intuitiveflow

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?

It is hard to not be able to sleep because of constant pain. It is even harder when the pain keeps coming in waves. You may wonder what is it. It is possible to see it as strong movements of energy through places in my legs that refuse to let the energy pass. It is thoughts that move energy, and that block energy. So what are the thoughts behind these occurrences? It is possible to tolerate it for a while. But very soon it becomes unbearable. You start moving in different ways to escape it, to change it, to make it less vicious, but these efforts only make the pain stronger.

Then you give up trying to do all these and you bring your body into a position in which you can tolerate it better. Maybe this position includes some movement? Then you just wait like this for some relief, some relative relief, that will make it possible for you to fall asleep for a while and have some rest that you so crave.

After hours of this, I got up and carefully walked barefoot on the painful soles just a few feet to the table. I turned on the lamp, separated a sheet from the block of watercolor paper, dipped my brush in the first color that called my attention, and started, with no plan, except for being true to what will want to come.

Looking at the drawing, you can see that all the lines have the same character. They are agitated. They are so taken by their agitation that they hardly create any recognizable shapes.

There is, maybe, a sense of walking to the right side of the drawing and being, at the same time, pushed back to the left. Maybe what is expressed, without having planned it, is walking against resistance?

The friction that resists the walking is the pain. For me the walking is spiritual, and now I read in the drawing a message to mysef: I need to go on, in spite of this resistance. There is still a lot to clean out from my subconscious.

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Looking at the drawing again, after breakfast, I see snowy peaks of a mountain range. It feels as if the view is being obscured by mist. We don’t see the mist. It is white and the paper is white. But the view is broken, incomplete, only suggested by discontinued lines.

So what do we gather now from these two interpretations?

The first one feels more convincing. Knowing the condition in which the drawing was made, it is easy to believe the first interpretation. It even has an additional “wise view” that shades some deeper light on the immediate experience of suffering.

But the second interpretation  can also be convincing, when you know that there is a meditative state throughout all of the experience. True, the experience is harsh. But I have changed at some point in my life and the aware state never leaves me. With all the harshness of the physical experience, there is some inner freedom from it and a continuous observation that is free from the stories of life. It is a view with the taste if being in awe. As if something, deep I me, is saying wordlessly: Wow! And even as the immediate physical sensation is of torture, there is the accompanying taste of eternity with the infinitely intricate and beautiful views that appear in awareness.

Seeing this, I can’t but feel thankfulness.

I could continue the drawing by adding colors and other effects, but I chose to not add colors to the drawing, so that all that I wrote about stays as clear as possible.

The drawings in my work are always the most direct expressions of the immediate experiences. The colors and other effects that come later offer additional interpretations of the same states.