Noticing Things

Weather Map of The Heart 12"x12" cold wax on canvas

I have been noticing things, things like how much I want from a moment, just a single innocent moment. When I sit, if I am honest with myself, I see the long slender digits of desire greedily fingering the air. I want this moment to be a certain way. I might want it to make me happy or entertain me, make me feel safe or comfortable or offer me a little drama so that I might escape from the boredom of a grey February morning.

All this wanting and noticing is like what is happening in the kitchen of a fine dining restaurant while you sit out front sipping wine and chatting.  But when I sit quietly in the kitchen of my mind, I see how much I try to cook the moment so as to make its flavour just right for me. I am kneading and pulling on each little fibre of now.

I also notice how I am not content to just work the moment but I lean anxiously into the future looking for the next moment or hour to please me, seeing what I might wring from the day. If we are honest we can notice how much we "want" without pause:  how we want things to be easy or simple or sweet, people to cooperate with and like us, how it would be nice to get some good news or a special treat.  Fill in the blanks. And with all the wanting I notice what it stirs: agitation, busy mind, nervous energy. I notice all these underlying weather patterns of my heart and mind when I am quiet. If I weren't sitting in meditation they would simply form the ground which the day travels over.

All this noticing reminds me to stop, to take a breath and just be. I remember how pleasant it is to just be right here, right now, without wanting.  And I notice how hard this is, how the momentum of habit has hardwired wanting into my brain.  I notice how much energy is preserved, even cultivated in this state of not wanting, how my heart sighs in relief when I am simply with life as it is.  I notice the startling and mysterious sound of rain drops plopping into the pond as I make my way around the shore. I am gobsmacked by the chartruesey greenness of the moss on the roof.

As I did a drawing exercise from my Frederick Franck book the other evening I notice how hard it  is to really see.  As I drew a small fallen leaf from my indoor ficus tree, I notice how my mind jumped ahead to fill in the lines with how it imagined the leaf looked.  I noticed how hard it was to slow down and simply see, to let the hand follow the eye. The mind is such an impatient, bossy creature!

So in between noticing things, I have been making my own cold wax with gamsol and beeswax. It smells divine, sweet like the beeswax (even though the gamsol is a petroleum based product). This seems much more do-able for me than the orange oil solvent which was a natural product, but intensely smelly. Turpentine is a natural product and also intensely smelly.

I have been doing an online course with Eric Maisel which is essentially coaching for artists. I am liking it a lot.  It deals in this lovely straight forward way with how to actually get down to work, how to deal with some of the unhelpful self talk that can surround the creative process and lots of helpful info on working with stress and anxiety and thoughts about marketing.

I have been listening to the World Tapping Summit!  Have you heard of tapping or EFT.  It uses meridian points (as in acupuncture) paired with some statements around things that might be issues for us; health issues, emotional issues.  I am finding it really interesting and it feels like there's something to it.

And thanks to Eric Maisel I have actually been painting everyday, first thing in the morning that's the trick.  I have some coffee, do my qi gong, make my juice and go off to paint for a while. January has flown by and now February is blasting through. I hope your winter days are rich and filled with inner and outer adventure! Where has this new year carried you off to?

Opening Presents & A Dart To The Heart

This little painting is a work in progress, as we all are. And like us, it feels like it is vulnerable and standing on the edge. Like us, it can go in a variety of directions. The moment always holds both danger and possibility. As my Zen teacher says, "we have more options than we think.

But I will pull back from the brink of the metaphorical. This mixed media piece is a continued exploration of a matte textured background in shades of grey combined with a shiny, drippy enso. This enso has a hint of ultramarine blue with some chartreuse and black. The line drawing of the Buddha still needs work, some refining (as do I, which is part of what always makes us a work in progress!). As I say this I am conscious of that Zen idea of holding 2 seemingly contradictory possibilities in our minds at once. We are fine just the way we are AND we can do better. Is that confusing? Only if we want to carve the world into opposites.

There is so much at play in creating a painting that parallels our everyday life. We are always exploring the background, don't you think? Feeling and creating and responding to the texture of life around us, to what life brings to us, to what we encounter. We move from dark to light and back again (like the little yin/yang amoebas). And like this line drawing of the Buddha we are continually inventing ourselves, drawing some aspects of our character with deeper and more definite lines, erasing and lightening the traces of what doesn't work for us, if we are attentive and skillful enough.

And the recycled pattern pieces in this work open a conversation as we might expect words to do. The dart to the heart... I liked that idea for a variety of reasons I don't need to explain, the piercing of the heart, that tender, vulnerable part of us. But the idea of the "dart" is used in Buddhist thought. The first dart is regarded as the event or instance of suffering. The second dart is the mental anguish we create or "add on" to what happens to us. The idea here being that pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. The other pattern pieces that found their way into this work are the little cutting line scissors that the Buddha holds and the words "back facing" which can speak to us in different ways.

So while life and art talk back and forth to each other, sometimes whispering, sometimes shouting, I never start a piece with an intention to "say" something. I become aware of some hinted at meaning as if I was an independent observer. Life imitates art. Who said that? And there is the natural synchronicity of things if we are willing to just look. It is happening all around us, all the time, the conversation between what goes on in our lives and the small things that pop up; our thoughts, our dreams, how the colour of our shoes matches the scarf of someone that we are drawn to, how a line in a poem that we read in the morning, somehow fits perfectly with something that happens to us later in the day.... It is about being open and aware and receptive to life with a capital L. It is after all the season of presents (presence). And as with all presents, they require opening.

Just Be

Today I am thinking about the gentle act of just being, not needing or wanting anything.  Is it possible for us humans to inhabit this state for very long?  It was Friday (Friday the 13th egads!) and we decided to have a fun Friday.  We settled on visiting some galleries and just having an aimless wander.  We identified a few small galleries that we'd not been in before took to the streets.

It felt good to not be task driven, no laundry to be done, no groceries needed, no studio cleaning or painting (not that any of these activities are bad or boring but I find they can create this momentum of "I need to get this done").  Removing these tasks felt like opening up a space, kind of like clearing your desk, quieting the ever present momentum of doing.   Tarthang Tulku in his book "Gesture of Balance", says "When we let everything be just as it is and listen to the silence within our minds  - this becomes our meditation.  This silence is not just absence of sound or freedom from distraction, it is full openness, the presence of the mind."  Maybe that's what we were aiming for without knowing it, some "gesture of balance" against the stage of usual activity.

So a Friday without an agenda  felt like letting go, letting go of expectations, a space clearing, a departure from the usual.  Is it the Puritan work ethic that drives that list making and task seeking behaviour that can seem so tiring and habitual?  It is seldom that I get up in the morning without thinking of all the things I want to and need to do.  Does that make me feel important, accomplished, satisfied?  And why is the list always longer than the day?

It was a freeing experience to just get up and take the day as we found it, to wander and chat with gallery owners, nothing to buy, not necessarily looking for art selling venues, just being open to whatever came up.  A door is open to a narrow stairway in Fan Tan Alley, let's go up.  Chat with the young art seller who has just launched a website.  Talk about the enormous round skylight in this one time gambling den.  A little shop with "Etsy" style goods on the corner; let's wander in and have a look.  Chat with the owner of "The Mercurio Gallery", a beautiful little space full of treasures owned by  a silversmith of 30 years, who just decided to open a gallery when the spaces adjacent to her studio became vacant a year ago.  In "Dales Gallery", we get a tour of the photography exhibit and learn how the photographer has cleaned the garbage up off the streets in the photos (digitally) and made the streets glisten just a little more in the dark, how he has created the perfection that lives in his head to share with us.  We sense he is creating a mood of peace and serenity by aiming for the perfect landscape, the Vespa framed by the yellow and blue walls like some abstract painting.  We have another lovely chat and wander on.

It is a lovely free afternoon, punctuated by a cup of good strong coffee before we start the walk home.  What time is it, it doesn't matter.  It is an experience of "no expectations", of sheer being, of connecting with others with no agenda.  The body and mind relax.  A vacation from the usual way of being.  I don't feel great, one of those days when for reasons that always baffle me I feel vaguely unwell, but that's okay too.  I keep remembering the Suzuki Roshi phrase I found the other day "enjoy your difficulties,"  and so I don't feel bummed out by body's failure to live up to my expectations.

Perhaps tomorrow, though I have things to do and places to go and people to see, I can carry with me that sense of just being, with no expectations, no agenda, that has caused my whole being to relax its grasping after how I think things should be.  Maybe I can let go just a little more and slide into that place of just being. 

Learning To Be Here Now, Over and Over and Over

Today as I sat in meditation I watched my mind wander.  And I wondered to myself what keeps me from being present, right here, right now in this very moment?  And the answer I came up with is my desire, my clinging, my attachment.  What my mind is most often up to is planning, what needs to be done: a list of would do"s, could do"s, should do's.  And if I look a little deeper these things embody what I want to happen.  I want to paint this, I want to send that email, yada, yada, yada.  Each person's mind has it's own habitual pattern.  Your's might be drawn to the past rather than the future like mine.  Meditation and practice really are all about getting to know yourself.

So in the case of my "little miss busy mind" (at least I'm not a busy body), there's nothing wrong with having plans or making plans but we miss so much if our minds are constantly wandering off on little side trips of their own, instead of taking part in what is happening right now.  If I look a little deeper it's as if I don't trust myself.  My planning is like mom nagging the school kid just before he heads out the door, now don't forget your lunch and your homework and remember not to loose your gym shoes and button your coat at recess, (and 3 more yada's).

And of course there's the deeply ingrained habit of not being present, the neural pathways that  cause me to drive down the same old rutted road of inattention.  It takes effort and awareness and diligence to focus on the present moment and sometimes I am just too lazy.  I love the Buddhist choice of words for this laziness, sloth and torpor, one of the 5 hindrances.  Seems so accurate.  There I am hanging in a tree, just slothing about in an old sweater, with my hair darting off in every direction, kind of half awake.

The other reason we tend to go off in our minds, Buddhism points out, is that we sometimes find the present moment boring.  There is so much more drama in the "he said, she said" of our lives than say, just paying attention to a plate while we wash it, seeing every contour and chip of it's lovely plateness.  But because we never look very deeply we dismiss many things as uninteresting.  This is I think related to the piece I wrote yesterday on knowing too much, too soon.  If you think about the poor little plate, we are not familiar with it because we never pay enough attention to it find it interesting.  Mostly we skim the surface of life,  like dragon flies passing over the pond  looking for mosquitoes. 

So what can I do?  Well here I am aware of the issue.  So step number one taken care of, because if I don't even notice that I'm not here now, I couldn't possibly do anything about it.  There are stories of people who meditate for years and seem not to reap the benefits.  The classic story is one of a monk who spends 25 years in a cave and comes out to be jostled by someone in a line up and push back.  

Once I am aware I need to be willing to do something about it, really willing, at a deep level.  And then I need to set my intention to change my behaviour, whatever that is; in this case be more present when I sit and throughout the day, to not be okay and lazy about wandering mind, to not be okay with sitting on the cushion while my mind goes out for a beer and pizza.  And I need to be patient and kind as I would with a small child, to continually redirecting and persevering.