RKzJ 2.04 “Scars: Seen & Unseen” now available here
Roadkill Zen (n.): The state of emptying oneself through spiritual creativity involving the searching out and usage of the seeming discards and decay of everyday life balanced with cultural overabundance and the ignored beauty of natural circumstances. This involves both opening the mind’s eye and closing at least one of the body’s eyes, searching out the center of sight. Acronymically referred to as “RKz”.
Roadkill Zen (n.): An online occasional journal highlighting contemporary poetry, flash fiction, cultural essays, and creative non-fiction.
Roadkill Zen (n.): A funneled electronic destination, whereby one artist and writer (Larry “Threecrows” Thacker) may rest the cumulative results of writing, poetry, art, photography, and other potentially adventurous or disastrous undertakings without trying to manage ten different websites (and none of them as cool as this one, thanks to Josh D).
Nutrition Facts Serv, Size: 1 visit, Amount per serving; Calories 0, Total fat 0g (0% DV), Sodium 0mg, Total Carb 0g, Protein 0g. A significant source of creative alternative thought provocation. Percent Daily Values based on a 200 page per day diet. Ingredients: About, Mountain Mysteries, Coal Dust, Poetry, Roadkill Zen Journals, Art-i-Zen, Blogsmack, Angstiness, Columns, Kudzu Extract, Photography, Linkage, Archives, unhealthy amounts of Caffeine.
So putting together a website designed to give you a spot to manage all your creative junk is one of those double-edged sword thingies. On one hand, you need to toss your creative self out there in more and more unique ways in order to express who you are and what you do, to connect with like-minded people, to encourage the same from others. On the other hand, you don’t want the work-in-progress to evolve into some ego-fest that gets in the way of the point - genuine self expression.
We hear people speculate as to humanity’s natural tendency for self-destruction, for killing, hurting. I disagree. I feel - I know - we all have an undying desire to create. It is one of only two natural tendencies we have as human beings in my opinion. The other is to love. The acts of loving and creating are the only two things we do. Everything else - hate, hurting, and every other emotional discomfort - requires negative work and poisonous effort, causing a vacuum realness. Creativity, in all its forms, and love, though requiring work at times, are the only real expressions of who we are.
Encouraging people to express this natural talent of creativeness is my lifelong dream. It is a dream I’ve floated in long before I knew it was a dream. Now that I’m finding my ”voice” in all the projects relating to writing, assemblage art and painting, photography, and the occasional wandering into the performing arts, some social justice issues, I am finding myself in each new project. But these individual pieces of work - a poem here, a painting there - are not the art. The art is, in fact, the dynamic expression of my whole life experience over the course of time. The ”work” is linear, a long, thin line of being, dabbled with created milestones springing from my own mind’s alchemy with the ingredients life throws at me.
I’ve had to personally let go of many expressive restraints in order to land where I am. The more you try to ignore fear the stronger it becomes over time. It scurries over to somewhere else, disguises itself and lingers. Fear knows you better than you know it. But it’s not real. It is the future ghost only you can breath life in to.
I eventually took a step back and looked globally at what I was “saying” in all this explosion of expression. What I found was someone desperately searching out symbolilc form and sense from real and imagined chaos. This is “Roadkill Zen” if you must know, the searching out of beauty and clarity within the discards of life. I find explaining it in much more detail than that about as easily as I can truly explain the physics of gravity; I know it exists and has control over all I do and see, yet the apple falling from the tree at my feet is about as technical as I can get.