The Big Picture

Kerry Skarbakka


Yesterday I went to Kathy Oddenino's latest seminar on Hidden Memories - Here is something she wrote, which I've been thinking about since:
We live countless lifetimes and as energy we create them intentionally – when we accept this we can see how we are changing and growing internally through our growth of Spiritual energy experiences, how we preserve our past-life memories in the neurons of our brain, and why our past-life memories are pure diamonds within the dual soul memory of our endless past lives.

Our mind is always seeking new knowledge, new experiences, so what is sought after by our mind is an image of the “carrot” that is leading us, motivating us in our continuing creation. What urges us on, to live, to get up in the morning, go to bed at night, eat, dream, read, swim, walk, fly, talk, laugh? A life without any sense of momentum is no fun – it is depressing!

When we feel or express that we do not want to grow and change, we are writing our obituary as a human being. We are not getting through our head the storybook of us as a human being.

Believing that we live only one physical life has kept us focused on only black keys on the piano keyboard, only one or 2 colors in the color spectrum, only a few tastes in our taste palette. We do not know how to use our hidden memories to our advantage because we do not “know” (accept) they are “there.” This is because our beliefs are “cast in stone,” as “fact,” and we have become accustomed mainly to proving only what we already accept as “true.” This is an internal image of what it means to make ourselves into “graven images” and worship this image as immutable, omnipotent, and to-be-obeyed. We misread what we see in the mirror. Kathy’s seminar yesterday on Hidden Memories (past life memories, past life memories as bleed through with flashback memories) brought this up again in my mind in a new way. We worship this image of ourselves as a monument to our history, to ourselves as we are, even in our struggle to survive, our struggle to conquer, and divide, even as we think we commit ourselves to unity, support, and love of our fellow human. This also relates to our iconic memory of the “Ten Commandments” cast in stone and given to Moses on the mountaintop - think Charlton Heston in his flaming fierceness as a bearded image of Moses on the mountain with those tablets, in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 film. We saw this film as kids in Nigeria, I think on a visit once to the theater in Ibadan, the city closest to Oyo, where we lived. Certain images imprint themselves in our memories. I remember looking up at the big screen, a towering Moses, towering waves on screen, Charlton Heston’s booming voice, a slave woman being crushed by a gigantic block of stone because her a piece of her clothing was caught beneath the weight. For those who saw the film, or read about the history of film and animation, the technology and skills which expand the ways we manipulate images, that film had plenty of drama – the River Nile turning red (dye) and more staged effects that add to landmarks of memory. The drama of images fascinates me, and understanding them as energy fields simply adds to my fascination.

In disgust, the stone tablets are broken. When we are fed up with our own waste and denial and wandering in the wilderness, we break the stone of our beliefs and see the truth of the ethical values which the “love your neighbor as yourself” intends as an energy message.

The day before Kathy’s latest seminar on Hidden Memories, I went to see an exhibit at the N.C. Museum of Art called The Big Picture. The exhibit featured 23 large-scale photographs by 13 artists, including Kerry Skarbakka. I’ve been intrigued by Rosemary Laing’s photographs since I first saw a print a few years ago from another N.C. exhibit catalog called Defying Gravity. Some curators and art observers are saying that photography is now the dominant force in contemporary art. This adds more emphasis to how we manipulate and interpret images as our skill and technology creations expand. Kerry Skarbakka is one artist who had 2 prints in the exhibit. His series of photographs of “perpetual falling,” and how he simply and profoundly describes his “impetus for change and “the challenge for self-improvement” all fit together for me in how we each sense our rise and fall. We “fall” through the energy levels within our mind when we don’t open our mind and rise to the occasion of the momentum of growth and change that our mind is seeking. This is depressing for the mind! We capture these images of ourself in many ways, in life, in art, as we learn the art of life through change – the death of loved ones, our own demise, our own rise and fall. The knowledge of who we are as evolving consciousness explains this pattern of creation and expression. It is beautiful to see how we change our view from "defying gravity" to knowing we can fly, or, as my friend PC beamingly acknowledges, Levitation of the mind!

Kerry Skarbakka
Kerry Skarbakka’s images picture a world full of physical and emotional dangers. His web site refers to German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who described human existence as a process of perpetual falling. This creates the framework for much of the falling/tripping photographs in his series The Struggle to Right Oneself, for which Kerry has become known.
Lightwork catalog