Welcome to the Otherside of the Wall

Years ago, when I was attending Bethel College in Kansas (USA), I had the opportunity to paint my dorm room white and black. I painted it like the inside cover of Pink Floyd's THE WALL record. However, instead of the freudian images used on that album, I simply painted the inside of a jail cell at the point where the wall was broken open.

It was a dark image with shades of gray, black and white. From an observer's perspective, one could not quite tell whether the mural on the wall [of A Wall] represented an event where :

(a) someone had just broken out of their jail cell--leaving the hole

or whether

(b) someone had broken through the wall only to discover the other side of the wall was a jail cell.

If one was sitting in the room looking at the mural, one was left conflicted at the ambiguity.

Was the viewer being invited to see the Hole in the Wall as a mark of victory at escape or was one to become saddened by the fact that prison was to be found on either side of the wall??

These are the tough questions or choices we face when we go off to university and first study the metaphor of the cave by Plato. Surprisingly, I still face these same questions decades later--albeit in a more up-beat way.

This is also what I experience as I travel around the world and face living in new cultures all of the time. Am I a prisoner in a cave who can escape and get to know reality [or some aspect of it] or am I doomed to discover that when I leave imprisonment, I simply move into another dungeon of someone elses making?

I wish to encourage writers, thinkers, world-traveleres, peacemakers, and seekers to encourage and encounter one another with this blog. (Tips on writing style are accepted, too.)

Kevin Anthony Stoda
Maboula, Kuwait