Earth Conscious

Today, Earth Day, an Extinction Rebellion is going on in DC and has been for days all over the world. A die-in stopped traffic in NYC. Young people have been protesting and getting arrested in London, trying to get the attention of those in power so they’ll do something about the destruction of the earth. One of their websites defined it as an International Rebellion against the world’s governments for criminal inaction on the ecological crisis.”

That we are supported by the earth is not abstract. It is the ground we stand on and we are never outside its influence. The gravity that holds us close is constant and so utterly dependable that it goes unnoticed. We need the air, the water, the soil and food to maintain our physical existence. And the needs run deeper than that. Recently, I heard a report of the healing effects of nature on mental health, psychiatrists prescribing twenty minutes a day outdoors to perceptibly change mood. My experience walking a half hour each day confirms it on a personal level, and it’s a joy discovering what comes up around the house my first spring here. Graham Greene said the more deeply you looked at a person, the more you loved them and it feels true of the nature around us. The more you see, the more there is to see. As love grows, awareness of responsibility builds thoughtfulness and the will to care for surroundings. Artists guide public noticing, help focus attention where it matters and more artists are pointing to environmental issues.

Our continuity with our environment is inseparable but unconsidered in modern self-isolation. The technological interface between people and the surrounding world reduces the interdependent complexity of the ecosystem that supports us to one flat screen. With everything reduced and isolated, made uniform in that single frame, it can distort perspective and minimize the power to amaze. Nature is real and it is powerful. You have only to see the tree branch growing from the side of a concrete wall to feel its ability to recover the planet with life. It’s time to be more cooperative, to be part of something real that gets all the senses involved. There’s no price on a breeze, but if we take the time to pay attention, it’s among the most beautiful sensations available. But even our breezes are under attack. A recent BBC report detailed new studies that show that air pollution impairs cognitive processes.

It shows student performance dropping on the most polluted days, as well as impaired judgment and higher crime., not just in urban areas, where the winds converge in New England also measure high, recipients of all the industry along the way from two directions. To ignore this is to cultivate ignorance.

It’s encouraging to see people distancing themselves from their phones, getting involved in real life and not the escapist fantasies devised for profit. Don’t buy it. Get to know the planet that’s always been there for you, and be with the earth, today.

Analysis

Vibration

A student of mine from Kuwait, in a poster honoring her mother, had vibrations expanding out from the form encasing her mother’s name in Arabic, filling the surrounding space. I felt an immediate resonance with the feeling expressed since throughout my own work I try to bring out those invisible dimensions. Her poster made me think about vibrations, rippling out from us with everything we do, as the raw material for the intricate Islamic patterns seen as divine intersections between resonating layers of universal order. Since everything is linked by the intersecting ripples, everything adds to the complexity and nothing is empty. The imagery is abstracted but expresses complex beauty and order. Thinking of this gave me shivers, considering how religious practices weaving through a day add coherence to our contribution in larger patterns. Whether its prayer or meditation or walking, having a daily element to remember what matters and be grateful, a physical motion that harmonizes with the surrounding beingness and calms the mind. Having a weekly interval with the ancient wisdom that speaks to the heart, reinforces the virtues that matter. It’s important to enrich the soul with whatever strengthens synchronized patterns. It feels good to flow with the current and navigate with our visual attunement to unfolding structure.

For Erich Fromm, the essence of spiritual orientation was in the sense of connection, occasions of wonder, and concern with the meaning of life. Looking at art, finding the work that sounds a personal chord is a way to prompt thought relevant to the way we feel at the time and become more familiar with our inner life. Feelings that resist words may find expression in the particular choice at a specific time. Choosing IS self-expression. Over time we widen the scope of images and see ourselves with greater depth, perceive patterns, overlaps and parallels. This is our core understanding. We use it to predict and prepare. In the I Ching, whatever the advice, it is always assumed that we know what is right. Its advice is directed to how to be right in different modes of transition. Context is everything.

Images can, by offering an honest moment of the artist’s vision, stimulate personal reflection with insight about being human. The act of recognition takes us into our own experience of that feeling. My brother Bill calls it “closing the gap,” referring to the connection made by art and receiver reducing space between people. Seeing the “Monsters, Myths, and Surrealism” show at the Baltimore Museum of Art offered me many moments of connection with the work of those experiencing another time when insanity seemed in ascendency. Many serious artists are eloquently expressing the tragedies, dangers and absurdities of where we find ourselves.  These are our tools to see what needs to change.

Here’s a link to the growing gallery of student work pointing to dangers in current trends.

http://visualcommentary.blogspot.com/2016/10/consumerism.html

Fish

Feeling the Picture

My husband still marvels over the fact that when Great Britain voted for Brexit, I spontaneously exclaimed. “God, Maybe Trump can win.” He couldn’t see how I could have related the two, he followed the newspapers more closely while I surf over various, radio, TV and internet sources. The difference in our thinking wasn’t between who had better information it was the focusing on the information and not the overall picture. To use the word of the 1940’s and 1950’s psychologists who studied perception, the gestalt is the sense of the whole that leads the organization of the information. Recent brain science says that the difference between hemispheres is in how they process information, the right dealing with the whole and the left more with the detail. Words are seductive details. As Walker Percy once wrote, “We tame the world with descriptions.”  Words, labels and facts give the illusion of knowing but are only islands in the big picture. Writers are now questioning the usefulness of educational emphasis on accumulating information and seeing the need for ways to build big picture thinking.

The big picture starts with the body’s adjustment. The word ‘feeling’ is not vague but represents specific sensations as the body anticipates what the scene suggests will be necessary. Nervousness is felt in our gut, excitement or apprehension, whatever the situation requires, stimulating hormones to coax the necessary parts into action. Even subtle recognitions are physical, an adaptation to the requirements of what we’ve noticed. The mirror neuron system understands other humans, resonating with body language and facial expression to know from our own feelings what is felt by another.

When my students are drawing only scraps of white paper there is still the wide variety of feelings created by the composition, how active or organized any relationship between scraps can suggest protectiveness or aggression. Perception is perception, the same systems processing art or the surrounding world. Simply how forms are arrayed in relation to gravity creates an expectation that has a feeling attached. This first level perception is often ignored. The cultural stress on language steamrolls non-verbal truth and stifles the development of wisdom.

The stress level created by denying what the body knows contributes to the psychological pathology of our time. The excess of cognitive dissonance, outright double-think requires a mental gymnastics made possible by the detail/symbol oriented part of the brain controlling most thought.  Because the actual picture creates one kind of feeling and the verbal arguments another, persuasion needs the emotional element aimed at forcing agreement. Accepting the explanations and verbal flourishes, the dissonance is between a physical reality felt in the tension of distrusting a person or circumstance, and a layer of words that repeatedly says trust.

Looking at art is a powerful tool for strengthening the early stages of perception that recognize the large relationships unfolding in the gestalt. Artists pull out the essence of the whole and sensitize viewers to overall structure. It’s an area of education that’s been neglected for too long.