Where Is Your Trust?

8"x10" acrylic on canvas board

“If I was asked to get rid of the Zen aesthetic and just keep one quality necessary to create art, I would say it’s trust. When you learn to trust yourself implicitly, you no longer need to prove something through your art. You simply allow it to come out, to be as it is. This is when creating art becomes effortless. It happens just as you grow your hair. It grows.”  -John Daido Loori from "The Zen of Creativity"


I have come across two pieces of writing on "trust" this morning and I don't believe in coincidence. I need to hear this.  I think our understanding is like some moveable puzzle and we always need certain pieces at certain times, to help us with our understanding of truth, the universe and our place in it. My puzzle needed the "trust" piece right now.  Lots of lovely pieces have been moving into place but there was a gaping whole where trust should be.


I think we need trust everywhere in our lives, even Loori"s reference is specifically to art. Trust, when we wear it well, can be like a shimmering veil that, flows over everything, making  us graceful, patient and wise.

studio bits (charcoal & newsprint on card)

Marcus over at Wake Up & Laugh wrote a lovely post about "entrusting" which was the second finger pointing toward "trust". He tells a story of a family's trip to Disneyland in which the little girl becomes so excited that she runs toward something and gets lost. On finding her the father says, "if you get lost again, remain calm and wait where you are. I will find you." Later she needs to call on these wise words and the father finds her calmly sitting in one place waiting for him.  This is his example of "entrusting".  The child trusted her father to find her.


We might use this story for a metaphor for how to conduct our own lives, keep calm and if you feel lost, wait where you are until you have an experience of being found. That experience may be an event or simply some internal sense of how to proceed, an inkling, a hunch, but it won't come from your thinking mind.


But for me the story was instructive about how to use trust in our lives.  We don't throw out our thinking mind and just trust blindly or wildly, that can get us in a lot of trouble. There are situations that do not deserve our trust.  Often we have little "niggles" about who or what not to trust and sometimes we ignore them. Our desire can easily get in the way of clear seeing. Then we learn by hindsight. But as long as we learn we train ourselves in how to use trust next time.

 more studio bits (6"x6" acrylic & charcoal on canvas paper)

It comes back to the Zen idea of "we do our part."  The child used the rational part of her mind, remembering to stay where she was.  As a bonus she stayed calm!  But that wasn't hugely necessary. She just needed to stay put to be found. Weeping would have been fine, she'd still have been found.  But she did save herself a little suffering by remaining calm. Perhaps her calmness mirrored the depth of her trust?  Or perhaps pointed toward her temperament? But she knew where to use "trust".  If she hadn't believed she'd be found by staying put she might have done other things.  And so it is for us.  The hard part often comes in knowing when and what action to take and when to "trust".  I think we do the best we can and learn from that. After all what is life if not our own little experiment in living a human life?


Trust. I need to remind myself of this valuable quality over and over. How do you use trust in your life?