“This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life”, a slim book whose title is almost as long as the text, can be read in twenty minutes or so, but the import lingers…and moves me to tell you about its message: Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on in front of me. Instead of paying attention to what’s going on inside of me…’Learning how to think’ really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think…to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience…The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide..what to worship. (Bold is his.)

He goes on to describe many of the things we worship as a culture today:

money,
the power of being on top,
beauty that never ages,
fame,
“the freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.” (p.117)

Wallace points out how each of these is fueled by fear, contempt, conflict and craving, eventually leading each of us to feel inadequate, incapable, less than, ETCETERA.

Living unconsciously, living on our default settings, we forget to actually live.

WOW.

Take a breath, think about what you’ve just read. Really, I mean it.

And then imagine your own life lived more fully.

Take another breath.

And then – if you choose – read about my painting process for the second round of DEEP which I was privileged to experience between February and April. I find connections between Wallace’s message and my own lived experience.

For this session of DEEP I decide to go simply and playfully. I find my rolled up brown “packaging” paper, tape two big pieces up on the wall and then try to imagine how this flimsy surface is going to support one painting that takes six weeks to finish. I may have to shift to canvas midstream but I decide to trust the process and give myself permission along the way to do whatever is required to keep  one painting evolving.

Serendipity arrives in the form of a CD called Sura by Chloe Goodchild, a teacher of mine. She has the organization in the UK called the Naked Voice. I was doing grunt work of some sort while listening and suddenly realized I was singing along to a song of hers that I know in my bones but whose words suddenly had new relevance.  I paraphrase the lyrics here. A song called: Silent Laughter. The silent laughter flows like a breeze through an open window, saying BE DEEPER STILL, be deeper still, stand at zero, stand at zero.

So this painting  stands at zero for me. I begin with dots and suddenly know I have to finger paint. The energy of our painting ancestors 30,000 years ago chronicled in the film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, that energy  courses through me. Without thinking about it my left hand keeps going into the three dark colors I’ve laid out, black, blue, purple, and my right hand goes into the white, cream, peach…I don’t know why the dark and the light so frequently intertwine in my imagery but here it is again. Then I have to add a bit of color in between – red and green.

I love this muddy muddle – I don’t know why. What I do know is that I have been in the grip of true expression and that is the water I swim in!

It may be the most potent painting of my life and I’m not sure why I say that. Something about possibilities and freedom.  I am aware that this image is possible because of my skills and development as an artist for the last twenty years and I am aware that I may never have so completely abandoned myself to a painting’s lead. For instance those red ribbons need to remain. I even make them more brilliant and defined.  When the painting is done, I still don’t know why they seem so important. I see them giving boundaries to the mystery and maybe that’s IT. All I need to know. Life is Mystery after all.

My desire to reveal humanity’s commonality often moves me to paint an “unreal” skin color, or in this case to make each limb illustrative of a different two-legged race. You can see the difference in the hands for instance.

 And I love the portal into the landscape of my indigenous soul. Even the white horse of Uffington finds its way there. I can imagine the old Roman road linking my modern biological self to my ancestors as it spills out, through, and down between my legs as another red, zigzagging ribbon. WOW…birth’s blood.

The painting got harder as I got close to finishing. I didn’t want to mess it up. I am surprised by the androgyny. I keep being surprised by all of it. I keep being startled by how much I love this image, even now. For reasons beyond my understanding, I feel as if I have arrived as a painter, that nothing will ever be the same, that I have found and expressed a deep, daring and truthful part of myself that will never be hidden again. And that is JUST THIS, just the way it is.

I think the mid section might be a mandala but as I lounge on my bed for a break I gaze at the painting ( my art studio is also my bedroom ) and suddenly see a box with an open lid where the vagina would be. I imagine a trap door releasing butterflies, angels or something.

I get off my bed and toddle over to the picture and begin painting more on the legs. I am not sure if they will remain loose or get detailed. I’m surprised by how stiff acrylic is – difficult to use after tempera but I love it – the freedom of adding layers, which totally obscure what’s beneath, delights me. And that delight arrives after years and years of adoring watercolor for precisely the opposite reason…I love its transparency and rarely use them opaquely.

I begin the head today – ask myself how my own head is feeling as our teacher, Connie,  had instructed.  I’m reaching for heaven but not sure I can stretch that far! I know I need both brain hemispheres to be alive, active, whole and well. I know the right hemisphere is a garden and the left is the cosmos. Geometric, sacred shapes I use a lot – cross, circle, triangle, spiral and square appear. Both hemispheres are fertile, changing, metamorphosing. They meet in the center. The face is looking off to the right. I don’t know why.

The next day, I begin by painting  but oh my god, I am filled with too much anxiety over needing to prepare for the art tour and to move and with worry about my car which collided with a deer last week. My belly is disquieted/rumbling/uneasy. I know it’s nerves. I am not sick.  I quit painting in order to pack and return to the image in the evening. The painting process takes me. I see a fist for the right hand and paint it in but know it probably won’t stay. The angle of the head has been telling me I need to have a hand that is holding something: a ball? a crystal gazing globe? Now I think it may be the moon because the face seems to glow with moonlight, not sun.

Instead of a box where the vagina would be, I suddenly know I have to paint the archway that mesmerized me in an English folly – the vagina becomes a portal. A path from my ancestral landscape has to fall out of that portal and lead down to the planet where my feet currently stand. As I write this sitting in front of the image, I see how the mystery of the universe can be embedded between the red stripes above the portal. Those red ribbons are so potent for me and I don’t know why but I know I must honor them and keep them in the painting.  Those red ribbons contain the mystery.

And I’m struck as I write this for you now how painting this way engages my entire being. There is no right, no wrong, no technique, no mistake nor striving to reach a goal, just painting in response to what the painting shows me, wants from me, ignites in me. I don’t question, I just engage. And isn’t that a grand analogy for living fully?

A year ago right now, two people dear to me died. Those losses staggered me.  Then as summer unfolded it became clear that new money wasn’t flowing as quickly as I thought it would, my landlady didn’t want to put up with diminished payments, and when September arrived, I fell in the SeaTac airport on the way back from a myth symposium in CA and ruined my knee. It took weeks and weeks to heal. I limped around at my new part time job working at an art gallery, got laid off pretty quickly because of faltering sales, then was hired back on around Christmas time. The need to downsize and move became imperative, a deer ran into my car, totaling it, just when I needed it most for moving and carrying my art to the destination for a studio tour. Borrowing cars from friends and family for an entire month was nerve wracking, especially when my left foot was in agony. I broke my toe late one dark and rainy night by jamming it into a book filled box lying in a spot where it wouldn’t normally have been. The rains came and they came and they came adding to the general malaise of my disoriented state. For three weeks, I had no telephone, Ethernet or cable and I can tell you I felt realllllly sorry for myself.

But I don’t want you to. A brief “oh wow,” is all I need because despite the travail, I am lucky beyond measure. I have my wits still and good health for which I am grateful.  I’m surrounded by supportive friends and family and a sense of connection with the invisible mystery that carries my life forward.

AND

During that crazy time in Oct/Nov 2012, I continued to paint, inspired by the course called DEEP with Connie Hozvicka. Read my October post if you want to be reminded of that class. And as my own life was falling in shards around me, so was Connie’s and also a number of the other students. So in the fifth week of a six weeks course, we stopped. It was so perfect. I couldn’t have continued with the last assignments and the one I did finish may be the most important image of my painting career.

I want to share a little of that with you. Our last assignment was titled “ Just This.” I wasn’t even sure what it meant but I liked it. It chimed deeply within me. Just this. Just this. Now that, now this, and then this again. Oh yeah, JUST THIS. I am all of this…whatever this is. Connie’s directions were to use a large vertical sheet of paper and begin painting our feet. How are they right now? Move up to the head with the same question, then fill in the middle. Curious yes? But I loved it.

Here’s how I began.  I knew I’d start by “finger” painting but because I wanted to use acrylic, not tempera, I pulled on latex gloves, got my palette knife and a big sponge and plunged in. I knew I had to start with black – my head thought I was going to lay down black for the feet area, white for the head and red for the middle. That’s not what happened. Black was needed for both feet and head and the center demanded both red and white and yellow – I was making big sweeping motions for the center and suddenly realized I was drawing the infinity symbol, which also reminded me of butterfly wings.

What you see on the bottom is an expression of what I felt when I asked my feet to reveal their status to me. Shaking and quaking with no firm foundation.  I used the palette knife to carve zigs and zags and before I could say Jack Rabbit I could see fish shapes taking form and the suggestion of other critters. I began to darken in around them to reveal them a little bit more. Then I am reminded of the earthquakes which were happening just north of where I live. They seemed relevant and I had to paint the planet splitting in  two. A crack between worlds is opening up beneath me, my feet spanning the two sides.

 I am the bridge between everything.

Aren’t we all?

And to choose JOY as the theme – brilliant too.

Joy is a topic with which I am deeply familiar because it is closely linked to ecstasy, a topic I ponder frequently AND experience often because of the spiritual practice I teach: Ecstatic Wisdom Postures. See my other website.

Even so, Connie’s question of what makes joy challenging took me on a long meandering journey in my journal this morning. Joy, true joy, so different from happiness, is probably one of the most uncommon and uncomfortable sensations in our time and nation. True joy is to know the state of ecstasy, that divine connection with spirit, with that which is larger than ourselves and which our small rational minds and caged bodies can’t contain. Jungian psychologist, Robert Johnson, in his 1987 book, Ecstasy – Understanding the Psychology of Joy speaks to this eloquently:

 I am sorry to say that we rarely stand outside ourselves these days. The world is too much with us. We are constantly working, thinking, planning, doing – what to eat, where to go, how to support our families, who to vote for. All the responsibility and power we burden ourselves with! We can’t bear it for very long without breaking down in some way. We need some relief from all that strength; to be for a moment in that timeless, spaceless, primal place which has no responsibility, which isn’t going anywhere. We need to stand outside ourselves and experience the flow of life…However, we cannot say what joy is. We must go the further step and discover its true nature for ourselves. When we can make peace with the Dionysian element we will begin to see the glow of ecstasy that enlivens every living thing. And, in the fiery glow of ecstasy, joy can be born within us. page 13/14 and 94.

So our challenge this first week is to paint from a place of experiencing joy and to do that accompanied by music. Joyful music, that is. Music that makes us want to dance and twirl and feel good about our lives, our world and ourselves.

I’m one who rarely listens to music – partly because music sings me internally. But I wanted to honor Connie’s instructions and see what would happen. I canvassed my CD collection and decided to start the painting with Abdoul Doumbia – a drummer extraordinaire from Mali. I slashed and splashed with a palette knife to the wild rhythms pouring over me. I was too immersed in the process to take a photo at the end of this stage but of course now I wish I had. Before the thick and textured paint dried, I wiped smearingly clean a rough seated rounded shape in the center. I knew I wanted to express visually how I feel when I’m experiencing bliss,which for me means a sensation of merging with everything. That is the deepest love and comfort I know. That sensation requires something womb-like, something that reflects the still-point of joy.

Musically, I chose Enya – one of her early CD’s that has accompanied me for more than a decade. Paint the Sky with Stars. The figure emerged quite easily and I fell in love early on.

As I gazed at the painting over the course of the remaining hours of my day, I saw things I wanted to tweak. I woke this morning ready to begin my day with those last details and chose The Best of Adiemus – Karl Jenkins the Journey to guide my being.

Here she is in her naked beauty. Blissed Out Joy.

I ended the last post with a “come-on.” Stay tuned for that list of modern assumptions that may be our undoing: Here are they are:

the world is inert
resources are for us to take
we humans are self-sufficient and stand alone
we humans are separate from nature
human health has no connection to a healthy environment
our brain lives only in our head
rationality is the only way of being that matters
our belly has no intelligence
ancestral myths are irrelevant, meaningless and false
community celebrations are trivial, unnecessary
we are in control and can invent a solution for every mess
reverence, humility and gratitude are not prized
dominating and winning are everything. . .

. . .these assumptions have now led to a perilous situation in which our life support system – the planet – has been brought to her proverbial knees.

But these assumptions are simply that. My son says, “You know what they say about assumptions, don’t you, Mom?  They make asses out of you and me.” So rather than be an ass, we can make fewer assumptions. But assumptions, like stereotypes, are sometimes useful, so we might still need a few. What might they be like?

If rationality is not the only way to be smart, what is? Perhaps our notions of the brain need changing. Imagine a brain in which both hemispheres rely on each other, acknowledge each other’s validity. That integrated brain would be very potent. Long before Ecstatic Wisdom Postures came into my life, I was following Jean Houston’s work, reading her book Mind Games to be exact and doing the exercises with a small group of psychotherapist friends. One particular experience riveted me. In active imagination, I experienced a gorilla from the right side of my brain reaching over to the left hemisphere to grab a banana – food for thought!  Literally and figuratively.

And a head connected to the body – imagine that! The vast, beyond-reason intelligence housed in our gut could be mixing and mingling with our rational selves to provide a much larger set of perceptions from which to make decisions.

The South American prophecy of the eagle and the condor sheds light on the new assumptions we’re being asked to embrace. This prophecy says that cultures run in 500 year cycles – or thereabout – and that around the time of Columbus, the paradigm of the eagle took precedence over that of the condor. The condor represents a spiritual, intuitive, heart centered and creatively connected way of living. The eagle represents an intellectual, rational, analytical, technological and scientific way of living which, though rich in many respects, also supports domination and disconnection from nature. The prophecy suggests that this is the time when the eagle and the condor must fly in the same sky for the human species to save itself. I think of it as the eagle and condor flying as side-bys in the same sky of mind.  Mind refers to a whole brain that communicates with the body as well as the invisible intelligence surrounding our bodies.

The notion of a whole body/mind shakes the foundations of psychology. What will be considered normal when ordinary folks routinely converse with both the world of matter and the world of spirit simultaneously? Can we learn to think of it as normal to experience ravens giving us messages, trees talking, ancestors filling a room with their presence and synchronicities affirming our intentions?

Ecstatic Postures, because they come from our ancestors all around the globe, remind us that we are all indigenous. Ecstatic Postures help us access the earth honoring wisdom in our DNA. They show us how to begin taking personal responsibility for nurturing reciprocity with the “other”, manifesting a culture of “wild ethics.” Read David Abram’s Becoming Animal – An Earthly Cosmology.

Evolution and the planet call to us humans to get comfortable with these expanded capacities as modern, urban humans. This is not “woo-woo” but evolution revealing itself. Those of us who have practiced Postures for a long time are in the forefront of this awakening.  We need to support each others knowing and way of walking in the world because we are the imaginal cells of a profound evolutionary shift in human capacity. Our Posture practice hones our ability to stand tall and speak with legitimate authority as to what it’s like to have eagle and condor flying together in our own minds, to be walking our talk as compassionate, connected and whole humans. The resistance to such profound change is monumental and the current cultural paradigm’s immune system is rallying. If we support each other, inspire each other, and energize our community, Ecstatic Wisdom Postures just might offer the tipping point for humanity’s coming of age.

Imagine that!

Imaginal cells – have you heard of them? I attended an Earth and Spirit conference in Oregon in 1989 and heard the biologist, Elizabet Sahtouris speak. She described imaginal cells, the cells which carry the butterfly blueprint to the caterpillar.  When the caterpillar first notices those butterfly cells gathering, s/he becomes a voracious eater.  Consuming everything in sight the caterpillar eventually becomes so bloated s/he stiffens and weaves the cocoon around itself.

Metaphorically, doesn’t this sound like our current cultural need to gobble up goods?

When those first imaginal cells appear, the caterpillar’s immune system immediately kills them.  But as more imaginal cells show up, the immune system can no longer fight them off and the cocoon is made – that’s when caterpillar soup begins bubbling and that little living being is neither here nor there…another fine metaphor to help us grasp why our contemporary culture seems amorphous and incoherent.

Though our technologically savvy, consuming oriented, modern cultures are brilliant in many respects, we humans suffer from a host of debilitating symptoms new to the planet.  A few of those disorienting symptoms are: alienation, numbness, raging fear, depression, fatigue syndromes, meaninglessness, anxiety, helplessness, addictions, addictions, and more addictions.

This is the first time in human history when we have actually been aware that we can destroy our entire planetary home. This is an unprecedented human awareness with which to deal.

No wonder we go shopping.

Ecstatic Wisdom Postures provide direct experience with the sacred; personal awe and communal wonder dance – truly good medicine don’t you think? Experiencing the divine in everyday life is an antidote to some of our modern ignorance, our impotency, and a catalyst for the imaginal cells in the human evolutionary butterfly to gather with wit and wisdom.

We humans can transform ourselves. We’ve done it countless times before during our two legged history to achieve the fully functioning rational minds and scientific technological savvy we enjoy today.

Along that evolutionary way, however, we have had to diminish our intuitive and spiritual capacities, forget our ability to dream while awake. We’ve adopted a set of modern assumptions about how life works that may be our undoing.

Let this new image I’ve painted, get your imagination stirred up and tune in next time to read more about our assumptions. The painting is called: Intrepid Together.

For years – and years – I’ve been writing a book. I might call it, “ Memoirs of an Urban Wild Woman”- or I might not. In 2008, February 29^th I woke for the second time that day at 8:46 a.m. I had this dream in response to my request for inspiration in restarting the manuscript:

I’m in another place and time experiencing myself as a baby being born. I emerge from the uterine confines of warmth and darkness into a softly lit, shadow dappled world filled with warm hands tenderly holding, my ears swooning with the oooohs and aaaahs of enchanted human endearment accompanied by a symphony of meadow larks larking, chickadees twittering, bees buzzing, ravens warbling, snakes slithering, flames crackling, waters burbling, winds shooshing and caressing, grass blading, seeds popping, stalks stretching, leaves unfurling, buds blossoming, flowers perfuming, cats purring, beetles clicking, ants trailing, mice chittering, dog gamboling, mouth suckling, warmth guzzling, breath revealing, sweat informing, melted butter hands stroking my nakedness cradled in warm sensory surround.

“I have come home!”

Primal infant awareness of sheer joy prior to words, but I need those words now to describe the felt-sense of gratitude for the truth of my embodied connection. I am home.

If you were born in a high rise, clanging, blinding, measuring, weighing, calculating, sterilizing hospital, as I was, you had no chance to arrive home. Think about the ramifications.

From a different vantage point, Richards echoes this wisdom in the Epilogue – She is on Her Way which concludes his book Cosmosophia: “If we are to once again experience the cosmos as our womb, to participate meaningfully in the awesome event called the Universe, then we must simply walk outside, pause, and look at the shining stars, or see a child being born, or listen to a tree’s leaves rustling in the wind, and be amazed. Until we regain this capacity, no set of ideas can save us from ourselves.”

Imagine how differently we all would live if we remembered to wonder, simply wonder…

Ahhhhhh time to take my precious fingers away from the treasured keyboard, open the door and step outside.

Let me know how you relate to these ideas, this dream.

Thank you…

As you know who follow this blog, I’m on fire because of the online art course, BIG, that I just completed. Luckily, the inspiration grows because of the Facebook tribe for all the BIG painters who have gone before me.

Hali has inspired me with her Art as Prayer project.  I intend to participate and maybe you’ll be drawn to do that too.

Then a video made by friends of another Fearless artist moved me with their artistic message for re-imagining our lives.

My own first attempt at presenting a slide show about Ecstatic Postures and mounting it on YouTube makes me laugh now that I have read the book, PresentationZen by Garr Reynolds. I can’t wait to redo the powerpoint with zen in mind!

And then, and then I’m powerfully inspired to create a new video to answer the question lodged in my soul: What is the ALL that I want to leave behind for my descendants?

Immediate answer: My love for living on this miraculous, mysterious, flourishing earth.

And then here comes Theodore Richards and his book Cosmosophia.

I began reading it two months ago and it is so full of deep thoughts and dense information, a global overview of religious traditions and early cosmologies that I stumbled and put it aside. I returned a few days ago and along about page 161 and Chapter Nine I started shouting Yes, Yes, YES. Dog eared page after page. I couldn’t keep up with writing notes to myself in the back. My book has actually changed shape with all those dog ears. I can’t imagine Kindle ever being so sensually gratifying!

Richards begins and ends the book with the womb, many wombs actually. I find that riveting because they relate to an epiphany in my own life. I have written several books, though never published. I’ve begun the “same” book three times now and was looking for inspiration in the Spring of 2008. I asked for a dream. And I got one – a huge one that relates to being truly born on earth. I’ll share that story, maybe on Friday, because I feel the need to paint it, too. In the meantime, I want to share a bit of Richards’ thinking on the subject of womb because it relates. On page 36, he writes under this sub-heading:

Cosmosophia: The Compassionate Wisdom of the Cosmic Womb

In keeping with the oldest of the Wisdom Traditions…wisdom can be understood not so much as something that comes from humanity, but is embedded in the mysterious processes of the cosmos. Cosmic wisdom is the capacity of the Universe to experience itself as a coherent and compassionate whole – a womb – even as it gives birth to novelty. As I watch my infant daughter in her crib, I can see in her eyes a yearning both to learn and grow and to regain the sense of safety and nourishment she felt in the womb. The newness of the world into which she has been born…allows for new connections to be made. . .and at the same time, there is something lost in her departure from the intimacy of the womb. For the rest of her life, she will strive. . .to regain a felt sense of the world as her new womb…What we seek is not a return to the womb we have left but to embrace the metaphorical womb into which we have been born.

Imagine the world as a safe and nurturing womb for all of us. Delicious idea, isn’t it. Makes me want to dance, to feast, to celebrate.

Then we held the Birthing Posture, remained in silence afterward and began painting how it feels to be me now. Ahhhhhh the color, the movement, the diversity…ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Dragon, web of life, cosmic grid, royal bird trees, phoenix rising, cosmic serpents coiling, flames reaching, frustration, exhilaration, all of it inspired deep contemplation and ebullient recognition.

The following day, three of us shared over coffee, delving into our dreams for the August posture ceremony which we thought was going to be another masked trance dance. Our vision grew quickly, focused more precisely. August will be a new ceremony based on the ancestral wisdom coming through our Ecstatic Posture practice and the planet’s call for human awakening. It will be mythic, it will embody the living world, it will animate our modern souls and kindle the fires of cultural evolvement. It will help us be the pebbles in the universal pond of wonder, composting our too tight cultural boxes into fertilizer for walking the edge, for stepping into the truth of our own grounded experience.

Two questions were posed by Shannon and Victoria that rivet me. If I knew, truly knew, I was an ancestor of the future, how/ who would I want to be?  What is the ALL that I have to give?

We think we know the title of the ceremony is EDGE, an acronym for something more. BUT we plan to meet again next week, maybe camp in the high country. Only spirit knows where that will take us.

I hope you’ll join us in Sequim,  WA, August 16th to 19th.