Goodbye to a legend

‘You can put your hook on a desert, and lay it on the desert — on the sand. You wait for a long time for a fish. Maybe huge, huge ages of time before water and fish come. So you’ve got to go where the treasure is.’

―David Lynch

David Lynch passed away this month, and I wanted to reflect on how his art and life impacted me.

When Lynch came out of with the final season of Twin Peaks, I scratching my head: ‘How is it every filmmaker got worse with age, but Lynch keeps reaching new heights?’

I was profoundly moved by the quality of his work, especially given the fact that all my childhood movie makers weren’t able to continually tap into anything deep as they marched through the decades.

But here was Lynch: a body of work flanked by Eraserhead, and Episode Eight from Twin Peaks Season Three. How was his art able to maintain so strongly?

TM

It didn’t take long to bump into Lynch’s push for Transcendental Meditation (TM) around this time. I took a serious look at it, then decided to try it out.

I have been at it ever since. Lynch got me into TM, and I have been a calmer person and enjoying life a good deal thanks to him.

For me, TM is agnostic, and it simply offers a way to relax daily. With this new calmness, I am able to better deal with life’s curveballs, and step out of myself whereby I can see things coming at me as I watch from the sidelines.

Instead of feeling like things are affecting me, I just see things affecting Nato.

This comes in handy. With more of my day in a healthy state of mind, I can appreciate when the Muse speaks up, and pay attention to what the Muse brings my way. Before, I was too distracted with having life wrestle with me: there was rarely a quiet moment for the Muse to be heard.

Captivated

Of course, in the main, Lynch was a filmmaker, and this output is what most of his admirers will be regarding in the years ahead.

For me, nothing was better than a night with David Lynch. From the heart-felt The Elephant Man, to the surreal Inland Empire, my attention was captured for every minute of it.

There’s hardly a work I would consider a dud. This is usually impossible for a given filmmaker! Heck, even my least favorite Lynch film, Wild At Heart, has some of my favorite scenes within of any Lynch film.

Truly, Lynch pulled off an almost impossible task with his body of work: something akin to levitation if you ask me.

Legacy

While his parting with us isn’t tragic, many people will feel his absence for sure. I have such a debt to him for leading me to TM, and I hope I am just one of many in this area.

An artist with no peer, David Lynch will remain wild in our hearts forever.