"To explode is to transform; to increase suddenly, to take up space. It's the result of internal pressure-- of energy that has been building. An explosion results in scattered pieces and a burst of light. So go ahead and explode -- but scatter your pieces everywhere and use that burst of light to show you the way."
Once, at the end of one of those days where you've been physically still but mentally erupting, I found myself writing in block letters, this perspective on what it means to explode.
After dragging a #8 filbert brush through shades of deep emerald and piercing pink, I filled a silent room with pungent color. Generally, "pungent" is a word used to describe taste and smell but I see no reason to abstain from using it here because if colors had flavors, then those ripe shades of pink layered with audacious shades of green would be just that: "sharply affecting... as if by a penetrating power" as dictionary.com articulates.
Anyways, colors trigger our senses. We can see them and feel them. I would also argue that colors can make noise too: The light melody of a powdery, pale pink, the loud combustion of a fiery red, when we hear rain falling gently and catch the scent of petrichor diffusing through the air, it sounds like a hushed balance of muted blue and weightless gray.
However, an explosion is a bright emotion. I found myself focusing on a word and letting the colors and brushstrokes build upon the thoughts, feelings, fragmented memories and wistful dreams that were the compounded energies inside of me.
To such unrealistic and doubtful realities, I had pinned my focus of energy and as an inevitable result, that night in the stillness of a studio, I let that burst of light illuminate the canvas on which my scattering pieces would find their resting place.
The loveliest notion about something once whole, now being in pieces, is the ability to reassemble the pieces in new and brilliant ways.
I find that prior to an explosion or any breakthrough of sorts, there is an intermittent phase where our contact with reality feels like our internal and external worlds are both the north ends of a magnet: two repelling forces that cannot touch no matter the bullied power exerted by both parties to connect the two.
The more we try to make contact between them, the more we feel this frustrating lack of control. And just when you think you're about to bridge the gap and touch the two ends together, another micro-explosion takes place between the two north ends and as if taken over by a magic force, the two ends bust away from one another as one goes upwards and the other falls downwards and we find ourselves back to where we started: polarized.
I think that some explosions are predicated on the discontent that arises from polarizing situations. I also think that we often don't give enough thought to the internal polarizations that take place in the universes that are bound within each and every one of us amidst the external polarization of political climates, work dynamics and maybe even home lives as well.
When I think about explosions, I think that they require an internal instability placed in an external environment that is equally as unstable and hence, the two combust and an explosion takes place.
What we choose to do with the fire and energy that results, is up to us. We can choose to flip our side of the magnet so that we break the repelling nature of polarization and begin using the energy from our combustion to propel us forward and attract positivity, or we can allow the explosion to consume us and if you've ever watched a glowing amber flame consume the tip of a newspaper, you know that it doesn't take long for this consumption to take place.
To explode is to transform. To explode is to bring to life a compounding build of internal energy and space. To explode is to begin again, to reassemble and to become expansive.
Build. Explode. Transform. Scatter. Reassemble. Repeat.
