Healing and growth through intuitive art
He was hungry
When he fell
His green was still alive
His sun still yearned to shine
A little more
His joys and sorrows
Leaned against the wall
The light has started
Growing bigger
It was beautiful
He knew
Now where is
The unseeable heart
That will accept him all
Into itself?
I came to life
With thoughts of up and down.
I saw a lot of space above me.
I found
that I was going flat
And soon
My face was pointed down
Towards my shadow.
The light of what’s to come
Is shining-in already
Here and now
And there is always
Plenty loving space
In all directions.
The view of up and down means that I had to grow. I had to be better. There was something to grow into. There was also the view of the horizontal of course. Yes, things happen and we are moving from here to there. But up is the direction that I wanted to grow into in my youth. All the idealistic people around me wanted this too.
But there were things, parts of my story, that pulled me to the horizontal view. You have to make a living. You are alone. Your body needs sustenance. There are achievements that you will need to fulfill. Some people will help you, and others will be a danger.
And chasing after achievements, you end up, or I ended up realizing that I had limitations, and these pulled me down. I failed to go up because I had flows in my character. This is what I came to believe.
Now I am old. I am eighty. I have a heart condition. I suffer with tremendous nerve pain in my feet. I know that we do not disappear when we die. I know that we are not who we think we are. There is a change in perspective that has to take place if we want to see this. It is not seeing really. But we can be in a state in which we know it. In order to know we need to switch our attention to a different mode, which is the gateway. And here it is. You can try it out right now.
Usually we give our attention to the objects. In the case of this painting, we give our focus to what is drawn and painted. And this is indeed what my story above spoke about. But try this: Try to let go of the objects, as if they don’t mater for the moment, and allow yourself to experience the space in the painting, that is everywhere. And tune in to yourself as you do it, so that you can feel what it does to you inside. There is a subtle sense of relief. Ahh… Like that. Do you feel it? Focusing on the objects turns out to have been an effort, compared to the experience of tuning in to the the space. This is the point of all of this art and poem.
The art was done without thinking. I was just following my sense of beauty.
The poem is a reading of the art, but it responds to the sense of beauty too. And because it does it, it brings to me this content, that the space inside of my mind wants me to get.
And here lies the power of art. Of all the arts.
Dust has gathered
On the surface of my sun
My sun is emanating
Light and rain.
Discern:
Let your heart
Do the choosing
Let your sense of beauty
Show you
We are one.
Weeds grow haphazardly in the village
And the village travels like a boat
On the face of history
To reach its destination
Aren’t the weeds distracting to the travel?
And what’s the village’s goal, if not
To travel while the weeds distract?
And why is the goal so far away
Along the waves of words,
And not right here, right now?
The bird wants to fly
On her own
She slowly disconnects
From where she stands
Wanting to fly
Takes its energy
From the sun
And it is light
Hesitation
To leave the earth
Is from the fear
And it is heavy
For many years
It seemed that
She has flown
And stayed
It took a lifetime
To slowly be
More airborne
Than earthbound
One
Lifetime
Which is
No time at all.
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.
Night is coming to the desert
In the fading light
Animals show up
In a hurry
As if their working day
Begins
Legs and tails
Sharp little teeth
Soon it is hard to tell
If they aren’t really
Thorny bushes
Folds of earth
Or empty rivulets
Waiting for the floods
That may or may not come
This year
Then the stars
Open their eyes of innocence
Quietly
Pouring down on us
The essence
That we are.
Now:
Who
Do
You
Want
To
Listen
To
?
This is a person too.
You can see him dancing, even though not anatomically correct.
But when I sat down to paint this, I did not know that this would come.
I was thinking about how the energy in my body moves when I feel the fear.
So what is the fear?
It started when I was three and a half. I did not have the language to describe and explain to myself what happened and I could not choose what to do based on my story. Instead, it was created energetically, unexplained. There was a crude understanding, as children do, and it was all wrong.
So I just let my mom do with me whatever she decided to do. She was hurting and never knew how to share her feelings or ask you about yours. You can say she was a logical and practical person. She thought about what made sense to her and did it. I wrote about it in the past. It is about the death of my father in the war and how I came to think that I have caused it.
Usually, I am very good at detecting inner events like feelings, sensations, thoughts, even those very fast and quiet thoughts, that we usually are not even aware of. I am really good in catching them all. You can say, in a way, that I live partially in my subconscious.
But this fear used to overwhelm me without me noticing it. Suddenly I would be frozen without any feelings, except for finding out that I was not doing anything in spite of having decided to do something.
That something had always to do with trusting my heart and doing something independently, something that I really wanted to do.
The event that brought about that trauma also started with me, while I was, so innocently, following my dreams, and sensing success.
So many times throughout my life, when I would start moving in the direction of my dreams, this fear would freeze me and I would not feel anything for a few days.
It happened again these days. And I wanted to draw/paint how my body felt.
The color shapes give a feeling of dancing. But if you look closely at the character of the drawing lines, you’ll see that they have the energy of wanting to grab something, they struggle and they feel lost and hopeless.
But in some ways the situation is better than in the past.
There is also an expression of pain, and one of the places of pain is the area of the feet. The body tries to get up and dance, but it can’t because it is wounded.
Also, if you check where the center of gravity of this body is, you’ll see that it is slightly under the middle of the page, and because of it, it feels as if the body is too heavy to fly up. Just this, the sense of heaviness, shows the desperate state, the disbelief in the possibility of arising. Also the lines of the drawing are expressions of feelings.
So there is more expression of feelings this time. It is good. There is no freezing any more.
Then there are the yellow lines and they are the light and the freedom that are in me too.
The blue lines also look as if they do not belong with the feelings that the rest of the body has. They are a little more relaxed, colder and freer than the body. Maybe the blue lines are like the surface of water and the body is coming out from the water.
And here, maybe, you can catch, like a detective, but in this case don’t forget to be a loving and maybe even a laughing detective, why the pain was developed and kept in the body system. The fear that freezes was in danger of disappearing. You know how careful and inventive the subconscious can be when it believes one of its programs is in danger. I meditated a lot and was getting to deep places and to different energetic environments, such that would make the fear disappear, as it cannot be in such environments. So the subconscious gave me an explanation why I won’t be able to do anything, and gave me a convincing story, to prove that I need to keep the fear. I just can’t, with this pain, do anything. The degeneration takes away more and more of the body and I’ll die one day, without flying. That’s what the subconscious says, just because I had taught it to protect me in this area.
I got you in on this moment of change. There is one solution to all problems, psychological and physical. It is: Go deeper within yourself.
I like the painting more when I get very close to it. So close, that I almost don’t see all of it. This is also how I like to paint. The world around the painting disappears and all I have is the lines, the colors, the shapes, the textures. It is an extremely pleasant world for me. Who knows what’s in it? How deep can we go in it? Does it mirror me? These questions come to me now.
Maybe answers will come if we look at the painting and see what we can learn from it.
The lines in red are the energy in my body or maybe better, in my being. I know, because this is what I wanted to draw. The energy goes up, it feels to me, like fire, but not that fast. The energy does not stop. It goes and goes and goes. It is a good feeling, basically, of wellbeing.
Yes, you can detect some hesitation and doubts here and there, by the direction of the lines. But it flows on. This is the life as it comes together from so many shallow and deeper layers of thoughts. Thought after thought and Choice after choice, I determined how this flow of the energy of my now-life will go.
Take a little distance now and see those thoughts, those choices that build the flow.
They look like leaves here, with different emotional charges (colors). And their movement is not so unlike the movement of the energy. They represent all the same directions that appear in the flow of energy. This is expected. In some places the leaves seem to get entangled and almost become a blockage. But once their influences come together in the flow, they seem to move more in agreement.
How can it happen? There must be some other influences. And these are the yellow and orange shapes. Two of them, those with the straight lines, look like big bodies of light, or I can imagine them to be knowledge that is bigger than the stories in the leaves. And we have the rounded orange cloud that also contains that light in it. I won’t escape, I realize, without saying the word love.
And if you look at the general composition you can see that there is a lot of white space in the picture. This makes whatever happens in the picture, all that we talked about before, less significant. The forms may break apart, become brittle and dissipate in the white space. There is drama in the forms but the stronger presence is that of the white, into which all of the dramas may disappear.
And there are the three pencil lines. They seem to be some spontaneous excited declarations, while the more quiet curious shapes and the murmuring energy do their parts.
Now we can go back to the questions I asked in the beginning.
What is in it? It is not a question any more. Or, indeed, it could have been something else.
Does it mirror me? Of course, and probably mirrors every one else, in different variations.
How deep can we go into it?
The thoughts and choices belong to what we did throughout life or lives, so even if we go deeper than we ever thought possible, we will still encounter the same situation in which some kind of believed stories create flows of lives. The possibilities are infinite, and limited at the same time.
If we go into the white, we know it has no end. Every time we go a little or much into the white, we cause a change in our stories and in the flow. Our ’now’ changes. It can become more or less beautiful, more or less heroic, more or less of anything.
The ‘now’ is where our frontier is. This is where we come with all the stories that we have created and the ways that they have interacted and built flows, and with these we face and touch the white. The white can only touched in the now. Maybe we will step a little more into it, and all that we are, will change again.
Now the white laughs and says, between rolls on the ground and back flips: you have never been anything but white.
So what will a painter do?
The flowers grow in all kinds of shapes
The light in the flowers
Is your light
The light in all things
Is your light
Every little speck of dust
Is a door
The door is always open
Come, go through it
Come and meet us where you are.
There is light in the white areas
There is light in the ochre
There is light in the black and grey
I am in the black of all shapes
You are in the white of all
And we do not know
We tell each other ochre stories
We laugh and we cry
We say: I am ochre, who are you?
Are you ochre too?
Don’t tell anybody that I said this
These are actually
Only words.
intuitiveflow 