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 .