Alignment August 21, 2009

Summer seems to be quickly coming to a close, the light is changing, school is starting and everything seems to gain more of a structure as that happens.  This summer has been unusual and I have not been able to paint like usual.  Our house is on the market, and so we are constantly facing the challenges of living in a house that needs to keep that ‘non-lived in’ look, so I have had to shrink my studio space needs down to a fraction of what it was.  That means that instead of the usual 7-10 paintings going at once, I have only a few smaller ones that can fit; and instead of my usual everyday fervor, I am compelled to go down and work on them only when I have enough time and energy to pull them all out and put them all back when I am done.  This doesn’t work well for an artist, as most of us like to spread everything out and have it waiting for us in that same way when we return.  It keeps the flow going and there’s room to move about and think and see.

But that is the way of it right now–I spent my typical time of bucking it, or feeling like I should be doing more, or that things should be different than they are.  But now I realize that my life is simply providing me the opportunity to put into practice what I have been studying– loving things the way they are.  I stumbled upon an amazing body of work by a lady named Byron Katie (and here, she would affectionately say, ‘Is it true?’ because she does not see anything in the world as so finite that you can put a lable on it–even if it is her own name).  The premise:  the only suffering is the suffering that results from thinking things should be other than what they are.  Reality is god, meaning that it is all powerful–it is what IS.  And by accepting that and working within that, you eliminate your own suffering as well as make way for the new that is waiting to come into being.  Fighting it keeps you stuck.

And an interesting thing happened as a result of deciding that I was not going to feel like I should be able to paint more right now–I began doing something containable, something easily picked up and put away, and something that I’ve worked on sporadically for over ten years–I began writing again on a book that I originally got the idea for when I saw a play with my daughter when she was in elementary school.  First, it began as a children’s book and that led me to painting.  With the idea for that book, I began seeing the illustrations and bought paints and trepidaciously picked up the brush and began painting.  Over the years, I got so involved with the painting that it took on a life of its own, and that is where all of my creative energy has been channeled.  But now the book, now in a different young adult version, has been calling to me again and all of my creative energies have been pouring into that.  Ten plus years of ideas are gushing out onto the page and it feels good.  It may take another ten to complete it, who knows?  But if so, that is also the way of it.

The painting above is called, “Alignment” and was born out of the idea that our lives are most purposefully and powerfully lived when we align ourselves with what is going ‘right’ instead of ‘wrong’, with ‘what is’ instead of what we think ’should be’.  Now I can look back and see that, although sometimes it seems that things are not getting done like I think they should, they actually are doing exactly what they are supposed to.  I began writing over ten years ago, and that made me want to paint, which then led to my wonderful experience with all my paintings and now an extremely fulfilling and budding career as an artist.  And now, circumstances make it difficult to paint, which has led me back to writing.  And if there is suffering in this, it is only and exclusively when I say that it should be any other way.

on Being June 18, 2009

on Being 60 x 48 Acrylic on Canvas

 

 

Nothing affects me like nature.  Nothing. 

I never knew about my connection with the earth until about fifteen years ago when, badly needing sanity and stability, I stumbled upon it, and I haven’t let go of it since.  There is a rhythm, a sort of current that pulls you in the direction you always intended, but I had never heard it so clearly until then.  It was like hearing my heartbeat for the first time, and now my life is structured around that pulse.  That is where art comes in.  

 From the first time I ever heard Joseph Campbell lecture on the nature of symbols and their function in our dreams, language, art and myriad other areas of life, I was hooked.  It was only when I came to the understanding that the opposites that we experience in this life ( i.e. light and dark, good and evil, life and death) are merely representations of different aspects of a ‘whole’  existing somewhere, that I began to gain a sort of balance and comfort with nature and my own skin that had been missing since early childhood. 

The resulting realization in my adulthood has been that well-being underlies all existence.  However, awareness of that well-being is often drown out by the noise of life, and in some cases we forget what it looks and sounds like altogether.  When I am painting, I can examine and explore this reality without the confines of culture and its unrelenting dogma, and it opens those places in me that are otherwise inclined to closure and atrophy.  Art is my doorway into the essential, yet unknown aspect of existence and my paintings are many times not what I intended, but a complete and pleasant surprise to me when I step back and realize that it is ’as it should be’,  and in much the same way I view life…

Contemplating Happiness February 5, 2009

Contemplating Happiness

Happiness is….

I’m guessing that if you got 10 people to finish the sentence above, you would likely get as many different ideas.  The concept of  happiness has been one of continual evolution in my life.    It has only been recently that I have realized my conflicted feelings on this subject, no doubt resulting from harboring remnants of all the aforementioned evolutions of the word, but it is amazing to see the regularity at which the subject has been rising up under my feet.  But I think for any of this to make sense, I have to map out the crooked road by which I have come to my current views on the subject.

My first memories of actually contemplating happiness were as a child when my father was putting me to bed and would implore me to ‘always be happy’.  I can only assume this statement was in response to the overflowing and naturally occuring happiness that exists in children and was being exhibited by me.  Children are irresistable to us grown-ups, they draw us in like magnets; the most grumpy adult will generally melt at the sight of a laughing baby, and I believe this is a large element of the attraction–joy is our natural state of being and children, for the most part, still remember that and do not resist it, grasp at it, nor feel some stifling sense of guilt over it.  They simply are.  

I remember as a child being keenly aware of the unhappiness of adults.  I didn’t understand this unhappiness, and basically did not question it’s validity, but I did question my right to be happy when they were not.  My naturally flowing happiness became painful to me as I saw myself in contrast to others around me, and that is the moment I began to grow up and leave joyous childhood behind.

When I was in my late twenties I was going through a divorce and someone actually said to me, “You know, God did not promise us happiness.  Suffering is a sacrifice we make to him; if you let happiness direct your life, it will lead you down the wrong pathway.”  Luckily for me, my mental instability was making it very clear that regardless of what God felt about happiness, I could not live without it and would likely end up in the hospital if I didn’t pursue some measure of it.

Since that time, I can pretty much look at all the wonderful things in my life and find a common element–they all originated from my desire to be happy.  I know that whether religious or just simply reflective, most of us are wary of basing anything on happiness.  The religious thought is that our heart cannot be trusted, therefore to be directed by your happiness is pretty much a risky business, however, I find it ironic that our ability to create suffering for ourselves seems to never be viewed with the same suspicion and caution.  The generally spiritual approach is wary of happiness because it is illusive, always just out of reach and makes empty promises of fulfillment with the attainment or achievement of things that can keep you chasing after them your entire life without any self-realization.  But I’m just coming to realize that at the heart of both of these views is a very grown-up misunderstanding of happiness.

Why, as adults, do we associate happiness with things or circumstances instead of a state of being?  The question never entered my line of sight until this last year when I began attempting to choose my thoughts, thereby choosing my moods.  Good feeling thoughts = good feeling mood.  Seems simple enough.  However, I was so convinced that my mood was determined by my circumstances that it took me months to even grasp the concept that the reason it seems that way is that our moods are determined by our thoughts, which 99% of the time are determined by our circumstances.  It’s such a consistent formula, that at some point most of us feel tossed here and there by the circumstances of life, feeling powerless to control much of it, and doomed to feel certain ways about it.

Children are naturally joyous, regardless of the things they have or the circumstances that surround them.  In time, most of our children are taught by example to begin to believe that our circumstances determine our level of happiness, and we can’t control most circumstances.  I have been thinking this way for so long, I have actually found that on certain subjects I actually have an aversion to thinking thoughts that make me feel good about it.  I’m much more comfortable feeling miserable or hopeless or powerless about it, even though I may wish with everything in me to change it.  That’s what I was thinking when I was painting “Contemplating Happiness”–happiness is a choice, as cliche’ as that sounds, and when I am insisting on feeling rotten about something, I really can choose something else.  The joy we were born with is still available at all times, but most of us have forgotten that.  And like all things we’ve forgotten how to do, it just takes practice to become so good at it that it feels natural.

Bonne Nuit, Terre Mere January 3, 2009

Good Night, Mother Earth

“Nature, nature, I am your bride!  Take me.”     from the movie Orlando

These were the words uttered in desperation by the main character Orlando (played by Tilda Swinton) in the movie of the same name as she flung herself facedown onto the ground.  The spirit of the age had finally taken her and broken her, as she roughly put it, by taking away all of her earthly posessions; because she had not married, bore a son nor had a brother to claim it, she was a non-entity and could not own property.   I try to watch this movie about once a year, for several reasons; based on the writing of Virginia Wolfe, the main character lives through many lifetimes, hundreds of years, and experiences herself as both male and female at different points, learning firsthand the vantage point of both.  She comes to the ultimate conclusion that she is the soul, not the personality or gender that is represented by the body nor dictated by the culture.  However, the age in which she was a woman only saw her as her gender and it was at this time of cruel disregard and oppression that she flung herself to the place from which she came.  There is more to the movie, although I won’t be a spoiler–but I love that moment of complete longing to be taken back to that from which you come, where the aspects we experience as most dominant in our world–gender, religion, nationality, political persuasion, profession–are the very aspects which fall away, leaving only what we began with, what is real.

We recently went into the mountains of east Tennessee to one of our favorite places with some of our best friends.  I was spent, it was just after Christmas, and I was feeling the emptiness and disconnectedness that always comes when I have not spent enough time out of doors, surrounded by beauty and open spaces.  Over a period of 24 hours, with four adults and 5 children, we hiked many miles.  We climbed trees, frolicked and skipped, sweated, touched rocks with their mossy coats, and soaked up all we could.  I felt the ability to breathe deeply returning, and my awareness of my being, along with my ultimate perspective, was coming back as well;  I felt as though I live in this unnatural habitat of concrete, noise and schedules, and had suddenly been returned to my natural habitat; the one in which I belonged and would flourish; the one from which questions of the meaning of life and my place in it do not present themselves–I simply AM.  Nature had done it again for me, as a mother nurses a sick child, soothing her, singing to her, holding her, my Terre Mere had found me and made me whole again.  As we left, I was filled with gratitude that such an available and reliable resource is waiting for me at all times.

Vibrations November 13, 2008

The Hado of the Flower

I have been reading so much lately about vibration.  My concept of vibration in the past has mostly been limited to things that I could witness with the naked eye or with my sense of touch: my washing machine out of kilter, coming to life and creeping across the floor, my phone when it is set on ‘vibrate’ and skitters across the countertop when it rings, the feel of the enormously loud bass line from a stereo in the car next to me at a light; however lately, my experience has been inundated with the subject of vibration in a way that I have never thought of it before. 

Not so long ago, I was introduced to the idea that everything is vibration–you, me, a rock, a soundwave, everything seen or unseen.  At first, it sounded a bit out there, but I soon discovered that it is a fact completely shored up in scientific fact.  Even our thoughts are vibrations, which I touched on in my last post.  The reason we can change our lives simply by thinking differently is that, in our attraction-based universe, thoughts and things of similar or matching vibration are attracted to one another.

Which I imagine is why, once I was introduced to the idea and began pondering it, it seemed that every book I picked up or conversation I had seemed to deal with that very subject.  Like attracts like, and I have been experiencing it firsthand with almost spooky regularity.  So I have been trying to perceive the world around me differently, or more accurately.  I am so conditioned to perceive the world with my senses only, and I tend to be somewhat of a stubborn ‘realist’ at times, but I have been reminded that we override our senses regularly, we just don’t notice it because once our brain knows that what we are perceiving is not as it actually is, we perceive what we know, not what we actually see. 

For instance, mankind used to believe that the sun died everynight on one side of the horizon and was reborn every morning on the other side because that is what we all actually see, but we know that the earth spins, causing the sun to appear as if it moves across the sky, disappears and reappears daily.  We override our senses and are informed by what we know instead.

And so I begin:  I want to begin to see my world as it actually is, not just what I see.  I want to see everything as a vibration; the very thought that everything is vibration is a vibration!  It really does change the psychology and opens up enormous new horizons of thought and expression to explore.  Hence, the new vein of artwork I have been inspired to experiment with–I find that it helps me to begin to think of everything as a vibration if I try to represent the vibration of that thing with something else.  As in the painting above, you have the flower and then my musings of the vibration of the flower in an alternate design.  I think the idea was inspired by the research of Masaru Emoto who, through highspeed photography has captured the effect of different thoughts and feelings upon water molecules at the point of freezing.    

The ‘Hado’ I refer to in the title is a Japanese word for the subtle energy that exists in all things.  Here are a couple quotes from his book “The Secret Life of Water”:

All that exists in the universe vibrates at a unique frequency.  So if you emit a hado of happiness, then you can be sure that the universe will respond with happiness.

When we return to living as one with the universe, we will rediscover the simplicity and spontaneity we were intended for and that was intended for us.

I, for one, feel that vibration is one worth staying with for awhile.

If you are interested in seeing Mr. Emoto’s amazing and ground-breaking work, here is a link:

http://www.life-enthusiast.com/twilight/research_emoto.htm

Three Reflections October 2, 2008

Three Reflections

 

The older I get, the more I realize that there are different ways that I look at things, sometimes incongruent with the others, and sometimes going on simultaneously, giving life a rather schizophrenic feel.  Of course, I have developed a particular favortism for some of these perspectives and have been attempting to see the world through the eyes of the more positive perspectives as the evidence is piling up that these vantage points direct me toward the things I truly want. 

So I guess it stands to reason that as these favorable qualities become apparent in my more positive outlooks, the disadvantageous qualities of my more negative views also come to the fore and make it clear that when I am seeing the world through those eyes, nothing in my landscape is holding the things that I want.  But it has taken me years to realize this, because what I never knew was that there are two parts to every subject–the subject itself, and the lack of it; and for many years I would look out from my negative point of view and think that I was seeing all of the things I dreamed of (albeit usually far off and frustratingly elusive), but what I was actually seeing was the lack of them.  The amazing thing is that once I realized this, I really expected my whole psyche to transform and for my positive vantage points to take over and drive the vehicle, so to speak; but alas, I am the one still calling the shots and unfortunately, I am a creature of habit, and when it comes to my thinking, I have some really bad habits. 

Not too long ago I came across the line of thought that we all create our own reality–literally, everything that comes into and out of our lives is either invited or let go of by us by our thoughts.  My initial response to this theory was incredulity; afterall, if this were true, wouldn’t we all have exactly what we want, all of the time?  But considering it further and attempting to put some of the philosophy into practice, I am realizing my huge miscalculation–I was assuming that the average person, like me, had a commanding relationship with their thoughts and could, with a mere decision, turn the ship around and never look back.  I don’t know what it says about me that finding the level of difficulty in directing your own thoughts to be monumental makes me put more stake in the theory itself (perhaps a habitual belief that anything worth it must be hard?) but it certainly explains why everyone is not running around with everything they ever wanted–as a man thinketh, so is he…

So upon reflection, my initial thought that if this were true then ‘why isn’t everyone running around with everything they could ever want within their grasp’ has now transformed after my firsthand experience with trying to direct my own thoughts only toward those things that I deem positive and good and a fulfillment of my dreams.  And I intend to put this to the test–if for no other reason than that I want to be thinking my thoughts, not having them think me; the tyranny of the urgent dictating your thought life leads to a very frantic and unfulfilling life experience and that’s not what I choose…see?  I’m already beginning and on my way, and all because of a little reflection on my part…I want to reach for the better thought, not the most familiar or handy or acceptable.  I think the painting above is how I would like to see my operation–me, myself, and I, all in the same boat, going the same direction, trusting life and trusting the current beneath us…in a word, peace.

The way of water September 11, 2008

The Lily Pond

 

I have discovered that you can group people into one of two categories–those that literally ‘change’ when they are around water, and those that are unaffected by it.  I am in the first of those categories and I plan on living near some body of water someday because I am a water person; to see it, to hear it, to be near it changes my psyche and stirs something in me–I feel relaxed, I feel peaceful and I feel that everything will, after all, be all right.

When I was going through the healing process of my aforementioned collapse in my 28th year, water unexpectedly played a large part.  Up to that point, I did not know that I possessed this link to water as I had never come into contact with my need for it.  Ask most any person who studies the meaning of dreams and they will tell you that water is a very common symbol of the unconscious.  Many of our symbols are personal and unique to our experience in life, but water seems to be an archetype for the human race.  During this period of my life in which I was putting myself back together, water played a prominant role in my dreams almost every night for a couple of years.  When I think back to that period of healing, I envision myself immersed in a large body of water, within sight of land but far from it, treading water to stay afloat and growing strong legs that would one day take me back upon solid ground where I could begin a new life. 

Being near the ocean always reminds me of the comforting truth that the well-being of the world far outweighs whatever seems wrong with it at the moment.  And whatever seems wrong with me and so all-important at the time is clearly temporal and unknown to this eternal force that goes on churning and moving day in and day out.

When we were in Hawaii this last June we visited a beautiful Hindu temple on the island of Kauai.  The monks there had built their own garden of Eden, blending their cultivation in with Hawaii’s natural beauty.  The Lotus being a significant Hindu symbol, they had attempted to build a lotus pond.  The pond was fed by a natural running stream in which tilapia swam, and the lotus being a favorite food of the tilapia, no matter how hard they worked on building a robust lotus pond, the fish devoured it.  One day one of them had a revelation–if the fish were not hungry, they would not eat the lotus.  The monks commenced to meet every hunger need the fish had by other means and after some time, the lotus pond was beginning to blossom and thrive.

The painting above was first inspired by that beautiful and peaceful lotus pond and it is a reminder to me that the peace and beauty we experience in our lives sometimes must be found in ways that take some unconventional thinking.  Sometimes when things seem impossible, it’s just that I’m looking at it from one angle and can’t see it any other way.  Just because the tilapia are eating the lotus doesn’t mean that lotus is all the tilapia eat…

Predacious Duality September 7, 2008

Predacious Duality

Earilier in the summer, there was a juried art contest that I was wanting to enter, and now I can’t even remember the subject matter, but this is the painting that flashed into my imagination.  I didn’t get it done in time for the contest, but the impetus for the contest was all I needed to begin looking at a subject that I think I’ve been chewing on for sometime.

I want to begin exploring the theme of duality and all of the implications it holds for us–our experience of living in a world of opposites, our penchant for making our worldviews lean more toward a philosophy of opposition instead of a philosophy of unity, the effect that those philosophies have on our beings to name just a few.

A philosophy of duality and opposition was very prevelant in the early part of my life.  Until I was about 28 years old, I saw the world in very black and white terms.  The themes of good and evil, sin and righteousness, right and wrong tended to be the filter through which I gathered information from my world, and that being my filter, that is exactly what I saw.  What eventually became apparent though, is that I am not wired for such a worldview.  Although I’m sure I did not start my life thinking in these terms, somewhere I adopted them and around the age of 28 it began to literally tear me apart.

The symbology of the figure in the painting, standing on point, balancing on rocks that are stacked in the least stable arrangement possible is how I remember myself around that age.  It is clear when you look at the painting what is coming; if not now, very soon there will be a collapse.  The apple in one hand and the serpent wrapped gingerly around the figure signify the contructs of a psyche in opposition, seeing only the things from the natural world that mirror this mindset–the stark contrast of night and day supports the belief that this is all there is to the world, thus making the world she is standing on extremely small.  The river below her seems to be a dividing point, yet it is the one saving grace of the scenario.  If she is fortunate enough to realize upon her collapse that this river lies below her, she can fall in there with the possibility of emerging with a new worldview.

Learning Mahalo August 24, 2008

Learning Mahalo

 

So I finally got my three paintings done that inspired my last post about wanting to turn back.  I finished them by sticking to the very simple idea of just continuing on until the paintings tell me they are done.  No matter how many times I fear that point will never come, it always does; sometimes much later than I want, but it does always come.

The painting above is one of the three.  It is called ‘Learning Mahalo’ and is an expression of the shift in my mindset as of the past few months.  I took my eldest child Jordon to college this past week and the effect of of this mental shift was made completely apparent to me throughout this experience.

‘Mahalo’ is the Hawaiian word for ‘thank you’ and gratitude is a concept that I have been focusing on in one way or another over the last year.  However, truly learning ‘Mahalo’ was something that did not occur until we took a trip to Hawaii this past June and spent a month surrounded by nothing but beauty, nature, water, sunshine and laughter.  A portion of the trip was spent visiting my uncle and his family who live on the island of Kauai and we had some life-altering adventures there with them.  My uncle’s partner became our personal gratitude guru and displayed for us, in the flesh, what one looks like when they live, eat and breathe gratitude: in one word, it looks like joy.

Upon returning to our regular lives, we each took away from those lessons our own impressions, and I have found that mine were deeply imbedded in my psyche and this concentrated beam of attention that I have placed upon gratitude has done nothing less than change the trajectory of my life and my perception of everything that enters it.

Now fast-forwarding to this past week when I left my baby and sent him from the nest alone into the big world of Chicago.  It was excruciating, yet exhilerating…even in my moments of sobbing, the biggest portion of my emotion was attributed to this deep sense of gratitude that this wonderful creature had been given to me to care for for the last 18 years and now he had an amazing, exciting future ahead of him.  What would have seemed like an ‘ending’ to me only 6 months before now felt like a beautiful, exciting beginning and I was basking in the amazing emotion of being in the current of this great forward motion of life.

And as one positive thought attracts the next, I am so grateful that my new ‘Mahalo’ mindset made available to me all the positive perspective that it deserves!

August 6, 2008

Droopy Flowers on Blue 30x30 Acrylic