extremist noticing--this sense of first sight unencumbered by knowingness, by the already-been-theres and seen-thats of the adult mind--and that word, of course, is wonder.