It is a gift to be blessed with passion.

It yields the richness of hope, of motivation, and it brings the livening of eagerness and desire.  It graces one’s days with relevance.  It bolsters affection, breathes fear, uplifts and stings and grieves with sentiment and love.  It, in essence, is the key to the fulfillment of life itself.  This is its enormity, its importance to not only bring ambition, but to relish in life’s ultimate privilege.

 

Within this same breath, it must be said, too, that passion stirs the heart in many forms.  Aspiration surely fuels frustration and heightens the blows of defeat.  Wishes, commitments, enthusiasm; all form an inevitable bond to a disquieting awareness of mortality.

 

Inflicted with this unrestful contradiction between love and the passing of time, Tim Cantor created the original oil painting I Come to Rest.  Along with his painted allegory, there exists his correlative poem to which the final words read, “Love not the past less, but the future more.”  Written in the latter part of 2008, it is, perhaps, the artist's answer to harmonize the nostalgic nature of the human condition.  As one ages, there is a reigning tendency to fill more hours of the day straying in the recollections of one's own history ― roaming in the footprints of a path already walked.  Fondly.  Regretfully.  Always wondering.  Always questioning.

 

There is a darkness in memory, bred by sadness and the impossibility of altering the past.  Moreover, in its relentless manner, this sadness not only feeds off remorseful memories, it clutches onto the good ones as well; as longings, as yearnings, as wonderful yet torturous evocations that can spoil the present.  They urge the veracity that each day gone by is precisely that; ‘gone by.’  Unrelivable.

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