Landscape Theology

I am honored to link you to an online exhibition of my landscape paintings. Michael Schwartz, Professor of History and Philosophy of Art at Augusta State University, selected the paintings and wrote this review: 

Majestic Worldspaces of Sentient Nature

David Titterington’s paintings sing rhapsodic songs of the love of nature - nature as Love. Not to the exclusion of human culture - yet, somehow, nature on its own terms.

Environments slip and slide between and amongst micro-, meso-, and macro- orders of being – from microbes to animals to skies to starfields: magical worldspaces of sentience, the resident beings variously implicated in tempos of birth, life, play, joy, death, decay, and more.

Titterington’s glorious integral art makes visible the unseen radiance, mystery, and wonder of nature in all its Aliveness and endless Perspectivism – inviting us to enter into the direct feel and felt sense of these otherwise secreted and beautiful regions of the Kosmos.

While even seemingly ordinary landscapes are revealed in unexpected and novel ways. An art then that is a sheer gift in its magical disclosures of the incalculable orders of Life and Love. 

                                                                                                      Michael Schwartz

June 2013

opening as Love

Harold: Maude? 
Maude: Yeah? 
Harold: [pulls the stamped coin from the arcade out of his pocket] Here. 
Maude: A gift! 
[reads the engraving] 
Maude: "Harold loves Maude."... and Maude loves Harold. This is the nicest gift I've received in years. 
[she throws the stamped coin into the water] 
Harold: [gasps, bemused] 
Maude: So I'll always know where it is. 

Creative Connections

The Chinese invented paper money and the value was derived from a magical aura around writing. In early America church bells were inscribed with prayers and sometimes baptized. Morse code was invented by a painter. Before he was an artist Van Gogh was a preacher. "Emerald City" is a technical term used in Iranian Sufism to mean "the world of the Soul". Before the Nazi armies invaded Paris, the Louvre was emptied and its contents were secretly distributed among wealthy French citizens who hid them in their houses around the country. When The Mona Lisa was hidden from the Nazis, the curator of the Louvre kept it in his bedroom "so that there would always be someone with her."

Director Paul Verhoeven intended RoboCop to be a retelling of the Christ Story.

The tune for "Yesterday" came to Paul McCartney in a dream. Lord Monboddo, a deist, first wrote about the idea of human evolution. Erasmus Darwin wrote poetry inspired by Monboddo, and then his grandson Charles copied the theory from his grandfather. Humans and worms share and underlying brain blueprint. If you have a deep voice you may have a low sperm count. Some Nazis believed that the secret origin of the entire Aryan race could be uncovered in Tibet. One of my good buddies who meditates a lot visited me in a dream and then told me about it the next day.  If rats learn to swim through a maze, their offspring will learn the maze more quickly. When the brain area necessary for muscle relaxation during REM sleep is surgically destroyed, cats fall asleep as usual, but during REM sleep they walk around and act out hunting dreams.  Snow White and the Seven Dwarves had its premiere at New York City's Radio City Music Hall, and afterwards all the velvet seat upholstery had to be replaced because the young children were so frightened by the sequence of Snow White lost in the forest that they wet their pants.

Brain scientists now say consciousness does not occur in our brains, but is dynamically distributed, boundary crossing, offloaded, and environmentally situated within materiality. In 1980 there was a Sheffield University student who had a measured IQ of 126 and passed a Mathematics Degree but who had hardly any discernible brain matter at all. "You are not the one who experiences liberation; you are the clearing, the opening, the emptiness, in which any experience comes and goes, like reflections on the mirror. And you are the mirror, the mirror mind, and not any experienced reflection."

Six million pounds of space dust settles on earth every year.  There is real gold in the sun.  The first email was sent in 1971. "Columbia" is an old name for America. Queen Victoria commissioned a big fig leaf to be placed over The David's penis. Seven of the male members of the cult Heaven's Gate, including its founder, voluntarily underwent castration in Mexico as an extreme means of maintaining their ascetic lifestyle. Over 50 percent of American evangelical Christians say that non-christians can go to heaven.  

Gender-Landscape reciprocity

I got an article published on Solpurpose.com!!! The editor says "This essay, adapted from a much longer academic paper on the embodied origins of gender identity, connects nature, mind, and culture in a unifying poetry of experience."

holy holy instrument

"The body is a man's first and most natural instrument."

Marcel Mauss, "Body Techniques"

Every time I watch this video of Bobby McFerrin improvising in his current tour "Spirit You All," I feel joy and creative life, in me and in him! It's so inspiring. McFerrin loves to talk about improvisation and the creative spirit, often cloaking them in Christian, soulful languages, but the direct performance of his spiritual music/practice/gift/concentration shines like a bush fire, right? Did anyone see him in KC a week or so back? I wish I could have been there. Here he is with his daughter singing a version of Mere Words, one of my favorite songs of all time...



Here is the original.

smile. 

Body Theology

Here is my thesis! I'd love to know what you think.

a new "Powers of Ten" and empathy as the spiritual doorway into transcendental states of consciousness.

So THIS is beautiful and worth exploring. And this video conceptualized the christic empathy prism! I love this:

Transcendenz from Michaël Harboun on Vimeo.

I love listening to that laugh

from here And he says he would support a woman successor! What a wonderful religion...

Our trip to Ojito (Koko recall)

ojito