Things that I drew many times before, appear again in this drawing.
The drawing is dense with shapes, especially on the right half. This drawing asks for colors that will help define the shapes, the background and the background of the background. The first background is the environment. The second is eternity.
What are these things doing together? They are flowing. They come into being and they move on, leaving their place in our awareness for other things to come, with the flow of our thoughts.
When you look at details, you may find that even shapes that seem to block the flow move, together with everything else.
All the things that I love move. They are not now what they were before. Mainly, everything shows to me how everything changes. Like watching a parade, I watch my life passing by. There will always be something to watch. My thoughts will make everything more and more beautiful. The sky will turn into the infinite heart. My home will recline on the back of my cat and both will float as clouds over the land, spotted with things I have not come to know yet. The village of my youth will undulate with little waves, while a simple bug will fly away from the big pine of my youth to its own new perceptions.
Then, when you think of it, only thoughts and perceptions change.
To end, since the drawing begged for colors, I gave them to it.
I thought just now of calling it: birds falling from the sky.
As in many times before, many shapes that I drew, not knowing what I was doing, ended up looking like strange animals. I did not think of any birds and no people were planned. But now there is a man in the left lower corner, doing something and maybe using a second head to look at the biggest falling bird. Maybe it is falling right on him? On the right there is a bra hanging from a tree branch. It seems there is some ground at the bottom. It is not drawn. But several things stand on it. This is why, for me, it feels that an earth must be there. At the top there is a big bird feeding a young, smaller bird, while in flight, as airplanes sometimes do. maybe there is a cat down on the earth, with some unknown creature standing on its back. So what is behind what I draw here? I somewhat like this drawing. I did not add paint to it, to preserve it as it is, in the most alive state, before the power of the colors reduces its strength. Being raw, you can feel the fascination with the shimmering of everything. This is how I see things nowadays. It is not a perfect drawing. The hanging bra and one little bird, alone in the air, at the top left, break the diagonal flow of everything else. The little bird moves at least. But the bra is defying every tendency in the drawing, by hanging vertically, as if nothing is happening around it.
This is not a happy drawing, though the deep curiosity is here, and curiosity is a happy state. So it is a mixed mood.
I love birds, I love rocks (there are two at the lower right corner), I love cats, I love people, I love the sky. There is nothing in the drawing that I do not love.
Maybe the issue of the drawing is the inconsistencies?
Maybe it is the big event of the central big bird falling and the chaos that it creates?
Of course there are always details in life that continue their natural way of behaving, as if nothing happened, as in all cases when some disaster occurs.
This is it! I have caught the essence of the drawing for me.
How do I know?
When I wrote this it felt right.
So:
Disaster happened.
and nature goes on as if everything is okay.
The sky continues to be wonderful.
Painfully, the recognition is being forced on you: the big disastrous event is only in your eyes. Big as it is, it comes and goes without leaving a mark in infinity.
There is joy everywhere.
The universe with no borders is flowing gracefully and lovingly forever.
Everything happens and nothing happens.
It is like all the little waves that you bump into when swimming in the lake. How many of them will you remember when you are already out of the water, lying on your back on a big towel and watching birds in the blue sky?
I saw blue. I made the drawing. It is an interpretation, as all channeling is. The reading will be an interpretation too.
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The first result: Childhood memories It is a cloud that seems to be everywhere, but more dense, in the kind of density that clouds can create, above me. Maybe it is more like fog. I know that there is clear, beautiful sky, beyond this fog. Just three years ago I stood in my crib, looked at this beautiful sky through the open window in the living room and admired it. I did not have the fog yet.
The fog is only for me. Other kids around me do not seem to have this fog all over and above them. They seem to be fearless, compared to me. They speak freely, sing freely, play freely. Only I have this fog.
The fog makes everything that I want to do difficult. I move through viscous caution. I speak, sing, even think, through this fog that only I know about. Others do not see it, except for women. Some women have the ability to see it. I know that my mother sees, but she never says anything about it. I have to be very careful with women. As long as I am doing what they approve of, I am okay. But I can never be sure. I may do something that will anger them, and they will punish me. Women can punish. I am never safe. What will I do without my mother, if I anger her?
I don’t have words for all that I am describing to you now. I feel all of this and I can’t explain it. Even if I could, I would not dare to create words about it. I don’t even dare to look at the fog. I act as if the fog does not exist. It seems that most people do not notice.
Somewhere, in a deep and hidden place inside of me, I know that I have given up my freedom. But since I know that I cannot have it, I make myself numb, so I will not feel the despair. Despair and fear make the cloud.
Not as I usually do, I knew what I was drawing before I started. Usually, as you can see in most of the previous entries, I allow what wants to come to show up, and then I read it or relate to it in another way. This time I experienced the fog and wanted it to speak. You saw what it said.
I still have it. I have broken through it numerous times. Sometimes I broke through it many times in one day. At times I stayed above the fog, so to speak, for days, weeks, and months on end. But it is still here. Especially when I am about or already in the process of breaking through the fog in an even greater way. The mere readiness to face some new frontier is enough to provoke the fog, even if it was dormant for a while. So I am having this conversation with my infinite being, through the drawing and the reading.
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Now, even as the blue lines wanted to tell that story from my childhood, there are many other ideas that showed up in the drawing, and I am going to write about them now.
Here is what can be noticed in the drawing. There is a stream with waves and there are some less flowing shapes above and below the stream that join the stream. Also, the stream starts from the left, where it is less flowing. It starts from a place that almost does not move.The lines there are heavier and clumsier. If you follow the flow from the bottom, there is only one line that goes from the bottom into where, after some hesitation, the flowing starts. There are two more lines that come into the picture from the bottom. They come together and just point up but do not join the movement.
What if the stream is transparent? What if it is a strong stream of unseen substance, that, when it moves through physical things, it draws them into the flow. Do they want to move? Probably not. They want to continue being the physical things that they are. But the stream wins. It pulls the physical things into itself, and now we can see the movement because it seems that the physical things are what the stream is made of.
The physical things can also be thoughts that have become persistent. They too do not want to change. But the stream takes them on its trip and they gradually dissolve into its better feeling.
And there are two separate shapes above the stream that fly independently up there. They seem to have a smooth flight. Why are they looking back?
I am going to jump to the words that come to me now. It is like a description of a whole life. Its essence is an unseen stream that seems to attract to itself some reluctant physical things or habitual thoughts, and they end up moving along with the stream, as it goes all the way out of the picture. There is no doubt in this drawing that the stream continues, after it comes out of the frame. Still within the picture, its flow becomes more flowing. Maybe it is moving faster and easier in the right side of the picture, as it has less things to carry; or the things that it carries get more streamlined.
Did I mean to draw all these things? No. I thought about the cloud but did not know how I will draw it. I just felt that a line wanted to be here and another one there, and I agreed to draw them accordingly. Why? Because it felt good to do so.
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This good feeling is the sign, for me, that I am drawing what my deeper part wants to tell me, based on my state of mind. The good feeling is from the energy of my deeper part. My state of mind was that I wanted to be free of the fog. The first thing that came was the painful story of the habit of thought that a childhood trauma has created. (This is just a way of saying, but the truth is that I have created everything.) The second is the bigger picture, not as it is seen through the eyes but as it is felt as the energetic reality. From this, deeper view, the drawing tells me that I am getting freer from the fog. The way I am getting freer is that, because of experiencing the bigger picture; meaning being aware, the weight of the stories of life becomes lighter. If in the beginning of this life the stories were heavy and clumsy, now they let themselves be carried along with the unseen current. They cannot stop the flow because I chose to go with it.
What is the flow? It is who I really am. A part of the infinite flow of everything.
And what are the two birds above the waves? They are me too, on another level. It is the level of being able to see the bigger picture. People call it awareness. In the past, the bird still looked backward, based on the understanding that the past was important for the present. Later, the bird still looks back, but less. This is the development.
The stream is free of the stories. I know this. All the stories end up melting into it. What will happen to the stories of the past? What will happen to the bird?
Well, it is not the stories that melt. It is how I relate to them that is losing ground. They will stay. My brother will still have his eighty years birthday in a few days. My children will still be in their middle age years, and they too will make choices every day, about joining the stream of who they are or resisting a little bit more. My relation to all the stories will come only from my true essence, from my steam that flows forever.
The stage workers bring a heavy black chair onto the stage. The chair has stout heavy legs. The workers place it facing sideways. Then they leave the stage.
A man now comes to the stage and he is dressed
in black. He turns to the audience and boughs. You can feel that he is
preoccupied with something, as if not all of his attention is to the show, as
so many people that we know are. Maybe we too are like that. Something bothers
us even as we perform the movements that our society expects us to perform.
But this person is well exercised in doing all
the necessary things and we, in the audience, get the feeling that he knows
what he is doing and we don’t have to worry about the performance we are about
to watch.
The hall is dark indeed. We do not look at
ourselves. We are focused on the stage and our hearts just pump a little bit
stronger than when we are at rest.
The person on the stage sits in the chair,
facing sideways, as the chair is. He looks at us, to connect and to draw the
attention he needs. We can feel it. He needs our energy in order to perform his
miracles. Nobody says anything and there is not even any pantomime that
suggests it, but we, in an unnoticeable way, become committed to giving this
unknown man in black clothes all the energy that he needs.
To our amazement, while the man is still
looking at us and we feel his preoccupation with something that we do not know,
the legs of the chair start to become shorter, but the seat remains in exactly
the same place in the space of the stage. It does not sink down. Indeed it
floats in the air.
The person’s feet still touch the floor. If he
was made of steel and if his soles were screwed to the wooden floor of the
stage, this would be somehow physically possible, with a lot of stress. But
this man just walked. His legs are not made of iron. How can he do this? What
is going on here?
The man on the stage acknowledges our wonder.
In fact he seems to be just as quizzical about this as we are. He slightly
boughs with his head to us, but our attention is attracted now to something
else that is happening.
Somehow, in a way that I cannot explain,
another, slightly smaller man is coming out of the first man’s body.
At first it looks like a shadow. But the
shadow immediately becomes a real sleek person, who climbs on the first man’s
shoulders and sits there. This person is more extravagant. He smiles at us,
tilts his head slightly forward to thank us and he waves his hands, as if he is
conducting the applause.
We are still holding our breath, fearing that
the two men on the stage might fall backward. How can this all be?
And before we even start slowing the clapping
of our hands, another, smaller person comes out of the second one and sits on
that one’s shoulders. The clapping goes wild. We do care about these wonderful
people, who can do such miraculous things, and we want to be very careful not
to excite them too much. But we can’t stop our gratitude from coming.
The last one is a child. Maybe he is a
smallish teenager. He takes his cape off and waves it for us, as if to show
that this is an easy thing to do.
The child is shaking his body up and down to
imitate riding on a horse.
Then he folds himself back into the second
man, and the second man disappears into the first man, who still looks at us,
collecting our energies.
Only the first person is on the stage now,
sitting in the chair that does not touch the floor. Some clapping still lingers.
There is an expectation that the lights in he hall will come on and the show
will end.
The stage workers appear on the side of the
stage.
The chair, independently, starts to move from
under the man to go towards the stage workers, as if they are its parents who
came to take him back home. But the man’s legs prevent the chair from going to
its parents. The chair tries again, pushing harder against the legs, and this
time the man in black notices. He apologizes and lifts his legs from the floor.
The chair runs to the stage workers who hug it and walk away.
We move our attention back to the man who,
yes, there is no way to deny it, is still in mid air. Who knows how he can be
floating there in the tense silence, still looking at us with the expression of
not being sure that he did not forget something.
Then there is a puff sound, like that of a balloon
exploding far away, and the man disappears.
Note:
You may wonder about the significance or
insignificance of this show. It had a profound effect on me.
Walking home, moving from light to light in the night, I was not sure where my footsteps rested on the pavement. I still remembered the comfortable chair I was sitting on just a few minutes before, but the chair was not under me. Somehow my mind mixed the chair that I was sitting on with the chair of the show. And when the chair in the show became a child and ran to his loving parents, I felt that my own childhood was leaving me and all of its traumas became resolved. I felt as if I gave up the need to rely on my childhood’s experiences in order to explain my life. And I knew I did not need that part of my life-story any more. More than that, I did not need my whole life story. Instead, I settled into the flow of moving from light to light in the night, trusting the never-ending emergence of playfulness.
I invent as I go. The next line always suggests itself. It means that I am in a conversation and allowing the infinite-field draw through me. It always responds to my mood or feeling in the time. And if I allow a description of some energy, an expression of a feeling or any inner experience, come through as well, the energy of the feeling is released at the same time that it comes to be seen on the paper. It is released because it is being seen from the perspective of the flow, which is a higher energy. Higher energy dissolves lower energy.
Then, still in the process, relieved from what I felt before, a new, better feeling arises and is also expressed in its turn. And so on.
At some point I feel good about the way the drawing is now, and this is the sign to stop. It feels complete.
This feeling of completeness is miraculous. Where does it come from? I ask my inner guide and he says: This is your gift.
Do I understand this? Not really. I consider this not-knowing a gift too.
…
I can leave the drawing as it is.
And I can start playing with colors and additional textures or whatever feels good.
I wait for the lines that are done in watercolor to dry out. Then a thought comes to me, to photograph every step, so when I share this text with you, you will have in front of you what was in front of me when I wrote about each of the steps of making the painting. But I get so engrossed in the process that I do not want to stop, and I end up finishing the whole painting, without taking any photograph in the process. So you will have to imagine the steps that I wrote about, when the painting was in progress, while looking at the finished painting.
Now, with the finished drawing in front of me, I already feel so much better than before. Yes, just making these few lines made me feel so much better. All along the way, through the doing of the drawing, I released whatever emotions came up and became freer. Infinity matched my new feeling and brought new ideas for lines or effects that felt better than before.
…
I did the first color area, the dark green. The people at Prismacolor (I used Prismacolor pencils to color) call it Olive Green, but it is not olive green at all. It is more like what is called in other places Forest Green. It has a sense of depth and aliveness. I feel happy about how the drawing jumps above it. The softness of the green and what feels like a positive environment makes the brown of the drawing a bit scary and as it has bad intentions.
Also, suddenly there is a feeling of depth. The green calls you to sink deeper into it and the brown line is jumping closer to us.
…
I had a feeling of what would come after this green spot. I saw in the imagination many colors. I saw a procession of them in the same kind of spots, developing into some jolly dance.
But now, that I see what is appearing, as I am working on the next color area, the ochre, another game suggests itself to me. I feel excitement about what I’ll do. Look at this: another improvement in the level of joy.
…
The second color, the reddish ochre, is in. It feels as if it is under the green, but if you ignore the area where this new color touches the green and look only at how it interacts with the brown lines, it feels to be closer to us than the green. It is under the lines just because I drew it as such. But it is jumping out a little and in other circumstances could be felt to be closer than the brown lines.
I look at what I have now and I feel it is almost enough, but not yet.
The color areas have some stability to them that makes the lines seem more active than before.
Does it feel good now? Yes, it does. But still I feel there is need for more.
…
There is strong pain in my left foot. The foot is hot. This is unpleasant and my automatic thoughts about it take my mood down a bit.
On the other hand, even though I can do something to reduce this pain, the interest in what is happening in the painting keeps me involved in the process.
…
I get tired suddenly and decide to stop and continue the next day.
…
I look at the picture in progress in the next day. The red added a stone like body that is suddenly turning down. The ochre and the green made an effort to go up and this red goes down. It is not a stone really, and the green and ochre aren’t that heavy. They float. They all are light and it is just a meandering of energy, depicted in this way.
Making the red go down is actually following what the drawing does. The following of the drawing is not like making a copy of its movement but a variation that is at play with it. Again, the colors add a sense of depth, a concrete depth. The white background that the drawing played on can represent the infinite space, the boundlessness. The colors come a little closer to the way we experience our reality (This shape is close to me and that one is a bit farther away).
Adding the colors and then more effects is like composing music. You have the leading voice in the drawing. If we do not add anything after this, we have an a-capella performance. Adding the color spots and other things is like adding harmony and maybe a base line and drums. This is the way it is for me. The added color shapes can go along, can highlight the drawing and can contradict it. This creates the composition, and the composition is the most important aspect of the way the whole piece feels. When you play music, it is because you love to hear it. And it is the same here. Everything is done in the painting because I love to experience the way it comes out on the paper.
…
Now I have just done the light, dust-in-the-desert like, cloud under the lines in the left region.
As I was finishing I felt a bit of an alarm. Maybe this is not the best color here? I saw it there before I made it. I always have this soft, trusting, question in me before I make the next step. What will come now? Aug., what do you think? Aug. is August Moon, my inner guide. He is always present for me so lovingly. And he paints with me. We are one, you can say. So I invite him to participate in all that I do here as a human being on this earth.
Usually, as soon as I ask, I see the next step in my imagination and I do it. When I say that I see it, it is still not final. It keeps changing as long as I make it. Ikeep changing throughout the process, and these changes are expressed all the time. This gives a wonderful feeling of wellbeing, of playing joyfully. You can say that it is a way to walk along with awareness. Awareness itself only looks and knows. But I like to express, so I invent ways to make effects in the art that express what awareness sees.
…
At this point I look at the painting again and I start seeing possibilities for a few steps ahead. But when the blue is done, all the other possible additions become unnecessary.
…
I needed to have blue there. It was something I felt very strongly in my body. So now I feel relieved. It is a good feeling, like: Everything is okay now.
But is it? Let me look again.
The addition of the colors has made the painting more dramatic. Especially the addition of the blue has a strong effect. Now the lines are like wind and the way it blows, and the color areas are like a thunder as it moves through the landscape.
The fact that the area with colors is in the middle and is surrounded by white makes the scene harsh. It is almost shocking. Such a drama is happening in the middle, that everything else in the world has become white. The central happening has sucked all the energy from the world.
And me? I feel excited. What a game! Look at what I made!
…
I could stop here. It is like a minimal statement. The string instruments, as I imagine the lines to be, have a meandering tune. They mix with each other to travel along a short musical sentence, from right to left. They go up, they go down like in a wave, they swell again and this is the whole sentence. And in the background you hear the thunder of other instruments rolling, making a big show, but it is a short and colorful one. It all happened quickly and now it has ended. You still tremble with the sound waves.
…
Something deep in me wants more. The picture is not totally true yet. Something is missing. To be satisfied I need to add something else. And I add the screens in several places.
Yes, this is better now. Something deeper wanted to be expressed. August moon is smiling now and this means that I am in a very good state.
The last addition of the screens softens the harshness of the event. It says that this was a little occurrence in infinity. There was a concentration, some contrast, some rumbling of a passing energy, and now it is dispersing and about to disappear into the infinite peace.
…
Time to sign
I can add or align my signature with the edge of the picture. But then it will be like saying that I add my power to the tendency to confine, to frame and limit the view. So instead I decide to be close to the movement and to align myself with the infinite ebb and flow in the ocean of energy. Not to feel protected by holding on to a defined place. Not to say that my power comes from having a point of view. Instead, I am everything. Everything happens within me, is made of me and disappears in me.
…
This turned out to have been a meditation about the nature of our reality. It lead me from expressing feelings as they were detected by the awareness, which is the background to all of our excitements, going along with the experiences of how the feelings kept changing from involvement to detachment and from the narrow view of: Oh, what is happening to me, to awe.
It is a healing trip, like a pilgrimage that sends you walking in the mud step after step to disentanglement and to the bigger view of the truth that opens up.
It is based on listening to one’s heart and doing what comes from there.
This is one possibility of becoming free. There are innumerable ways and this one is my favorite.
I was still trying to see more colors in the
two upper leaves on the right side, as the knowing that the painting was
finished started to occupy some space in my being.
This also was the time when the name came. You
cannot give a name to a piece before it is finished. Well, maybe in most cases.
Sometimes you know the name even before you start. It is a strange thing, the name. It is the “what is it about” of the piece. Sometimes it happens when you recognize something special about it. In other times it is an interesting feeling that you have even before you start, and are curious enough to explore it with the art.
In any case, what has given the name immigration to this piece?
For me it is this strange line that crosses through almost everything else. Here you have this plant or whatever is depicted as the main subject, and with no logical reason, in comes this beige line, wrapped in orange, and dares go through the leaves that have color, the thick beige trunk and the empty leaves, as if it has grabbed the right to come in at the level of its choice and disregard the prevailing order.
You could even say that this stranger has cut
through the old and established areas and it is aiming at the most vulnerable
but alive green. Isn’t that green the best of all places in the plant, where
life is experienced in its strongest impulse to grow, and its boldest claim to
the adventure of being a body in space? If you had to choose a place to experience
life, where would you go?
And yes, the plant was just all right without
this beige and orange intrusion. Everything was just working fine. But coming
in, as this new line did, has just given the most interesting and the most
intense experience to this old plant.
It has introduced drama to the composition.
How poor would the composition be with only all that is okay in it? Now
something is breaking the routine. Something is happening, sweet, tasty, maybe even
spicy.
You really need to look at immigration from a composition point of view, to see what it means to everything that is involved.
As it happened to me many times before, I was planning to paint big parts of the picture and use a few different colors to help identify different entities or things that happen in the picture.
Still with the same intention, it came to me to jump to a different portion of the drawing, near what I came to call the mice, so that I could better imagine what color I’d give to one mouse’s back. And suddenly, looking at the whole picture, I knew that it was finished, and the meaning came to me, as it is in the headline for the entry. Until then I did not even think about mice and a goat.
It is an interesting thing, isn’t it? I start with one thing in mind and end up with another.
This change that happens within a creative process is not an exception to the usual way things go. I believe it happens in every creative process. As a creative process goes on, because of allowing it to happen through us, our perspective changes. We become better connected with the place from which the creative process comes from. Creative processes happen not only in the arts but also in many other activities, when we really put our hearts in what we do.
Why? What does this mean?
The answer is in the following of one’s heart.
When we follow our thinking processes, we can’t but be limited to what is kept in our minds, which is what we have learned. We can learn more before we make a new decision, but still, we will be again limited, this time to our extended knowledge.
Creativity is different. When we get into a creative flow we let our minds rest and we open our inner listening to what may come from the infinity of all that is. This is what I call intuition, which is: Knowing without the need to think about it. If you do these things, you probably know that creating or letting intuition come through us, feels so much better than trying to solve problems through thinking. The intuitive flow is what brings us into a deeper state. Our perspective changes and with it our aims, the ways we think and act and our choices.
In a way, getting into an intuitive flow is like climbing a mountain to be able to see a wider area to understand it within a bigger context.
So it is natural to start a work of art, aiming at one thing and to end up in a different place.
In my case here, the mice who still want to talk with the goat represent ways of understanding of my life that are based on ideas that I had stored in the subconscious in early age and that are still active today.
I feel something went wrong and I want to fix it. I, represented by the mice, want to talk to the goat. The child wants to discuss an unfinished business with the parents or with his world.
At the same time I keep getting better at going deeper, and from there both sides of the conflict are seen as what had been created by the same intelligence, to enable experiencing this unique conflict and maybe to enjoy the deeper satisfaction of freeing ourselves from it, realizing that it is a game after all and it will change when our belief in its truth will end.
This is what healing is. This is what meeting your true self means.
Everything is changeable. The two sides of the conflict were invented for their enactment on the stage of life. One of the sides is what I call “I”. The other side is mostly the other people around me. I had my extensive experience of living the conflict.
The show has ended now.
The lights in the hall came on.
It is time for curtain calls. And then: What will be the next show?
