CD#10 Coming face-to-face with a giant made of sand
June 2021
In this newsletter, Jan Rudestam writes about coming face-to-face on retreat with a giant made of sand. We start, though, with some musings on meditating creatively by Arah Gould, and end with great news about Brigid Lowry’s new book. There’s more, of course. ⁂
MUSINGS ON MEDITATION
Navel-gazing and bird song
by Arah Gould, Portland Oregon, USA • arahgould.com
We meditators are sometimes accused of being navel-gazers, which seems to suggest useless time spent peering down a hall of mirrors or into a lonely wind tunnel or getting lost in repeating loops of narcissistic drivel. The way it’s described, gazing at one’s navel is rather futile, like staring at a ‘Dead end’ sign and expecting a path to open up.
Sure, stuck and uncomfortable places exist in meditation, but they don’t last forever and can often teach us something about ourselves, if we can bring some curiosity and patience to the process. Fruitful explorations that help us cultivate more of the life-affirming qualities we seek are indeed possible, and a real gift of meditation. Experiences may occur that expand our perception of self, give us a fresh perspective, and fill us with wonder.
If I were to actually engage in some navel-gazing in meditation, what might I really see and what might I learn about myself? Perhaps if I really took a look at my navel, I’d see a monument to my origins. I might recognise my belly button as a physical reminder of my connection to my mother, and her connection to her mother, and so on: a navel monument, marking the place where I was once joined to my mother, my lifeline. It very well could then lead me to consider my beginnings as an utterly dependent being, a self whose whole world was bound to another’s by a chord, linking me to my life source and all the generations that came before.
How funny that in turning toward myself and gazing into my navel, rather than collapsing into a nihilistic black hole of self-absorption, it’s possible that I might instead become more aware of my inextricable link to others. I might be hit with the wonder of how I am but one small moment in the larger torrent of life. Gazing inward, it might be that I discover the most expansive world of all.
And if that were the case, then my navel would be like a telescope, offering a glimpse of the cosmos and my humble, yet precious place in it. Meditation can take us from the micro to the macro, from a small, petty self fixated on a narrow view, to a more fluid self embedded in a complex and ever-changing landscape, sustained by forces seen and unseen.
Just this morning in meditation, as is my custom, I opened myself to the familiar parade of emotions, thoughts, images, body sensations, and memories that made up this me of the moment. I’ve learned to listen and attend to my inner world.
This time, amidst a thought – perhaps it was the most mundane of thoughts – my attention abruptly shifted to the sudden and insistent chirping of birds out the window, and with it the unexpected sensation of something vital and brimming with life on this most bleak of January mornings. I can’t recall ever before having noticed the abundant cheerfulness of bird song quite in this way. I too for a moment shared in this riotous energy of bird chatter and it filled me with a momentary buoyancy.
Just after, the bell rang, marking the end of the meditation. Call it navel-gazing if you will, but I emerged from this meditation with senses sharpened, my spirits lifted, a tender kinship with the world, and a readiness to meet my day. ⁂
Arah Gould is a long time meditator with Pine Street Sangha in Portland, Oregon, USA, and a teacher in their Continuing Education program. To find out about Pine Street Sangha’s creative approach to meditation write to molinewhitson@gmail.com.
Notated music is just a sliver on top of thousands of years of improvised music.
– Stephen Nachmanovitch in From this world, another (Terranova Editions, 2021) by David Rothenberg and Stephen Nachmanovitch
PAINTING THE CONTEMPLATIVE STATE
Fredericka Foster: Thinking as water
By Ronn Smith • creativedharma.substack.com • Cambridge MA
Fredericka Foster’s paintings are both mysterious and deeply comforting, not unlike a river, lake, or large body of water, which has been the subject of her work for more than 20 years. As she states on her website: ‘Our bodies are mostly water, and we are an intimate part of the hydrological cycle. Think about this when you first awaken – we are all water filters. We intrinsically know this, and that all life depends on water. Looking at water, or a painting of water, resonates emotionally in our bodies and minds.’
I interviewed the New York-based artist via Zoom on 17 May 2021 to discuss her career as a painter and water activist, her practice of Tibetan Buddhism, and Think About Water, an exhibition currently being presented in an interactive VR gallery on thinkaboutwater.com. Curated by Doug Fogelson, the exhibition features 28 ecological artists and activists who interpret, celebrate and defend water through various mediums and innovative projects. The online exhibition is ‘open’ until 21 June 2021.
Our free-ranging conversation covered her love of museums; her use of a limited palette (with colours often ‘stolen’ from the paintings she sees in museums); and the inspirational work of John Cage, Mark Rothko, and Mark Tobey. The following is culled from that interview.
⬆︎ River Revisited, 2017-21, oil on canvas, 40 x 60"
Ronn Smith ❖ In describing your process, you have said, ‘I am primarily a perceptual oil painter, using imagination to explore the rhythms and forms that appear on the canvas. The colors I choose are arbitrary, and paint is layered until I see movement and life. The interaction of water and light is what interests me, and by painting water without a horizon, I am able to capture its abstract nature.’ When were you first aware of water?
Fredericka Foster ❖ I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of water. I was born in Seattle, Washington, and all of my summers were spent at my grandparents’ lake house, and later, when my parents got a lake house, there. I was in the water like a fish. But it wasn’t until water became the subject matter of my work that I really came home.
RS ❖ When was that, Fredericka?
FF ❖ The first water painting was exhibited in 1999, I think. I began meditating in the 1970s with the om mani padme hum mantra, from Ram Dass’s Be here now. Then, in the ’80s, I was doing Zen, and Shunryu Suzuki said, ‘If you want to understand the mind, simply watch water.’ That process of watching the mind and watching the flow of water became very important to me. That process, of course, is very meditative … most of the time, not all of the time.
But before starting the water series, I did a series that involved a lot of symbols and metaphors from different faiths. I found out that water was common to every single one of them. So when I started to paint water, I realized this was my personal history, my spiritual practice, and I was no longer interested in self-expression. I noticed: I’m witnessing now, how interesting. That was a very magical process for me. The distinction between me and water – since we are water, really – got fuzzy for me. And life has been fascinating ever since.
Chuck Close said once, ‘Every artist has to discover their subject matter.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s ridiculous. You need to discover your style.’ But at some point I realized that I didn’t have to worry about my style because style is intrinsic, and people recognized that I made my paintings even without a signature on the front. Close was absolutely right.
RS ❖ You paint on a large scale, and often in series. What I admire about your work is that each painting is both abstract and readily identifiable as water. Up close, I can often get lost in the abstract quality. Not including a horizon in the painting certainly helps here. But from a distance, I can identify the water and get lost in the movement of the water. A painting will capture the light on the water in such a way that the painting shimmers, like water.
FF ❖ I know I’m done with a painting when the water starts to move.
RS ❖ The paintings require of the viewer a contemplative state to appreciate fully, similar to the contemplative state I imagine you are in when painting them. I’d like to talk a little more about your meditative, or contemplative, practice. Do you still meditate?
FF ❖ Oh yes, yes, yes. In fact, yesterday I did a Tara meditation for my sangha, the Jewel Heart Sangha. I have been a serious … oh, that’s not true. I should never have said that. I have never done a three-month retreat, I never did a hundred thousand prostrations, etc. But I have a daily practice and a long relation with Tibetan Buddhism. I am so grateful that I met the dharma in that form because Gelek Rimpoche really changed my life.
RS ❖ It’s clear to me that your meditation practice informs your work. But does your work inform or impact your meditation practice?
FF ❖ That’s a great question, Ronn. I’m one of those artists who gets so anxious when I’m not making images. Even with my Buddhist training I still need to make images. What ties it all together, I think, is tai chi. At some point I noticed that the feelings I had when doing tai chi and the feelings I had when I got into relationship with my canvas – where the canvas finally starts to talk back, saying, ‘I need that over there, a little more other here’ – I noticed there was an emotional connection. This is why no matter how they try to kill painting, it will never go away. The kinesthetic sensation just feels so good in the body. It feels amazing when you get into that flow. I am painting water, and that water moves, and often I’m listening to music … so I see a bridge between body, mind and brush.
RS ❖ There are a lot of artists, all working with water, in the online exhibition Think About Water. How did the exhibition come about? What did you learn from working with these artists?
FF ❖ I started thinkaboutwater.com in 2008. It was mostly news about water. Then, when the pandemic hit, and I really missed not being with other artists, I invited a few people for a little conversation about the project, and there was some enthusiasm for it. Giana Pilar Gonzalez, who is a performance artist and became my water journey partner, was very enthusiastic. As was Betsy Damon, the mother of us all when it comes to water. Now, there are about 30 of us in the core group.
These women are the real water activists. I never thought of myself as an ‘activist,’ but people used that word to describe my work, so I accepted it. But I know the difference between me and someone like Stacy Levy, who is going out and affecting wetlands. Women seem to be more attracted to this subject than men, so unfortunately there are very few men in the exhibition. But I’m always looking for men who are doing this kind of work. If you ever run into any men or BIPOC artists working with water, please let me know.
RS ❖ The use of photographs is a part of your process. Do you always paint from photographs?
FF ❖ No, I also paint from imagination, and those paintings are absolutely the hardest to do. I normally start out with a composition, in charcoal, and I keep changing it. But water has rules, and my brain does not know how to follow those rules. I have right/left dyslexia, and trying to think about painting that way just freezes my brain entirely. Somewhere in middle age I realized that my mistakes, my faults, were what made my paintings interesting. It also kept the work from being photorealism. Without those photographs, I start breaking those rules, those laws. So I use the photographs as sources, but not bibles.
⬆︎ Fredericka Foster’s worktable
RS ❖ Where do you see your work going, Fredericka? Do you see something beyond water?
FF ❖ I don’t. Figures have entered some of the paintings, but I don’t know if they will stay. I want to do something about my own journey with water. That work will be more autobiographical, although I don’t want to set it up that way. I’m not very interested in ‘autobiography.’ I still have a lot of paintings in me that I need to finish, but I don’t really think about the next painting. I am one of those artists who gets so anxious when I’m not making images, however, so even with my Buddhist training I still need to make images. ⁂
The stream will teach you to speak; in spite of the pain and the memories, it will teach you energy through poems. Not a moment will pass without repeating some lovely round word that rolls over the stones.
– Gaston Bachelard, Water and dreams (Pegasus Foundation, 1983)
SUPPORTING OUR COMMUNITY
We’re giving it all away
This newsletter remains free for everyone, and will continue to be freely available. In the last Creative Dharma we asked our subscribers if you would be willing to support this work with a paid subscription, with every dollar we receive as subscription income being given away.
Some took us up on this offer, updating their free subscription to a paid subscription. We’re hoping that others – you perhaps? – will do so also.
⬆︎ One Mindful Breath’s dana box; created by Grant Hayward, Mangawhai, NZ
Thanks to the support received from paid subscribers, we’re ready to award our first round of grants. If you are a visual artist, writer, film maker, or musician who combines a creative approach to the dharma with a contemplative approach to art, we invite you to send a request for funding that lets us know your vision and your need. In addition, organisations that fit broadly within the arc of secular dharma and which support events in their local community are also encouraged to apply.
To begin with, we hope to be able to give one small grant of up to USD 200 and a large grant of up to USD 1000.
Your short email or single-page letter should include the following: a brief description of your project, why it is important, how much you need, and the impact this grant will have on what you are doing. Send your request to newsletter@creativedharma.org. Recipients of our grants will be announced in future newsletters.
Starting this newsletter with a focus on creativity and contemplative practice, our intention is to foster communities with an interest in this topic. We knew this would take time, and take more than simply publishing a newsletter; we appear to be well on our way. ⁂
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.– from ‘The four quartets’ by TS Eliot
THE ORGAN OF CREATIVITY
Abandoning mental warfare
by Jan Rudestam • Santa Barbara CA • earthdharma.net
Back when I was learning to meditate – from books, tapes and lectures – I came to believe that thoughts were the enemy. To meditate successfully, to achieve nirvana, I had to empty my mind of thoughts. I tried focusing on my breath, but I couldn’t keep the thoughts away.
One minute I would concentrate on the inhalation, the exhalation, and in the next realise that I had been daydreaming. So I created a new character in my mind, a sniper, on the lookout for any thoughts that showed themselves. When a thought dared to appear, the sniper would blow it away. Bam! Pow!
Eventually I found a real-life meditation teacher and described my practice to her. She was appalled. The mind, she told me, produces thought the way salivary glands produce saliva. That’s what it’s meant to do. I didn’t need to shut it down. I could practice letting the thoughts be and observe their arising and fading away.
I had to unlearn mental warfare. As my anti-thought vigilante began to settle down, I noticed that the thoughts my mind generated were endless to-do lists, frets and worries, plans and regrets. No wonder I wanted them gone.
My Tibetan and Theravada teachers insisted that thoughts were to be ignored or avoided (though not murdered). The breath, they said, was my true friend (maybe my only friend?). Over and over again, I brought my wandering attention back to my breath. The breath became my practice.
Yet I was still aware of my thoughts, still felt they were wrong or bad.
During a ten-day retreat in the desert, I noticed that some of the thoughts showing up in my mind were really weird. They were so bizarre that I convinced myself that they couldn’t belong to me. I must be tuning in psychically to the practitioner next to me! Either I was becoming a powerful empath (my favourite storyline) or my old fillings were the antennae. Maybe I needed a hat lined with tin foil!
And then I got it. The sniper, the psychic empath, the tin-foil hat, even my thoughts of achieving nirvana, were generated by the incessant creativity of my own mind. The mind could do more than send memos, warnings, and chastisement. The mind can, and does, create drama and comedy, beauty and awe, connection and community.
And sometimes, the mind creates a gem, something beautiful, luminous, ingenious, revelatory, delicious, and novel. Something that sparkles with joy or deep satisfaction or a smart, Aha!
At another retreat, my mind produced a couple of short stories, offered them to me free of charge. One was about a woman on a meditation retreat coming face-to-face with a giant made of sand. I wrote down every delicious word, working the rough edges until they were smooth.
I don’t have to call myself an artist; I enjoy the gifts of poetry and art that arise from that organ of creativity.
This is not to say that the mind is always so generous. It still runs to-do lists, regrets, plans, and worries. The mind can be hostile, difficult and dark, running along old themes of depression and anxiety.
A lot of what shows up in the mind is habitual, old patterns and refrains. I’m still learning to observe them without getting lost in them, and without taking them personally.
I see that I have a strong preference for the charming side of my mind, the bright, seductive and playful part of the organ of creativity. I crave those experiences, but that’s not where I live. My mind resides in the muddy in-between, longing for more of the mental states that I want and resisting the dark and difficult mental states that continue to arise.
It is a creative act to hold all of these experiences with equanimity. ⁂
– Jan Rudestam is a clinical psychologist and graduate of the Buddhist Eco-Chaplaincy Training Program of the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies
DHARMIC CITIZENSHIP
Embodying the eightfold path
by Winton Higgins, Sydney, Australia • wintonhiggins.org
Two and a half millennia ago there lived a man called Gotama in a recently prosperous part of India, though one in which warring grandees put life at risk. He confronted the inescapable vicissitudes we humans all face – birth, death, ageing, sickness, separation, unpleasant associations, frustration, and our psychophysical frailty. He developed a practice to work with these difficulties in a creative way so that they ultimately fuelled full human flourishing.
The practice rested on an ethic of care and an investigative approach to meditation. Gotama elaborated a matrix of concepts (‘the dharma’) that people could deploy to parse and transform their own life experiences and inner lives. In this way he drew a diverse following, attracted the title of Buddha, and founded the tradition of dharma practice.
It remains a living tradition to this day, and has never stood still. From the time of his death, his tradition morphed into an institutionalised religion (later retrofitted with the title ‘Buddhism’) with all that this implies. Metaphysical beliefs came to mask and skew the matrix of concepts; practice was ritualised and regimented; followers were divided along lines of gender, civil status (monastic/lay) and rank; and the religious hierarchs entered into symbiotic relationships with temporal powers.
These factors blunted the dharma’s effectiveness in opening up the inner life, such that it functioned mainly as a conservative basis for social cohesion and political legitimation.
The religious turn might well have deadened the living tradition but for a sprinkling of dissenters in each generation, and the dharma’s own spread to other cultures and societies. Each such entry became the occasion for a fresh look at the original dharma as a prelude to the creative work of reissuing it in the new language, set of cultural reference points, and historical circumstances. The dharma reanimated especially vigorously when it entered new host cultures in which institutional religion played a smaller role in bolstering temporal power in the guise of a national religion.
In our own time dharma practice has spread to every inhabited continent on earth, including western countries in which the authority of institutional religion had dwindled in recent times, leaving a hiatus in ‘the western search for meaning’. Buddhism became one of the many contenders seeking to resolve this hiatus. It initially arrived in ancestral forms with immigrant Asian communities, then as a partially laicised ‘Buddhist modernism’ which made inroads into western societies from the 1960s.
As a hybrid form, Buddhist modernism preserved too many elements of Asian ancestral religious schools to embed itself in late-modern western culture. Secular Buddhism began to crystallise during the first decade of this century in an effort to overcome that limitation.
‘Secular’ here refers principally to the temporal dimension – to the fact that we ourselves and everyone and everything that constitute our life-worlds begin, endure for a while, and then pass away, in time. Secularity eschews revelations and beliefs about entities and forms of existence outside of time.
Like the Buddha himself, it has no truck with metaphysical truth-claims. Secularity insists that thought and practice should address particular times and circumstances. Like their forerunners in other new host societies, secular Buddhists return to the original teachings for answers to some perennial questions – ‘How should I live?’ and ‘What sort of person should I become?’ – and new ones generated by the possibilities and dangers we’re encountering now.
Like the Buddha himself, we in the west today are living through a period of great upheaval. We can cultivate the dharmic ethic of care by overthrowing long-established religious, social and political certitudes, oftentimes enjoying opportunities to challenge inured injustices such as patriarchy, racism and xenophobia. But we ourselves, our civilisation, and the very biosphere have now come under imminent existential threat from climate change.
To make the most of our dharma practice under these circumstances, we have to also dig deep in our own history and culture. By identifying the dharma’s western affinities we can realise its potential to enrich our lives and to deepen into the human estate. In this way, too, we can situate ourselves in the history of our own societies, so developing an understanding of how our current dangers and opportunities have arisen, and how best to respond to them creatively in accordance with our ethic of care.
We now live in an interconnected world facing a catastrophe which we humans have conjured forth.
We must break with the old idea that nice Buddhists steer clear of worldly affairs, especially politics; we must extend our ethical and spiritual practice precisely into these areas. Here we find the immediate drivers of climate change reside in a global capitalist system and the regressive policy regime of neoliberalism that is pushing us towards the brink.
At great cost to the social and the natural worlds, the current socioeconomic system once performed a progressive role in spawning science and industry. But it has now outlived its ability to contribute to human wellbeing, and only its barbaric destructivity remains.
To honour their ethic of care, secular Buddhists can lend a hand in restoring environmental responsibility, social control over productive resources, and social cohesion and fairness. This project requires a gradual transition to a new socioeconomic system – democratic socialism.
The processes that can build it are already on foot. ⁂
– an extract from Revamp: writings on secular Buddhism by Winton Higgins. Subscribers (paid and free) of this newsletter can get 10% off a printed copy of Revamp (all printed books, in fact) in the Tuwhiri online store by using the code CDTENR. Offer ends 1 August 2021.
More on A year of loving kindness to myself
The April Creative Dharma contained an extract from Brigid Lowry’s new book, A year of loving kindness to myself (Fremantle Press). This arrived recently from Brigid, who’s in Perth:
This has been a hard secret, but whoo hoo finally I am allowed to spread the word, Très bien indeed. I hate secrets and my brain was about to explode :) A year of loving kindness to myself has been selected as one of the Best Books of the Month on Apple Books.
At least three millions books are published around the world each year. Of these, between 10 and 20 were selected by Apple Books for April. Two people read the books in each category, and one book is selected, so this is a huge honour. Here’s what Apple’s reviewer had to say:
Most of us could benefit from a little tenderness and compassion directed toward ourselves. Australian author Brigid Lowry’s luminescent book is full of beauty and reminders of how to breathe through the difficult moments and appreciate the good.
Written as short entries that can be read in any order, A year of loving kindness to myself opens with a section for every month of the year, anchoring larger themes of Buddhist thought and meditation (for example, equanimity and living simply) to the experiences of the seasons and the passage of time.
The book’s second part is arranged thematically, with reflections on everyday activities like walking and making decisions – as well as Lowry’s funny, uplifting lists, from dreams she’s had to ‘things to do when life goes sideways’. We’ll add an entry to that list: open up this book.
Hearty congrats from the Creative Dharma team, Brigid! ⁂
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Main image for this newsletter: ‘Sand sculpture’ by Mike Craghead.
The August newsletter will include an article Brad Parks on metaphors in meditation, and much more. ⁂