Frustration

Meaning

From the beginning there is meaning. In the infant it’s not just perception but also correlation. Recent studies have shown that a nubbed pacifier which has only been in a baby’s mouth will be recognized externally when seen for the first time. One sense easily translates to another. The subsequent choice of a nubbed one over smooth is an early instance of preference attached to how something looked and its familiarity. Life experience accumulates a range of responses to sensation attached to objects and scenes that includes first impressions of preference- rejection, offense, neutrality. Response associations are embedded in how things look by personal experience and shared behavioral patterns basic to our species. We know when someone is about to fall because it’s what we look like if we lose our balance. We feel it in our bodies and might even automatically reach out if they’re close enough to catch. Neurologists have shown that an important part of how we recognize significant others in our life is by the automatic inner preparation that is part of the accustomed pattern of relationship and who has more control in that relationship. Everything we see is fused with a history of how we’ve felt about it. The responses express the meaning. The unconscious sense of absence, that lack of associations, might be the first sensation of difference. Without connections to it, we’re unsure how to respond. Art is a way to extend our range of visual associations through the feeling of the image making a bridge to surface unfamiliarity. We might not know what the specifics mean but if there’s a deeper feeling present, we feel it. By going deeper, we sense the universal. The common human feeling creates connection instead of division. As a sensory experience art reaches that linked core of response where sensation meets feeling, the summary of what something means to us. How we respond begins with this essence which is why experiencing art is so personal. Wherever there is a strong response signals an emotional connection to experience that shares that feeling and builds awareness of the personal emotional climate. Recent neuroscience has shown that art makes linkages throughout the brain which is why programs like VTS (Visual Thinking Strategies) are so successful at improving children’s test scores in all subjects. Looking at art and talking about what they see improves creative use of language and builds circuits that reach from the center out into all associated areas. Description of mood and feelings in a painting create mental patterns that resonate through the senses and are deeply linked creating expectations that form our intuitive response to different visual structures. Art extends our range of meaning.

Out of the Chreode

Re-Legacy

Patterns are everywhere. Visiting with my friend Paula Whaley was sinking into the presence of a woman who has affirmed and appreciated me since I first met her. We were both the on the Medicine Wheel Elder group who met monthly with the Baltimore Youth Ambassadors, a peer-counseling group, to hear their stories and offer advice and encouragement. I appreciated all the different people in the group but felt an immediate resonance with Paula and admired the essential wisdom she brought to every encounter. As we became friends, I learned she was the youngest sister of James Baldwin, a writer I felt like a force of nature, so powerfully could he convey the human heart. Because her father died the day she was born, he and her mother raised her. Our backgrounds couldn’t have been more different, yet we arrived at the same inner image of the world. An artist herself, her dolls expressed a world of feeling that I understand but haven’t experienced in the same way. While we were talking Sunday, I confessed to her that I hadn’t grieved for my mother. I told her I was reading a book by a former child actress called, “I’m Glad My Mom Died”. I’d forgotten about reserving it because when I requested it, there were 109 holds already. That was when she looked shocked. I reminded her of a conversation she once told me about with “Jimmy” and her mother around the kitchen table in their Harlem apartment. She was just a little girl and she asked them why white people were so mean. Her brother answered that it was because white parents didn’t love their children enough. White parents would object, but it may have more to do with definitions of love, particularly of children. White parents often see love as what they think is best for children without appreciating the way the child is. Jennette McDougal’s story is an extreme example of a parent trying to get a child “right” according to their own aspirations. The model fits many mothers I’ve seen in my parent’s and my own generation. I watched many times as they not only set goals for the kids but projected their own attitudes, kids’ own preferences and tendencies not even acknowledged. Disappointment, disapproval, and inadequacy are instilled at an early age as parents worried more about where the child wasn’t measuring up according to doctors, teachers, and themselves. Children are all different and the world would benefit from the range of new ideas that might emerge from their individuality, but channels of choice narrow and opportunities for self-discovery evaporate. Understand, I do not judge my parents. They are agents of the culture and did everything they were supposed to according to the acceptable models they were given. The generational heritage matters. Patterns repeat themselves. Studies on the relationship between child-rearing and the emergence of the Nazi party show that desire for an authoritarian who says they know best repeats the family structure. Frustration at what never had a chance to flourish is projected at the designated enemy. At a time when these kinds of attitudes are emerging again, we need to encourage the change in approach with the growing number of parents who have shifted from a fear-based approach to acceptance, support and love that connects beneath the surface.

Encroachment

Sharing Consciousness

Earth Day is a day to recognize how interconnected with our planet we are, how long the chain of events that brought our food and other physical needs, as well as all the influence of people in our lives and what goes on in our heads. Beyond the support for our physical body are the minds that shaped ours, the person we saw yesterday and the line of thinking that grew from that and any interaction. The idea of being separate is a trick of words. We are the ongoing expression of everything that has been shared with us. Think of the eye of Jupiter, or a place in a stream where the current circles, both holding thei shape as the current flows in taking a shape supported by what’s below. If we think of ourselves as complex patterns of energy, the rocks are placed by genes and caregivers, some burrowing into the mud, others nudged around until a strong current moves them downstream. What flows from upstream can’t be predicted but some of it will lodge in the swirl and some won’t. This image reflects how I think of various groups I’m part of as well as myself as a particular organization of energy that will break down when my body does. Called solitons, the specialized character for each energy swirl last until the supporting structure ends. For the tapestry of human energy fields, groups form and disperse directed by confluence of individual purposes. With every soliton we inhabit we make linkages that persist in the overall field of vibrations from all that has emerged. There is resonance with similar patterns, behaviors and thoughts, finetuning our perception of experience. The interplay of multiple qualities in the flowing overall consciousness is ongoing with everyone affecting everyone else in varying degree as part of a unified field These images free our ideas of consciousness as trapped in our heads, an assumption with no basis and far more evidence to suggest otherwise. Even in the most detached head-centered lifestyle, influence flows in from all sides. We’ve been ensnared by words for too long and they aren’t adequate to describe consciousness. Images are more effective at stimulating new ways of looking at a subject. Images can show the contradictory as complementary, the difference that completes and allows the whole to work. The soliton is just one image for the interweave of consciousness. It provides a set of relationships that stir the viewer’s mind to their own speculations. Artists are best suited to showing alternatives to old mindsets that keep people from feeling part of the universe. Efforts to shift the mechanical view of the universe to an organic growth model are already happening. Artists Alex Grey and Amanda Sage use organic patterns intuiting the webs and pattern of energy that grow in complexity. Even with the sky overhead and the earth beneath our feet holding us secure in its gravity, modern people often lose their sense of connection to nature even as many in medicine are seeing the concrete benefits of nature for relieving stress and prescribing daily doses. Reconnecting to nature personally may be a necessary first step to caring for the planet. The resonance with what grows reminds us we are growing too, are part of the growth of the planet with responsibility toward it.

Encroachment. (in progress)