Like Carola and Kelly, my favorite piece was also Rush.  It made me think of the enormous world we create in our heads.  If we could actually see this trail of inter-woven experiences that we all carry around with us I'm sure it would be vastly more ginormous even than Lesley Dill's epic piece exhibits.  This is closely tied to her use of language in her art.  Our experience is so colored by language and concept that it seems that it is more that our language dictates the way we create our reality than our experience of reality later being translated into conceptual language.  Lesley's work points this out to us.

In the modern classic Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Suzuki Roshi explains how we can learn to view and experience the world with a child-like 'beginner's mind' that sees through fresh eyes in a way not limited by our conceptual baggage.  Alan Watts explained in a lecture, quoting a famous teaching, that "he who sees five colors is blind, and he who hears the five sounds is deaf."  When language/concept dictates our experience, it becomes limited and buffered.  When we see a tree and quickly put it in a conceptual box of 'tree' we don't really see or experience what is there.  When we say the leaves of the tree are 'green' we miss the unique and fresh quality of the moment.  There are a million shades of green, and ultimately there is no green.  Green is just a word, and a word is not the thing it represents.

Lesley Dill's work show us the immense impact that language has on our lives.  But, to use language rather than be used by it, means to learn to experience the world as it is, with a fresh 'beginner's' mind and to experience the world without a conceptual veil.  This dynamic and perpetually new way of relating to the world will also lead to language that is new, dynamic, innovative, creative, exciting, and alive.

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