ABOUT ekoh
ekoh, painting live in Red Lodge, 2015
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BioScape
Biographical Landscape
...1966, Boston, U.S.A., Breathed inside this body, dysfunction, pain...
...1968, Early roots in Nigeria, Africa:
Civil war, slaughter, life in the ghetto, mud, blood, heat, malaria, fear,
talking-drums in the night embedded in my marrow;
Animism, sorcery, whispering spirits, shriveled dried skin, dried white bones,
smell of rotting flesh, throbbing flesh, torn roots, gripping roots,
rhythmic dance of birth and death embedded in my heart,
rhythmic trance...
...1974, Budding in France:
The scourge of school, the muzzling, laws and rules,
overwhelming yet empowering instruments of the mind,
art, literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis ...
minding my own 'key': ‘Art-Creology’;
Martial arts, pain, otherness, pain, strangeness, pain, discipline, pain ...
the journey to healing, connecting and channeling the invisible through form,
matter and words;
Ah! the face of fear, ah! the force of chi... floating above my body!
I am not this body!
A taste of the beyond...
...1988, Fertilized in New York:
The hunger in the people, the dreaming people,
the struggling, racing people, the skin-deep
boiling anger, blindfolds and shields,
the pressured existence of concrete, exhaust and
noise, the covert civil war they call life;
The forked tongue of ambition licks my feet;
Soaked in this urban poison,
an inner strength
transforming the poison,
the growth of my soul's
immune system.
The alchemy!
...1990, Flowering in Montreal:
Poetry, painting, drumming, dancing, yoga,
exploding in form, color, sound and space,
mirrors of the soul;
Penetrating form, penetrating meaning, teaching,
reaching, guiding;
The forked tongue of ambition shrivels and falls;
Surrender, love, shedding skins, embracing and
soaring song of the heart;
Mutation, awareness in dreams, visions,
the power of will!
Ah! the unexpected dissolution, death by light,
blooming into the cosmos, floating amongst a
million stars, unnamable isness;
It is Nothing, It is All;
I am not this mind,
not this self,
not this 'I'...
...2008, Drifting in Hawaii:
Cleansing winds, washing waves, warming sand, ebb and flow of life,
open eye of my true face, the other side of the looking glass,
there are no words for it,
and yet there are the words to say this;
Bridging the under and the above, linking the beneath and the beyond,
echoes of the unspoken, compassion, being an ekoh for the other;
‘I’ whom You are,
silence,
bliss…
...2014, Building on the Mainland:
Gentle hearts touching, friendliness, loving companionship,
learning the game of ownership in the fields of sleeping buddhas,
sowing in the garden of We, the Buddha;
Offering poetry as a window, forms as a mirror,
serving as an echo;
Serving,
in this world...