Mandala of Loss 6

The Environment of Companionship

Like the layers of an onion, working my way through the stages of grief started with surface things. I was able to soften the wounding effects of seeing shared things, by removing some, rearranging others. Always there’s a niggling sense of betrayal in these symbols of trying to move on when he’s not. That back and forth is a stage unto itself. But as the layers get deeper the body takes the brunt of suffering while day to day life is lived out buried in my work, walking with my neighbor and getting through the holidays, another layer of its own. The here and now is my refuge. I find pleasure in nature, satisfaction over seeing my feelings expressed on paper for giving me a glimpse of a stage I feel without words. I’ve appreciated my time with other people but coming home with so much to tell is hard. Six months in and this stage of loss is realizing that the more profound grief is the loss of that whole background of companionship. Surrounding me even when I wasn’t home, having someone to share whatever happens with creates a psychic environment that enfolded me wherever I was. The atmosphere of my inner world has suffered a cataclysm. The structures created by shared habits and routine are gone. The connective tissue between inner and outer environments are the patterns that characterize any couple. The antenna that pick up their interests has no one to transmit back the who, where or what they might have liked to know. The fact that it’s taken me so long to understand this is likely because its so unconscious and built in while living it. I offer it now so readers might think about and appreciate the inner environment created by people they care about, having their presence in the world. When there is a web of interlaced activity, it travels with us, an invisible personal nest of ongoing interaction. The living presence of someone behind the scenes in life is part of inner consciousness, something to be appreciated. Coming to terms with each stage as I peel them away is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The challenge to find it in myself to face the many facets of this shift is a human aspect of the reaching that characterizes the life force in all forms. Most obvious in plants that stretch toward light, we extend our being in more metaphoric ways and borrow the metaphors of plants as we keep trying to find the cracks in the concrete .

Mandala of Loss 5

The Threat of Beauty

In Olga Grushin’s outstanding novel “The Dream Life of Sukanov”, a well-indoctrinated soviet youth says, “Beauty is for the bourgeois.” Art that didn’t support the soviet philosophy was rejected, not just because beauty was considered frivolous or subversive but because it had power. Authoritarian systems want to harness that power only to further the aims of the state or ruler. Dave Hickey in his book “The Invisible Dragon” was the first to bring to my attention how beauty is a threat to authority because it needs no authority but its own. Beauty has the power to command attention without anyone pointing to it. Beauty engages feelings. The intensity of the feeling is a gauge of how much it matters. As G.I. Gurdjieff wrote “Feeling is the foundation of common sense.” Art develops the range and depth of feeling leaving it to the conscious mind to find words for it. Nature offers endless opportunities to see a perfect collaboration of light, wind and clouds in the sky. The healing power of sunrise at the beach for the variety of people who gather to watch has a quality of ancient spiritual homage. When authority wants to decide what has value and what doesn’t, whatever stands out in itself is a problem. Theories and analysis that try to break down a formula for beauty can never work because the response to beauty is individual and dependent on the moment. “We suffer from the delusion that the entire universe is held in order by the categories of human thought”. Alan Watts Labels and categories have multiplied in the modern world, each one making a boundary. Every label separates. Categories and definitions cannot pin down the experience of beauty. Try as they might with theories about symmetry or preference, they can’t capture the magic that happens for the brief moment that light hits the damp leaves with a sparkle that makes the heart glad. As Elaine Scarry wrote, beauty is always in the particular. Experiencing beauty is a sensation that connects us to the beautiful, drawing us out of ourselves and into creation. We love the beautiful because in that experience we love. Attention is drawn away from ourselves and into the world. The only thing that can heal the pathologies that ravage today’s collective soul is the power of love. Rarely do the artificial sensations and flash of media exhilarate like perfect moments of amazement. But technology does gives us access to a wide range of art to meet each person’s particular sense of beauty. Art unifies. Even when exposing flaws, attracting attention still pulls attention into the world of feeling, it depends on the existing connection between us as human beings that resonates and communicates. Artists that strive for beauty are stimulating the viewers best qualities, unselfish appreciation and gratitude for those moments of connection.

Mandala of Loss 4

Waves

The confusion that accompanies loss is for me the inability to understand what happened to that life force and spirit. Going to the beach alone was something I needed to face before the year was out since my nervousness about going there now could grow into something bigger if I waited until next spring. Being with the ocean at sunrise is the most healing thing I’ve ever done. It gave me dynamic imagery to reflect on the metaphor that I am the water not the wave. Every wave seems briefly to be an individual before returning to the ocean. The water didn’t really go anywhere just dipped back under the surface. When I think of consciousness as being a continuous field with a multitude of portals, the image of ocean and waves is useful. The same water is still there, part of the whole and can emerge in other waves. Ram Dass suggests that life force and consciousness have been evolving for all time. To praise the ancestors is to praise the developing humanity that emerged in us. In Thich Nhat Hanh’s translation of the Heart Sutra his commentary describes how the interdependence of everything in the universe shows there is no separate self. We are all interbeing. He creates mental images that describe how much everything depends on everything else. What’s invisible is part of what’s happening. Not the tall grass waving, but the wind moving the tall grass in the sunshine on a blue sky. Focusing on things leaves out relationships. The meaning of anything shifts with the circumstance. These images help me think of Michael as everywhere, not gone. His wave has risen and crashed but the essence that made the wave and is part of everything remains and was there all along. I like the term cosmic reality because I see it as the fusion of spiritual and quantum reality. Where it’s all waves, the metaphors of quantum physics offer an outstanding lens to think of relationships beyond the visible. Quantum entanglement offers connection across distances, what’s connected stays connected so I like to think that in the unmanifest level of reality we are still interconnected there. Finding the right image feels like understanding. One of the foremost philosophers of art, Susanne Langer said it simply. “Art looks like feelings feel.” I’ve always used my work as a mirror to my emotional weather. With the heavy weather I’ve been experiencing over most of the past year, my images also provide a structure for my thoughts to better see the whole of what ‘s happening to me. Finding images that resonate does the same thing. It starts with the feeling and feelings will stimulate relevant associations. Visual art depends on relationships and tunes our sense of the meaning in wholes. In a time when some would drown us in labels and separateness, pictures tell a larger truth and reinforce our ability to see the truth of the whole ourselves.

Mandala of Loss 3

Time Again

Though we acknowledge the cyclical nature of time with the equinox, our cultural habit is to think of it as a line. My very first post in 2008 was about time. The circumstance was my resistance to the idea of linear time when my grandfather died. Thinking of the passage of events as a timeline entails a sense of loss as things disappear into the past, never to be seen again, so my theme centered on the idea of mapping time as an image not a line. Iain McGilchrist’s book, “The Master and His Emissary” describes how the dominance of the brain’s left hemisphere leads us to think its way of structuring reality is true. Linear time is the left hemisphere’s order just like separating, naming and sorting. The right hemisphere perceives wholes in an ongoing present and intuits the feeling/meaning of the whole situation, feelings being the first meaning in our sense of something in relation to us. When Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor had her left hemisphere stroke, disabling it, she said objects started to lose their boundaries and that she felt part of a continuum in the right hemispheres ongoing present. In 2008 I chose to think of time as an image and envision my grandfather’s life as a painting. Even when it’s finished it’s there. Though an insect crawling on the painting would experience the blue as happening before the yellow, the sense of past and future is created by its path. The ability of images to improve our understanding has been known by science for a long time. In the 2008 post I mentioned a National Science Foundation Visualization Challenge. The call for entries included the statement. “You can do science without graphics. But it’s very difficult to communicate it in the absence of pictures. Indeed, some insights can only be made widely comprehensible as images.“ Struggling to make sense of Michael’s disappearance, I find myself going back to the image. Though it’s hard for me to think of Michael’s painting as finished, having that image is better because not only did I paint on his, he contributed plenty to the painting of my life so far. Not just mine but his students, friends and colleagues. That doesn’t go away. Every human connection is adding to the big picture, what’s living and growing develops that area of the painting. When an area isn’t developing anymore it still influences whatever else unfolds, sometimes dramatically. We are all working on one big image of the evolving human consciousness. Similar to the way biologist Rupert Sheldrake sees the field of all human mind as including everything everyone has perceived; we are all sense organs for the whole mind.

Mandala of Loss 2

Home?

So often since Michael left his body, I find myself asking “where did he go?” If you’ve lost someone that was part of your daily life, you may know what I mean. When I’ve mentioned that to a few friends often they know someone who after losing someone close, asked the same thing. It seems impossible that all that life and presence simply evaporated. Yes, a complete life story beginning to end unfolded, but that surface story isn’t enough. How he lives on in those of us that knew and loved him isn’t a big enough answer. I realize it’s a mystery I won’t penetrate until my consciousness experiences it. And my consciousness itself is a mystery. At odd moments it feels to me like what perceives my experience is exactly the same as when I was six. All that I’ve learned as part of my life story is still a surface narration. The witness within feels the same. The person identified as Susan has learned and aged with the world around her but even as the perceptual portal widens, that doesn’t feel like the whole picture. Ram Dass sees the body as something we use, like a car, but I don’t think of myself as a Honda even though it is likewise my vehicle. Am I really just a person, or as all religions suggest, a spiritual being experiencing a material existence. Underneath the bureaucracy of organized religion every approach has a richness for contemplation regarding the meaning of life and our existence as more than just our current role in time. Over identification with the physical body may underlie many modern afflictions. Each religion offers a lens and language arising from its native culture, though each at core can only point us in the right direction. Inward and beyond the worn out vehicle of our material life is beyond my vision. I can only speculate. With hopeful feeling I hold the image of an all-encompassing consciousness that Ram Dass calls home.

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

Unrecognized Emotions

In my drawings, one reason I try to keep recognizable objects out of my work is because I want to focus on the feeling itself. Deep feelings can be very complex and human psychology has as many variations as there are individuals. Verbal descriptions can’t cover it. Stories can do it, but they need time to unfold. The feeling in an image is there in the seeing, needs no explanation. Just like you don’t need to describe what you’re doing if you’re walking around obstacles on a wooded path, anything visual uses the language of perceptional intelligence which starts its meaning with the feeling. When a surface area has an identity like sky, water or skin the meaning depends on the condition of the area, relies on the quality. Diseased skin is quite different than smooth. The qualities and conditions in a composition convey a dynamic essence that can make an impression without attaching it to content. If a drawing strikes a chord, then a connection is forged that can trigger a person’s associated thoughts, sometimes with a feeling as yet unrecognized. Feelings represent a personal truth forged from the individual experience. Much of American culture is training in hiding, suppressing, and ignoring feelings. Family pressures to keep feelings in check are considered necessary to polite behavior. Even to have some feelings at all is treated as a personal failing. Others don’t recognize feelings because they’re inconvenient, get in the way of profits or maintaining external images of the self, projected for others. People turn away from uncomfortable realities that threaten personal comfort. Unrecognized feelings make people vulnerable to demagogues who tap the invisible pain and label it with a cause. The enemy then becomes an acceptable way to vent pain, rage, and grievance. A clear example is in the widespread stoking of antagonism by the 45th president. Unable to cope with losing, his rhetoric is completely at odds with reality, a pattern of tyrants throughout history. They know rational argument doesn’t work on those hypnotized by manipulation of their pain. They need the outlet for the intense feelings accumulated. So much hidden pain shows a failure of love. And tyrants tell their followers that only they care about them, thus providing the love. Like political propaganda that focuses on negative emotions, creating love for the earth cannot depend on persuasion. That’s why it’s so good to see many artists building care for nature into their work. To stimulate love for the earth is to strengthen our connection and care for it.

Disintegration

Valuing Water

“Many men go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they’re after.” Thoreau Thoreau understood the value that living on the pond had for him. Not just the beauty and quiet but water itself as offering something special. Today’s neuroscience verifies the value of all kinds of interaction with water, even just looking at it. The Thoreau quote came from a book surveying research on water called “Blue Mind” by Wallace J. Nichols. It presents a variety of studies on the benefits of water for both body and mind. Drinking water is important for physical and mental health. We sleep better if we’ve had enough water during the day. Experiments with rats showed cognitive decline when they were dehydrated. Just looking at water, even in images, is good for well-being. When hospital patients could look at water paintings, they had less anxiety. It was observed that blood pressure dropped when looking at an aquarium, a fact they must know at the cancer center where a big one sits in the middle of the waiting area. On the occasion of World Water Day it’s worthwhile to consider the many ways we are nourished by water and ways we might better care for it . The area of the brain most active when looking at nature, and in particular water, is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. This is the area that judges value, knows what is important to us. The location is at the front of the brain, right between the eyes. This is also the location of the spiritual third eye, a concurrence that stimulates my imagination in multiple directions. Central to them is the attunement to the whole as our ultimate guide to what matters. Though beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, it is always something that feels right and connected to us in some way. What draws us relates to how we feel, what matches our personal state, aligns us. David Bohm said the creative act was a matter of finding what fits. What we choose to see is a creative act of finding what fits our state of being. A friend recently sent me a graphic that said in big letters “Quantum physics is where they hide the scientific proof of spirituality.” It was my reading of David Bohm and Nick Herbert and others that generated my sense that the non-locality at the quantum level of is consciousness. Water and sky are my primary symbols for consciousness. How tranquil or choppy provides a clear metaphoric quality, as is a stormy day or one that’s clear and bright. Though waves may look separate they are part of the same substance. I see one consciousness flowing through all of us. Though it may be filtered through our thoughts, desires and fears, the consciousness having a human experience comes through us, not from us.

Shells Within Shells

Context and Perception

Lately I’ve been making mistakes in what I first think I’m seeing that are likely due to the radical change in what has surrounded me for most of my time since Thanksgiving. Watching Jamie Raskin speak on TV, I thought the metal pole with something hanging behind him was an IV. Longer study showed it to be a grow light. But IV’s have been everywhere in my travels between hospital and cancer center accompanying my husband to endless appointments and treatments, so that’s what I now see. Being alert to these shifts of context remind me of how dependent perception is on the expectations conditioned by the recent surroundings. What we see in the present is always influenced by what we’ve seen the most recently and as that changes so do first impressions. Today surroundings are often on a screen. Spending large amounts of time with media makes what’s on the screen our surroundings and has the same level of influence, the same effect as physical location. When extreme media spends so much time tearing things down it builds a negative outlook. Things seem so much worse than they are. People can snap under the strain. Seeing or hearing negative attitudes repeatedly makes it more likely that we pick up those vibes elsewhere. As the extremes of right-wing opposition push some into a we/they mentality it can be good to remember that both sides worked together to get an infrastructure bill passed that was good for everybody using roads and bridges, not to mention all the many workers hired to do the work. Theses shifts help us recognize the fluid quality of perception as a reflection of our own mind and recent experience more than the world at large. What a person is immersed in is the reality they see. This is worrisome considering that there are people making a conscious effort to create fear and animosity regarding those who think differently. The world needs differences for all the many varied things that need doing. If the standard we’re held to is too narrow, most of us won’t fit. Growing up being judged builds a foundation insecurity that is easy to manipulate by those wishing to factionalize. Many were raised in a critical environment, criticism from teachers, parents, coaches, influencers. This creates a habit of criticizing others and an expectation of being criticized. Most people probably don’t realize that as we break the habit of criticizing others, it also makes us less hard on ourselves. Cultivating an attitude of acceptance may need time to develop, but feeling accepted is an antidote to antagonism.

Re-Enactment

Re-Enactment- The Story

I first posted “Enactment” this past August. As has happened before, once I saw it on the screen I saw I hadn’t taken it where I wanted it to be. Since I had an absorbing painting project underway it didn’t move fast but I was glad to have it when my husband went to the hospital over Thanksgiving. Just challenging enough to keep my attention the minimal thing I'd been working with was soothing to look at. Home from the hospital thinking he had a condition that could be controlled, a few days later we get a call that is much more dire. Meeting with the specialist it became even worse. I felt steamrolled by what he told us. So this drawiing got darker then lighter in what I finally started calling either palliative drawing or therappeutic drawing behavior. I don't know if it's improved but it 's been a safe place to eend each day after endless treatments, scans and doctors appointments. I've finally reached a place where I'm ready to stop and go on to express what's happening now.