What marks a culture?

Musing today I wondered about the identity of cultures. Some cultures are healing, caring; some are full of commerce, and buy and sell all the time; some cultures make war; some cultures make beauty, and poetry and song.

What identifies desolate/delight culture? Maybe sometimes we do all of these energetic activities, then there is a transformation and we energize differently? What makes some form trans form? Why do we change and when? Why do we resist changing? Are we afraid? What do we need to learn to change without resistance?

The answers are in my experience....how to know my experience without avoiding what is unfamiliar?

What is subconscious gossip about change? What is my neurosis when something new is rising up to the consciousness?

What are the forms in a culture that support beauty? Or perhaps what allows beauty to emerge in conflict? What songs do we sing to heal? What do we sell that creates peace? Merging in and out of states of knowing.

When do I feel relaxed and whole? What is my kinesthetic delight?

When does impulse obscure knowing, avoid being? When do I repress impulse? When do I follow?

How long does it take to evolve? Now the questions are circling around the disciplines of the warrior-artist-in-training. This image from the Shambhala teachings....the Y-WAIT notion. The artist in a culture explores these questions. The artist never averts her eyes. The artist keeps the gaze, the watchers, the audience in her awareness, making a clear offering of her passion, aggression, her ignorance without self-consciousness. The artist makes beauty and surrenders it to any buyer, offers it to any struggle, sings it to any dying person, animal, plant, body of water, mountain....sings to the sun.