Thank you artists.. for adding to the world. For creating and re-creating worlds. For making this place colorful. Thank you for challenging convention. For living lives of integrity, not falling to compromise. Thank you for the sounds that transport us instantly to a world of our desire. Thank you for inspiring, for showing a way. Thank you for expressing the various aspects of being human. Whether its emotions, ideas, concepts, spirituality. Thank you for the expressions that many of us take for granted distracted from our nature and life itself in the obligations of reality that we commit to. Thank you for showing there is more to life than the banality of cultural convention. Thank you for the intensity. For challenging our comfort. Thank you for the films, the paintings, sculptures, photographs, fashions, architectures, music, and on and on. All mediums. Born in the creative mind as an abstraction, and delivered into the world in which we exist, made experiencial for all. From formless to form, and absorbed in the participants being. The gift is a metaphysical one that has the power to transform another in the deepest way. Thank you artists, for the shamanistic gift. Thank you for being preservers of history beginning from our earliest primitive state. Thank you artists for challenging the nature of this history and re-writing it. For breaking the dogma. For allowing all to partake in the creative, expressive nature of our humanity. Thank you to art... for surving till this day as that practice that stands in the face of cultural oppressive structures whether blatant or subtle, being the individuals ultimate expression of liberation. And I feel this is the greatest example of art. A life lived to this potential, even if only for a period of time. Many of us are fortunate to truly create the lives that we wish to live as a result of the liberties that we have been born into, or have adopted. But how many of us actually do so? Art has the potential to be the direct expression of this. And for this, I am most grateful. Thank you to art. Thank you artists.