Description

The deepest understanding we can gain of ourselves is through loving others. To be clear, I mean the simplest and most difficult kind of love, the one of no conditions. As I learn to unconditionally love my community the more I discover fundamental me.

It is a puzzling phenomenon.

Community determines identity, bares emotion and uncovers our greatest potential. Our layered and textured relationships can slow time down and birth our deepest joys and bleakest frustrations. Either way, we transform as we collect little soul-pigments of those who enter and paint another layer of our self-portrait.

Identity is embedded in our community; our history, our transactions, our touchpoints and failures define us. When we interact, we become the only us, not individuals, and so different from any other. We reflect each other like light beams on waterdrops, ever-changing and shifting. Never still as stone, we are unfixable.

It is in our chemistry.

Community has an undefinable magic. It connects people across time, life and space. We travel within it without moving, carried forward by love, family, friends, day-to-day acquaintances and even enemies. We call the members “mine” but they are really we. Among others, without words or even eye contact, I am still connected to a life force greater than myself. I do not exist otherwise.

Community is our always changing life-portrait, not just of I, but all who pass in life or death, love or fear, curiosity or shame.

Marika Reinke

Community. Acrylic Painting 54″‘ x 90″ ­­