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.