Healing and growth through intuitive art
There was some noise in his mind
He saw something
He read
About a man
Ancient drawings
And faces
And there was the pain
The lack of sleep
The struggle
He turned to peace
And out of nowhere
From far and from close
Softly touching
Orbs of air
Or softer than that
Came
He closed his eyes
And they organized
Themselves
Based on his love
To a new
Original thought.
Birds can fly
They are not afraid of heights
A bough
Is a home for them
Sometimes they would fight
for a good one
Then they’d sleep
Almost standing
Birds start to sing
Even before the sun arrives
Birds are soft
And hard
And I
What is hard and what is soft
In me?
What am I afraid of?
What will my dreams be like
If I have to keep my balance
At night?
Will I sing
In the morning?
When I was very young, there were geckos on the screens of the windows in my room, hunting flies and moths. And beyond the screen birds were standing on the windowsills. Then they would fly to the trees that surrounded the house.
In the evenings many birds would fight for the good boughs, making a huge noise. Then they’d settle down and sleep, sitting on their folded legs that held on to the thin branches. They did not have homework to do. I loved their boldness as they peeked into my room, with the excitement of having just flown still alive in them.
Today, when I close my eyes and imagine what a good life is for me, I see myself flying above the landscape, almost like the birds, but I flap less with my hands. I just have to think forward and I fly. And when I settle on a bough, at the top of the tallest tree, I do not shout. There is nothing to fight for. The world comes to me.
The mountain range is dreaming
It throws little lakes around
And casts reflections
In ochre and purple
When the sun goes down
To meet the mountains
The mountains cry
To the sky
And the other little mountain
Alone at the side
Oh,
Is in awe
The pain in my feet is hard to take. The body does not like it. The subconscious thinks it is terrible and something must be done immediately. I sit on the bed and place the more hurting foot over the other foot. I put my two palms on two different places between the knee and the pelvis. I want to feel both palms, as they touch the leg, at the same time. Not to move my attention from one to the other. Together. It is impossible to do with effort. I know already. So I relax as much as I can. I tell myself: Go empty. Go empty. Empty. I give away thoughts and worries. I feel calm for a moment. The pain goes crazy but for just a moment There is calm. In that moment the experience of the two palms touching in their different spots comes to me. It is not me chasing after the experience. It comes to me. It does not come to the mind but to the heart.
I stay in the experience. Within the environment of crazy pain, there is an area of peace, in which the experience of two separate hands touching two different places on the leg somehow continues to exist. I leave my attention there. I keep being careful not to make an effort. I just tune into experiencing the two touches. And the calm starts to grow.
Then there is a relaxation of the whole body. After some time the pain fades out from the foot that hurts more. Now it moves to the other foot and I continue. This is a healing state.
Sometimes the peace grows and I feel that I am the peace. Then the event of the pain in the body looks like an interesting event in eternity. And it is as if I am the little mountain at the side.
All the questions that we have
Lead us to one final question
And all the power that our questions have
Comes from leading us to this
The question is: Who am I?
Or what am I?
And there is no answer to this question
Because we are the freedom
To be as we wish
Or as our heart yearns
And it is, in the end,
To be ourselves.
My old brother sits in the room of our childhood
The trees in the yard
Move slightly in the wind
Inside of his body
The clouds, one big one small
Throw a ball between them
A picture that he made one summer
Still hangs
And every step that he took
Upon the reddish earth of the village
Has left a clear imaginary mark
In the infinity that he is.
A rock and a shadow
Stand on the flexible green
And a cloud comes
To cover them
It turns out
The shadows have been going on
From far in the past
And into the future
Unfinished life forms have only to ascend
As the blue haze is hinting
To come to a place
Of peace
The life forms
Will decide
Or does it only
Seem so?
The rock and the shadow seem to be me and my shadow thoughts.
The flexible green is the village where I grew up. Much of the shadows start early in life.
The cloud is the way our subconscious thoughts are unknown to us, until we learn how to hear them.
We know this, don’t we? The shadow thoughts are those that prevent the energy of our infinite self from being expressed by us in the life that we live.
Life forms are me and you and others. We constantly change, so we can be seen as unfinished, until we discover one day that we are like dreams. We always represent our state of mind of the moment.
Can we choose how we want to be?
I would like to add something to the previous entry.
In the composition there are two spots that have some uniqueness, some characteristics that are different from everything else in the picture.
These are: the area that looks somewhat like a head with dots inside and the area that represents the pain. Here they are:
These two spots relate to each other in their colors, textures and the feeling of having interruptions in them. I could call it spottiness. Please look at them in the big picture, in the previous entry.
In the head, the spots look like a decoration. In the pain area the feeling is of a bleeding in a weak system.
Because these two spots are the only different places in the painting, they become important, and the relationship between them becomes important too. They become the subject of the art. Usually the subject of a picture is the strongest and biggest element. and here the subject is almost negligible. The two big movements in this painting, this of the lines and that of the color shapes appear to be the strongest and biggest elements. Maybe it will be more correct to say now that the subject of the art is the contradiction between the strong and big elements and the smaller but disturbing elements.
This correctly represents the situation I am in. There is the big movement of opening and connecting more and more to the infinite part of us, and there is the disturbance of the pain.
The pain is related to thoughts that are at the same time beautiful and separated.
Thoughts, beliefs and expectations bring about the experiences that we end up having. Some of the thoughts, the red ones, are connected to the pain by color. If I could let go of these thoughts, maybe this will stop the creation of the pain? And what stands in the way of letting them go? It is the fact that they are considered by me to be beautiful.
Usually we would think that thoughts that create pain must be ugly, shameful, and having other such characteristics. But many of the thoughts that bring us agony are actually being loved by us. This is why we do not want to let them go. Is this true? These thoughts are usually chosen in a very young age, in traumatic circumstances. The child, let’s say the really lovely three years old child, encounters danger. Out of love, and out of wanting to make the situation better, he courageously decides on the spot to act in a way that for him will be the best solution. He feels that it will be a sacrifice. He will have to let go of something that is enthusiastically loved by him. But he is determined to do good, and save the moment. It is beautiful. He is a hero. But this choice of his leads to blocking his connection to his flowing happiness and this creates all kinds of suffering, including, in time, physical suffering.
What do you think?
Thoughts go right
Feelings aim left
White is all around
Red is where it hurts
And if this makes you want to ask
Let the questions go
Sink instead
To where the questions come from.
I’ll go line by line in the end. But first I’ll say this:
The poem is how I read the art. At first it is just finding content, quite intuitively. As this inner seeing goes on, a deepening of the awareness happens on its own. A deeper view becomes available and it expresses itself in the end of the poem.
This is a general characteristic of art making. When making art, any form of art, we tune in to deeper layers of who we are. You can call it a meditative effect. The noise of the outer layer of our life calms down. More subtle energies start to be noticed.
This happens too in the drawing and in the addition of background colors. The drawing already is a process of increasing awareness. So when the background colors’ time comes, I am already in a deeper state than the way I started, and the background colors are added with greater understanding and compassion. (Note: I do the background after I do the line-work.)
The whole event, the drawing, painting, reading and interpreting, is about introducing awareness to what is going on in the mind at the time of making the art and reading it.
Now line by line (almost):
I took the drawing to be the thoughts. They created in the picture a bridge like shape that feels as if it goes to the right.
The background color shapes seem to be aiming at the left and I took them as feelings or the energetic movements under the thoughts.
There seems to be a contradiction here. Why would the thoughts and feelings go in opposing directions? This question is not being answered. But note that the color shapes were added when already in a deeper state than in the beginning.
White all around is the feeling of the infinite awareness that is everywhere.
The pain is in my feet. In almost all of my artworks there is some expression of the pain.
And here, in the end of the poem, comes the advise from the deeper and wiser state. Go to an even deeper awareness. Answers that come from shallow layers of us will not encompass the whole picture. They will be partial, and more questions will have to be asked and answered. Better to sink deeper into the infinity that is us, and allow something more fundamental to emerge.
And better yet: No matter how deep the answers come from, It is awareness that notices them.
In the beginning there was a face
With jugged lines
As if hacked
From a Redwood tree
Then the forehead
From which the stories came
cleared up
And you could see the endless sky
And you could see the forest
As it hugged the flowing waters
Carving their path in the earth
From ice to sea
Then a woman of light
With a cane
Stood up to tell her pain
To the hollow pine of history
And as her light ascended in the air
One little cloud
Came to rest
On the mountaintop.
——————————————————————————————————————–
I saw myself for what I am and therefore the woman was seen for what she is.
She is my mother, and this seeing releases her from the character that she played in our dream life. I can laugh now. History is indeed empty.
I close my eyes
And let the not-body see
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.
intuitiveflow 