Kids of Lower Utopia - V6 No3 - Letters from the Front Lines
( A-work-in-progress)

V6 No3 Page 5. Pre-Introduction Part 2

AN INTRODUCTION TO V6 No3 KIDS OF LOWER UTOPIA
LETTERS FROM THE FRONT LINES BY RIVER SCOUT FINNAGAIN

(Pre-introduction contintued Part 2)

so you can only allow what is . . . to be. That is why "finding" the Truth is called Realization. You realize that the Truth is who You Are (unclouded by thought -- thinking is the problem, not the solution).

So why would you want the truth? Because "truth," as I am using it here, is synonymous, in my experience, with love, peace, joy, freedom, beauty, eternity, the Self -- everything we understand to be The Good. You are - within you - the very source of all that you desire, but the world only reflects what you have allowed yourself inside. So . . . why limit your Self, why not Be all that you are. It is, after all, who you are … already … right Now.

In this, my 8th book, Kids of Lower Utopia: Letters from the Front Lines, V6.No3, I am drawing, through the lens of Zen Non-dualism, an allegorical dream in which my heroine; River Scout Finnagain, travels through archetypal stages of realizations to finally arrive at her Self.

This story couldn't be told better in another medium than the pencil. Nothing holds more directly the silent life of observation-in-light as a metaphor undisguised then the pencil. Simple - direct - elemental. My drawings are spoken in a careful language of conscious vectors summing into "still-points" where life's attention waits gathering silence.

The pages are a sequence of images in a formal proximity that initiates a narrative flow which solicits from the viewer intuitive leaps to bridge the space between pages - leaps through their own non-linear space of Truth. At first this book was a series of wordless long-jumps, like visual Zen sutras describing the greatest of the hero's journeys - the one of Self Realization - but even my most perceptive friends asked for words to fuel their jumps. So I created the "possible" subtext pages (like diptychs) that are each a detail from their original page. On these pages I added one-of-many "possible" subtexts dialogues, along with a piece of the letter (as an ongoing narrative), that I found in a lucid dream which was the original impetus for this book. And it is in essence just a comic book - a story in words and pictures.

Art is a metaphor for being fully conscious, it mimics Self-Realization by seeing so thoroughly, so seemingly instantaneously "Now" that the viewer is suspended in "Aesthetic Arrest" and experiences observation free of thought. This is my Work.

Thanks for looking, your Brother Toc