Slow Up Buddy
30 x 48 in. Oil on Canvas. 2025.
(From my Meditative Art Series [MAS] )
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A reminder to the Self to slow Up is Here. And indeed the Self had to slow up for This One.
“Slow Up Buddy” took five literal painful years to complete. There was a time when I was racing—racing through my life, racing to get to some goal, where ego dream clouded the desire to sit and Be with my Self. One night in Oaktown, I was pulled over by PD for supposedly running a red. He was lying. It was yellow, and he was nowhere near to see it. He was scamming everyone at that stop. I fought the ticket, and beat it with glee, the judge throwing the case out!
But I was bothered. I wasn’t driving fast, but had I gone slower within my being, would I have seen the yellow light through the tree leaves and stopped even earlier? Then in my usual somnolent mornings, a vision flashed at me: a traffic light—the RED and GREEN LIGHTS OFF and the CAUTION YELLOW LIGHT ON, blasting warm heed over a setting sun, to go slower, to be in This Now and see The Beauty. At the same time, another vision: black lines blocking a caution light, a contrasting image to its “Buddy.”
2020 arrived, and so did the Covid Pandemic. I enjoyed the real quiet with art. There was time to deeply slow up during a chaotic world of disease and international civil unrest. I later joined an EMT academy to be a First Responder. In 2023, on an ambulance call, I severely tore my right bicep, losing use of my dominant arm for a year. Unable to lift a few pounds for several months, I taught myself how to paint with my left. Every time I wanted to paint quickly and rascally, I was not just stalled with pain, but also self criticism of a perfect aesthetic. My wife watched me tread between behaving like a buddhist painting a mandala and episodically losing my mind painting into the next morning, trying to master This hallucinatory Illusion. After full do-overs, and fits of punching and damn near kicking the canvas, I reluctantly scolded myself that the only way to figure out This Illusion, was to remain true to going slow with my Self.
Something happened after the pandemic was over. Most folks’ perception of time sped up! Months go by in a flash. Years quicker! It’s strange perceptually that a world-changing event happened more than half a decade ago! Why slow “Up” and not slow “Down”? It's common to say “I’m down for that,” when in fact it can mean one is sad… “I’m down.” Today’s language is poisoned with reverse speech, literally saying the opposite of what one feels. “He’s sick!” Who was?.. the surfer on a wave or the surfer in bed? “Slow Down Buddy” has black chaotic lines, messy..for a messy mind…and a messy mouth. Can there be more light in our simple words that can tackle the complexity of how our species speaks of itSelf, how it conceives of itSelf, and cautiously proceeds with itSelf? Both artworks are traffic lights to the Self… for ‘Truthful Speech’ and ‘Presence of Being,’ to see the Beauty that Is All-Ways Here…a reminder to “Slow Up Buddy!”
Ezra Jeremiah
