Mandala of Loss 1

Changing What's Seen

“You are the sky. Everything else is just the weather” Pema Chodron The changing nature of skies is one reason I use it to express emotion and mood in my drawings. It’s easy to recognize how shifting thoughts and feelings are. Physical objects are different. Their tangibility creates more sense of permanence even though they too have life spans. A meditation teacher once advised student not to look in the direction of a sound because everything that hits the eye has its own train of associations. So true. Almost everything in my house triggered thoughts of Michael. But they all must be kept because he might need them when he returns. And this is just the surface. There are many layers to grieving. I thought I was in it but had barely scratched the surface. The layers of things and their history of memories is amplified by the regular places and animated by their behavior there. When Michael’s sister Kathy described her side of the couch and how specifically she set it up, she could have been describing Michael. That was one of the reasons I couldn’t inhabit certain rooms at all until I rearranged them completely. The specter of his absence was too glaring where he spent the most time. It wasn’t enough. Even with the rearrangement the house has lost its feeling of home. I still look forward to getting back whenever I’m out. Until I walk in the door. The homeness came from his presence and it will take time to get use to the new status, the current loss of meaning that can only be regained with time and more living. The series I just started, “Mandalas of Loss” hopefully will help me work through the complicated quicksand of emotions. The first one posted above is as obviously flattened and shattered as I felt. The one I recently started has moved into a melancholoy resignation punctuated by the painful intensity hiding behind the surface. A whole area of self-definition, roles and responsibilities is gone. Though something similar happened when I retired, I was ready and had plenty that I was ready to fill the time with to restore the meaning of teaching in a different mode, This, I wasn’t ready for, and I don’t know that anyone could be. There’s no way to know in advance how woven into my fabric 50 years with a person creates until it happens.

Transmutation

In Memory of Michael Eller

Separation by W.S. Merwin

Fragile Membrane

Time Frames

I started a new drawing in a particular difficult stage and as the stress eased up, I began to hate it. Getting to the point that the drawing was upsetting me, I finally started something new on the verge of tossing the first in the garbage. I rarely abandon drawings so I kept it, thinking it might be something I wouldn’t hate as much in the future, that it might have something to show me when the time was right. The new one I started clicked, and with the strength it gave me from involvement, improved my mood and momentum. The movie “Enter the Void” starts with a young man getting shot, then continues with his consciousness after death through what Tibetan Buddhism refers to as the bardo. The journey through the in-between state illuminated key moments in his personal history on the way to the next life. At the end, reborn as a new being, we emerge to see through the infant’s eyes the first gaze with the mother. Many mothers have described to me that first look and a sense that the baby had a broad awareness we lose quickly as we’re trained to be people. This knowing reminded me of Ram Dass’s descriptions of the consciousness of his guru. He knew things about Ram Dass and others he couldn’t have known without inhabiting a larger field of knowing characterized by loving awareness. Many writings have associated death with light, moving down a tunnel toward light as the ultimate destination. Yet in my past drawings, because of its unknown quality, I have thought of it and depicted it as darkness. Until now. Without conscious thought as I was doing it, in the second drawing I saw the unknown as luminous, harmonic, a sense of a pervasive all-encompassing awareness, a fullness of knowing that can only be seen as light. We may have that awareness at the moment of birth. All of these thoughts came after the image which as the essence of an idea is the spur to thoughts. What’s most unexpected is the idea that these were the thoughts that emerged when I focused on the present. To scale down my attention in the moment goes inward beyond the known and this opens a different kind of spaciousness. Deep inside the moment, even briefly, lies awareness beyond time. Knowing they are there helps me stay steady in these uncertain times .

Another Phase