A garden grows At the top of the soil With a touch of sadness To it
A lonely soul Is leaving Hoping to have it better In another place
There is gold in the earth And next to it A hidden wound A flood of sadness And the body of a man
He is resting now Near water and green He is dreaming Of a life that he could have If he managed to go up To the open air Passing the blood And the tendency of history To pull us down Against our will
In the open air Our garden grows Married To a trauma
But we know Don’t we That every morsel of this scene Is made of gold
The queen had a party The guests drank and talked Around the table But I wanted to sleep So she made a bed for me Nearby I sank in Among the big pillows The words of a book Appeared And I read them in my sleep
Nerve pain woke me up Where in the book was I?
I left with all the guests Not before I saw the queen Getting into that same bed Saying: How nice that it is warm
I let the others go And came back to fetch my shoes But the royal cat attacked me twice And fell on its back Like a rag
I gave up I laughed
The dream of my life was lying broken On the floor And light was coming Through the cracks.
The mind creates magnetic fields Within what do they live? They live in the truth The truth is everywhere And it is the only thing That cannot be destructed Therefore It is not a thing
Trees grow from the earth They eat the earth and drink water They soak the sun They breath the air Like us The earth and water are The sun is The air is Products of the ancient mind And are influenced by my own Current mind
My mind Is a traveling choice maker in infinity Using the old truth As clay To be shaped with imagination
My body can be found afloat among the houses, tables, pencils, thoughts Emerging from the ground of all
I move between my feelings and my pen As if I fly From dream to dream
Myself has turned to air.
I let everything go. My attention goes to where it usually is, which is everything that has to do with seeing. Seeing seems to be the strongest attraction and if you try to feel where you are, when you close your eyes, most probably you’ll find that your attention is somewhere where it feels that seeing happens: Somewhere inside of your head in the front part. The place where thinking happens is maybe also as strong. But this is only a habit. You can move yourself to another place. Or you can shift your inner listening to another mode. You can settle yourself into an energetic attention. This is what I did here. I found myself just attending to the field of awareness.
In the beginning it looks empty. Then you feel that it is alive. Then you start knowing that it is eternal, and you may start knowing more things. In this specific case I started seeing colors. The painting was some expression of that. The reason for seeing colors may have been my expecting this to happen or even just wanting. And when you find your body, your thoughts and emotions or your experiences, in this context, Then this is what the poem describes. The sense of beauty is inherent in this state.
Your experiences will be unique to you, if you try this. Don’t take this writing as a guidance. My teacher of meditation would say: “Let go of imagining altogether. See what is there already.” What is there is awareness that you can experience. And beyond this there is nothing. That nothing you can’t experience. You just experience that there is nothing. And this nothing is you.
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 saw blue. I made the drawing. It is an interpretation, as all channeling is. The reading will be an interpretation too.
—————————
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.
——————————-
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.
———————————
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.
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.