The Love Project

Let us consider that I am a musician because I play an instrument, have reached a level of proficiency that defines my skill, practise with other musicians who consider me a musician (hopefully), and usually have an audience at shows. So, I am defined by people other than myself, but I am also defined by myself, but that self is one too many because ‘I’ am a sum of all the definitions that make ‘me’ Or, to take another example, one is a mother because she has a child, does the traditional duties of what one defines as ‘mother’, is defined against the person who is a father (perhaps) and so on. So when one considers that the essential goal of all religion really is to ‘know thyself’, one can safely say that the journey is about wading through all these different selves to find the one that makes the most sense to us. It’s like a hall of mirrors. Which one is you? There has to be a perfect mirror that mirrors back to you a true likeness of yourself which, of course, conventional mirrors are not. (Have you ever noticed that you look slimmer in one mirror and fatter in another one sometimes? And even a camera doesn’t do the trick. Which is your better angle you might ask? What really reflects a reality? The question is such a messy one that when we meet with an issue like the Jacob-Gomes vs Aria Lounge one, it begs many questions.

How did we begin to judge other people? What right do we have to do so? Was it always this way? When did gender definitions become a business? When did gender become important? Who is man? Who is woman? When did organised religion become another word for cruelty, for discrimination, for the inhumane? What happened to simply human dignity and respect for others? If I am because you are, then we are collectively responsible for one other. And by being responsible for one other it means that we ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. In other words, if you like being treated as a human being with feelings, then why do we persist in de-humanizing others? So, I’ve decided that I would like to focus on Elspeth Duncan’s 1,000 days love project. The project emerged from a challenge to do something positive for 100 days, proposed by yoga instructor, Karen Blackman. Duncan is a known writer, artist, musician and yoga instructor and recently released her book Tobago Peeps, a selection of her columns that she writes for the Guardian newspaper. What interests me this time around is the power of her personal 1,000- days love challenge. Each day she posts something about love, it can be anything as far as I see – photographs of a plant, sunshine through the trees or a video of burning incense.

I imagine that each day as she looks around she increasingly becomes a part of the animate and inanimate. I imagine that her days, as she searches for the next thing to give love to and to see love in, that her life is being enriched because as the days go by, it will become a habit, a natural way of seeing. According to her, in Kundalini Yoga, if you practice something for 1,000 days, it becomes a part of your subtle body.

Capturing that love through photographs and/or film each day concretizes an abstract concept.

In a sense, this way of looking and documenting is a pilgrimage. I found Duncan’s personal challenge such a powerful exercise that for this Christmas season I wish everyone could join (even if for the next eleven days), and bring in 2016 with a new way of seeing. Capture in writing, photographs, art, music, whatever your chosen mode of expression those things that feel like love to you.

Who knows? It might just feel great