peek-a-boo

I wonder how many people I passed by today that I never saw. People in stores, restaurants, toll booths, parking lots, check-out lines, banks, gas stations…how many of them did I see? How many people want to be seen, and how many are more comfortable with invisibility? What does it mean to see someone? There is something hard to describe…intangible…about seeing someone. It is an experience of a person deeper than the role they are playing in relation to you, like you can look past their outsides and experience them on the inside…as consciousness, or energy, or something maybe I don’t have a word for. The clerk at the deli slicing cheese; he isn’t a clerk at a deli slicing cheese…he is…who he is. But who is that? I don’t really know. But I know it when I see it.

When I see and am seen, interactions with others are different from the times I am invisible to them and they are invisible to me. When we have seen one another, we are visible, we are important, we are known, we are understood, we are not alone. It is like something inside of me recognizes something inside of you…recognizes that something in you as familiar, as if that something is…me.

update #4 on giant sequoia

The hot, dry Santa Ana winds seem to have been hard on the tiny growing sequoia over the last couple of weeks. Coupled with my being away traveling meant it dried out a lot, and I’m a bit concerned by the brown I am seeing. The hot, dry weather is supposed to return this week and so I don’t know if I should bring it indoors. I don’t really want to do that if I can avoid it. It just seems like a tree ought to be outside.

I’ve never grown anything from a seed before. It really is quite an amazing miracle to watch…to think that such a tiny seed contains within it all it needs to become such a mighty tree just leaves me in awe. For all the dominion we human beings can at times arrogantly think we are entitled to, we too have the same humble beginnings -  it brings into my awareness a feeling of oneness I often hear talked about in much loftier language, but in a very simple way is at this moment right in front of my eyes.

Tags: giant sequoia

move

Upon returning home Saturday I was greeted by a painting I started the previous Sunday evening.

I finally got around to asking myself a very simple question…what is the real reason for the block…

As there wasn’t any answer coming back that didn’t sound like an excuse I instructed myself to just sit down and start. Get a piece of paper and begin. It’s funny how when you feel paralyzed by something you can easily fall into the misguided interpretation that it is impossible for you to move. Impossible? Really? You can’t move? At all? Not even a blink of an eye or the wiggle of your little finger? The stubborn voice says “No”, I can’t move, not even a little finger. Time to laugh, and time to just move, even if it only meant tearing off a sheet of watercolor paper and putting it down on my art table and staring at it for awhile. At least it qualified as movement.

Of course it didn’t take very long for something to start to happen, that something that always starts to happen, the something that tells me I may stay up all night and lose track of time and forget about the things that need to be done or the emails to respond to or the telephone ringing or the laundry in the washer or the work that needs to be finished.

Then the voice starts… It goes something like…”I wonder what it would look like if I tried this … or added that … or used this color … or cropped this photo I took a few weeks ago … or put some molding paste here … or wrote a few words there … or … or … ” going, going, gone…

Being away from my painting last week was kind of hard in the beginning. After all, I finally started again and I was a little concerned about walking away from it for a week, thinking I would just come up with more excuses when I got back.

But when I returned home I looked at it and realized how good the time away had been…with fresh eyes I realized how very much I like what I am seeing. I’m not even hearing the critic’s voice (and that I think is a first). I’m not comparing it to anyone’s work or judging or being anything other than just happy to see what is emerging.  I’m just enjoying gazing at it in this stage of its life. I don’t feel any rush to move on to the “next phase” as I am merely enjoying it where it is right now. And maybe it doesn’t even need anything else added to it at all.  It just is…and I have this feeling that I will know when to either add to its dimensionality or leave it and move on.

Trusting in that higher, inner, voice of the heart never steers me in the wrong direction, whether in art or in life. It has just been to easy for me to let other voices stampede over the still, small voice that doesn’t demand or yell or intrude but just constantly whispers the truth to me. At times I have wondered where my heart is it seemed so silent. It had never been silent, just drowned out by the crowds.

I learned something important a couple of weeks ago about moving on…steps taken forward without as many going backward…and it felt really good to me, and very right with my heart… even though with it came some unpleasantness and a brief visit from the old nag known as guilt, and her cousin, self doubt…but their voices were faint this time…really, really faint…it does feel really good…but more importantly a deeper dimension of Love has taught me a lesson in a manner, and a language, I finally could understand, a language that got my attention and forced me to listen. Sometimes that language is quiet and gentle, and sometimes that language requires being hit over the head and knocked senseless…sometimes, repeatedly…this time…I’m listening.

heart’s home

This past week I was traveling and working…it was one of those really long kind of weeks…where time dilates and does funny things to your perception and memory…where details about its beginning, middle and ending are a little fuzzy and you have a hard time remembering certain things about it…where everything of your daily routine is turned upside down…was it really only a week? It felt more like a month…

and then…

…you return home and at the same time you feel relieved and comfortable to be in your own space again you also sort of feel like you don’t really belong there quite yet, and you feel suspended in a void of “what do I do with myself now…”

I immediately began with the activities typical of routine…open some windows for fresh air, sort the mail, go to the fridge, turn on the television and the computer and get re-integrated into the surroundings of home…I went into each room as if to say hello and bring myself back…these surroundings I love and that give me comfort and joy, but that feel so empty in these initial moments of re-acquaintance, as if my home without me in it needs me too…needs to be recharged by my being in it…receiving from me…as I receive from it…the comfort of our shared and intimate familiarity.