Art comes from...

[...]

Jon made a pretty spiffy comment to my last post:

Emptiness. Fullness comes from emptiness, and moves towards emptiness. Be empty about the strict pictures/intentions you have for your art, and Isness will direct what needs to be into the space you create.

What I really like about this is leaving the specific details to work themselves out. I got to class tonight during a discussion on making art, begun by one person's comment that she gets "all bottled up" trying to do some kinds of work; she makes some really lovely loose little sculptures but was a disaster at a couple more functional pieces, today.

And I was again uninspired to make anything. Life had provided plenty of material, but none of it mattered. I'd gotten a parking ticket for no apparent reason while I'd been at work, I registered to vote, had dinner. Before class, the phone rang as I was changing into my favorite ratty jeans and my toe caught an existing hole as I hurried to pull them on, making it much larger. The call was my mother, to call my grandmother; exciting family news. And yes, it was exciting, but not...

In last night's movie, "Adaptation", Charlie Kaufmann is advised, "find the one thing you care about, and write about that." So, I suppose, find the one thing you care about, and let the art be about or around or something to that. Well, in theory, at least.

I'm not sure what I care about. It's awfully easy to let things go on around me and not be touched by them; I nearly went kayaking tonight because the weather is so lovely. Different sort of meditation. (Here I paused writing for easily ten minutes.) That's it - what I'm really interested in is experience.

Not oddly, that's what my art and architecture have been about all along. Including the nice little pieces made tonight.

Exposure, too.

Meredith and Akilesh have shared an amazing dialog begun in Exposure and continued in Exposure - Going Deeper. It was such a lot to try to digest that I found myself responding with quotations and notes in excitement. This is more or less just my response to them, but I as always look forward to seeing how other people will respond.

Meredith made this comment and I understood exactly: "we can chose to be in places and near people that have this resonance for us, that feel good to be around, that have a vibration that harmonizes." It just feels good to be with some people, it's the easiest and most natural thing in the world to be there. Like a favorite well-worn pair of jeans.

They go on to talk about the light/energy/vibration within us, and Akilesh comments "And that energy has no intention to change anyone or anything, yet in its light everything changes, and transformation begins to occur naturally and spontaneously."

This reminds me of quantum physics, of how observation actually changes (or perhaps creates!) the apparent reality that is observed.

I'm also reminded of my first week at my new job, and that's a good way to describe the situation. I remember feeling compelled to be as true and honest to myself as possible - because there was no other possible appropriate response to being in proximity to Peter.

Akilesh, of this energy, that everything we experience as reality is that reflected back to us: "And we may recognize it as our own and make friends with it, and welcome it back home."

Henri Nouwen wrote a book entitled Reaching Out: Three Movements of the Spiritual Life. From loneliness to solitude, from hostility to hospitality, from illusion to prayer. At the St. Anthony Messenger online catalog I found this quote: Nouwen says the journey is "frightful as well as exhilarating because it is the great experience of being alone, alone in the world, alone before God." Something about that description resonates, too.

Another concept addressed: "To be helpful from wakefulness." The most powerful thing seems to be presence; just showing up. That presence carries a force of its own; right action in right time moves with it. Trying to understand the direction and cause anything of one's own tends to produce disharmony for the effort. It feels to me like making a great effort (which is really none at all) to keep one's eyes directly forward and to remain blissfully unaware that all the magnificent things going on around are one's own doing - lest ego get in the way, or pride think it was involved somehow. To say I did anything at all is a misstatement (that's frequently necessary). Not I, not I, it is here, I was somehow involved, but it was co-creative at best: the mystery in Christianity that both will and grace are needed. That's also one of the nifty things about playing guitar; the same thing'll happen. A twelve-string with lots of open chords can become very intensely resonant. Again and again I have beheld the most beautiful thing; it can barely be breathed. Any attempt at words has been an eternity short, and better left unspoken. Yet there it is.

"Don't expect God to meet you in the way you want Him to." The speaker would take them back if he'd known what that word would become. Ironically, he was Pentecostal, where apparently God is supposed to meet us in a very specific way (or such was my experience). But that's what all the above and (it seems) the dialog at Graceful Presence is about. Things will not happen in the way we expect them to, but they will happen of their own accord if we just let them. That's the big secret!

Akilesh also has this gorgeous observation: "When we have identified our hearts deepest longing, and clarified it as best as we can, we open up, clear out and pray; we yearn with everything we've got; we put our heartfelt intention out to the universe and ask that this be manifested. If we are devoted to this longing, we water and feed it, visualize it, meditate on it, paint, sculpt, draw, dance and write it every day and we hold it lovingly in our mind's eye, we give it oodles of attention, and sure as day follows night, this longing will manifest. The universe will line up with our intention and it will show up."

So it is! Even when that longing is for the unnamable and sublime - it happens...

What an odd evening.

I nearly died again today. The air raid sirens went off; after a couple minutes I called the office to see if it was my imagination. A funnel cloud had been spotted and was headed toward Lincoln Park, a neighborhood a mile from where I was at the time. Great time to be in traffic in my car.

(In the afternoon there'd been some, pretty far north of the city; they get clobbered all the time. I'd been on the roof deck before leaving work; the clouds over downtown were incredible; it had that mixture of light and dark that comes with bad weather, a sort of eerie glow, but none of the weird colors. It was so clear how the wind was moving on the water, from up there. Thought I saw a couple waterspouts trying to form on the lake, figured it was my imagination. Guess not. Camera phone would've been cool.)

Once I was off the phone, I was under a mile from my destination, and it seemed wiser to go for closer shelter than to bail on her and go home. The rain, nonexistent when the sirens sounded, got torrential just before I reached my destination - a concrete building, with parking garage. All safe.

It was surreal to be wandering through a shoe store and wondering if death was on its way. My friend was twenty minutes late coming from downtown, I managed not to worry much. Later in our expedition, I was overtired and hungry, and started feeling depressed and wanting to die. Not because I want to die but I'm not all too attached to life. I commented to her that rest and food would solve the problem, so it was funny that death was on my mind. It's odd to experience such emotions, and also be able to stop, just stop, and know - this - [space]. What a weird dichotomy. I'm dead already.

We went back to my friend's house and made crepes with crushed pecans and chocolate chips inside; it'd been a long week for each of us, and we were both silly. (The best way to make crepes, by the way, is to blend the eggs and dry ingredients, then add the milk and water. Much smoother consistency.) Then her husband joined us and we played a game for awhile before I came back home. I absconded with the loose sweater she'd lent me; the house was cold. It's a cozy sweater.

When I arrived, fire trucks were pulling up to the apartment building a couple of houses down. I'm pretty sure that nothing had happened; they left in about ten minutes.

What an odd evening.

Where does art come from?

I'm taking a new ceramics class; the teacher used to be a Jungian analyst and is now a sculptor. She was saying something utterly marvelous and very Zen, about not doing things that are too forced but keeping it loose, allowing your subconscious to be directing the work more. She was telling a story about one of her own pieces, how she'd undertaken some tedious drawing and it'd become all too contrived, and how it helped so much when the thing collapsed and found its soul.

And now it seems to me that there, with Jung and Freud too I guess, (I can't keep them straight) that there is yet another way of describing this, life, how things work inside us, or how they seem to from what we see... the unconscious is just the Unmanifest, the big Ocean, and all this we see, all waves and ripples and what-have-you. It was really exciting, as she was talking, because she said a fair amount before using the word "unconscious" and so I was completely following without getting hung up on a word.

It's difficult for me to do sculpture in a loose way, because craftsmanship is so important to me. Not to say that it can't be done, but I've got to learn to live with the intermediate messiness. I've practiced and practiced and learned to draw in a loose way, very relaxed, but sculpture is another matter entirely; perhaps I'll learn. Or I'll keep on making tumblers and things and drawing on them. Before the job switch, it was easy to dream onto a cup; now that I'm happier with life, I've little need to wish myself anyplace else, so finding a place for art to come from is more difficult.

Monday I made a little house with "rock star" stamped into it, to commemorate a very good trip downtown, doing permit stuff. Perhaps it'll just be lots of little pieces, comments on whatever's going on in my life at that moment; the real happenings, rather than the imaginary destinations.

I've been writing a lot, lately, about connection, about connecting with other people. Perhaps the details will fade from my mind over time and the poems will be fossils to us all; maybe I'll remember the unrecorded details and leave to everyone else the mystery. Does it matter?

rainy evening drive

the stillness that is me
touches
the stillness that is you.
bottom drops out,
silence explodes.
scarcely breathing, here, to hold it.

Well. That describes it perfectly.

A wonderful! bit of quote from Trev's latest entry:

If you are in the poustinia (internal "desert" or solitude) and God knocks on your door and speaks to you, that doesn't sound mystical to me; it sounds quite normal."

At times it's more like sitting down and drinking tea together. My perception, then, is split between the moment, where there's no question, no thought, only acting, being, and it's all as it should be... and a sort of outside perception, knowing that on some level something incredible is going on. And so these ordinary-extraoridinary moments are recorded, sometimes, so I can look back later, and remember.

It's been on my mind, lately, to try to describe why, of all things, I still practice Catholicism. Yes, I go to Mass, and am even the strong alto in choir. (My family is Catholic, I was raised Catholic. It amuses me that some people take on spiritual names at some point; Catholics choose theirs at confirmation.) But then I say things that are so apparently unorthodox. I feel inconsistent.

There's everything to say, but few words for it. I like singing. A lot. It's good for me. A different sort of breathing exercise, but more than that. I like the ritual. A lot. A different sort of meditation, but beyond that. Mass was once described as a framework in which other things can occur - in the original context, funeral Mass and grieving. I like the sense of being part of something greater, something ancient and enduring and universal. A different sort of depth, a different sort of center. And there's a sort of gritty reality to it all.

Catholicism is kind of the odd duck in Christianity for the Eucharist. Conceptually, I prefer it, but haven't found a need to revisit the question in the last months, much less the divinity of Christ, or the Trinity, or... The truth of it matters deeply and not at all. I feel excluded at times for having grown up with transubstantiation and being rather fond of it, like an eccentric great-aunt, and furthermore, feeling that something is real about it. Which is kind of weird-sounding too.

The insubstantial conclusion is just that I like it. Something connects. It helps.

rainy afternoon intimacy, or, zero 7, distractions, simple things, or, a day at work

a couple hours of wonderfully relaxed music
finished with a song that we both love.
the silence at the end, deafening,
perfect,
peace,
depth,
stillness.

after long minutes,
he picks the next album.
so unexpectedly tender, so gorgeous,
not filling the silence but filled with it,
fitting, perfect,
i find myself nearly in tears.
and when some songs later he starts quietly singing along,
a phrase here and there,
i close my eyes and and breathe deep,
holding back tears, filled with emotion, for an unexpected moment so strangely perfect.