Rest is not the opposite of action.

Photo by shikeroku (used under Creative Commons license)

Sometimes my fallow periods are filled with resistance: I want something specific to happen and it's just not happening (yet), leading me to recognize that things are still germinating. At other times, lying fallow is a deliberate choice that I make.

Six months ago I received two devastating pieces of news within a few days of each other, and the nature of my circumstances led me to choose rest as the best course of action. It's as if I were lucky enough to walk away intact from a train wreck, and rather than immediately searching for another train heading toward my original destination, I decided to just walk for a while and take in the landscape. To slow down, serve in a smaller way for a while, and discern the shape of things.

Though I've been at peace with my decision, reading this post by Alana Sheeren on practicing self-care led me to an epiphany: Rest is not the opposite of action.

Alana writes: "The revelation that has come this past week is that inspired action and slowing down aren’t mutually exclusive if I let go of the thought that I need to be there now. I can get more sleep and spread the word about the pregnancy loss support group I’m starting. I can meditate and journal and answer my emails. But I can only do this if I truly let go and trust that there is time."

These words sparked an insight for me: If "inspired action and slowing down aren't mutually exclusive," then rest contains elements of action, and action CAN include elements of rest.

I've always seen it as rest versus action, as if the two can only be at odds. But if there is action that happens within a state of rest, then rest isn't just restorative (taking you back to where you were before) but also transformative (bringing you into a new landscape entirely). And if there can be places of rest within a state of action, then that changes the game entirely, doesn't it? What if restorative transformation can happen all along the way? What if there's a deep breath available with every step?

Metamorphosis

I created this mixed media collage/assemblage, titled Metamorphosis, to donate to the "Art Lives Here" silent auction fundraiser for Hirsch Wellness Network, which provides creativity workshops to cancer survivors and caregivers. This piece is a diptych that incorporates tea and coffee stains, vintage pattern paper, ink, image transfer, magazine collage elements, and found objects.

A few detail views:

Some of the other art works to be featured can be previewed at the "Art Lives Here" auction Flickr page. Check out Hirsch's Facebook page for auction details.

On the creative process

1.  "Just being at the piano – egoless – is to reach that place where the only thing that exists is the sound and moving toward the sound. The music on the page that was outside of you is now within you, and moves through you; you are a channel for the music, and play from the center of your being. Everything that you have consciously learned, all of your knowledge, emanates from within you... You are at one with yourself and the act, and feel as if the playing has already happened and you are effortlessly releasing it. The music is in your hands, in the air, in the room, the music is everywhere, and the whole universe is contained in the experience of playing." [Mildred Chase]

2.  "We create together with our materials and our bodies, not just from our minds... When I move freely from my body and other senses, the materials will respond." [Shaun McNiff]

3.  "I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten – happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another." [Brenda Euland]

Sketching mindfulness.

I started a new sketchbook. A record of liminal space.

Making marks   /   old friends in a new space: seeds and mandalas.

Finding one thing to love in a place I don't want to be: crooked lamp in a waiting room.

Seeing the sky: clouds.

A breath, and a breath, and a breath. That's what I know.

Postcard exchange: Everyday mandalas

Here are just a few of the 25 art postcards I've made for the international postcard exchange hosted by Art Therapy Without Borders. All made with love and delight in my new studio space.

My weekday schedule has become very busy now that I'm being supervised for my counseling license and art therapy registration, and Saturdays in the studio are a touchstone for me. Now that the postcard exchange is coming to a close, I'm feeling pulled to return to the SoulCollage deck I started about three years ago--but the beauty of a dedicated studio space is the ability to work on more than one project at once.

On being enough.

Lately I've been experimenting with what I think of as everyday mandalas. I created this one, called Heart Mandala, to accompany my guest post at Tracey Clark's I Am Enough blog.

Or is it more?

I'm keeping a visual journal as a form of professional processing. This is what showed up this week.

is this my same broken-open heart

or is it more?

more broken

more open

It's an echo of process work I was doing in 2007 during my first year of graduate school. Which, in its turn, was a continuation of unfinished work from my undergraduate thesis the previous year. Artistic process, like life experience, can be a spiral in which we encounter a theme again and again, but always at a richer level.

How can I keep from singing?

It sometimes happens that when I have a strong drive to express something, it seems impossible to name or describe that thing. Or vision, feeling, experience... I don't even have the right word to categorize its very thingness. I can't tell you, with words, what the above image (a sketchbook spread using oil pastel, watercolor, and Sharpie) is about. But when I look at the image, it distills the essence of something I am deeply in touch with right now.

The past couple of weeks have brimmed with connections, potential, joy, and curiosity. And I don't know what else to say about that. In my journal lately, all I can do is make visual marks and make lists; sentences and paragraphs just aren't forming. And that's okay. I'm always a writer, and always an artist, and always a musician, but what I keep discovering is that at any given moment, one of those creative selves is primary and the others recede--and they all support each other.

Among all the intangible experience of recent days, here are the links to some virtual gifts that have arrived in my awareness this week:

Jen Louden's kick-in-the-pants manifesto about following your calling, a.k.a. the thing you want so bad you can barely stand to think about it because there are a thousand reasons you can't possibly walk that path: Holy Selfishness

Meditative artwork by my mentor, Adele Wayman. The images on her website cannot do justice to the visceral gorgeousness of her installations viewed in person, but go take a look anyway. Her art conveys so much about mindfulness that can't be explained with words.

My friend Melanie Weidner, a Quaker artist and spiritual director, is offering a 5-week online course called Creative Spark: Advent Meditations for Creativity and Community, and at an insanely low price. She's wonderful. Please support her if you can.

And Havi's blog post about safe rooms, which is bursting with a lot of really useful stuff as always, offered exactly the thing I needed to hear today: the bit about the V formation. Maybe you'll find it useful, too.

Meantime.

This time last year, I was ruminating about how I'm always surprised by the advent of autumn and all of its emotional connotations. Now, although many of the small details have shifted in a year's time, none of the big questions have been resolved. I guess there's a reason that Rilke's letter about loving the questions themselves is quoted so often.

So here's my meantime: I'm teaching art to kids. I'm a freelance writer. I've signed up to participate in the International Postcard Art Exchange with other art therapists who support Art Therapy Without Borders. My partner and I have re-launched the Defabricate Etsy store, featuring handmade baby gifts, mini quilts, ornaments, coffee cozies, and (as of this week) cat toys. (I stitched up a feline mascot, shown above, for the cat toy packaging.) And bit by bit, I'm making marks in my personal mini-journals.

Doing it all breath by breath, as always.

A postcard of the ocean

Photo credit: Stacy Lynn Baum, Creative Commons license www.flickr.com

I was a teenager when I first encountered the statement, “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” (It seems to me that dance might actually be a very effective way to evoke architecture... but let's leave that detail aside for now.) This quote comes to mind when I remember that I first learned about mindfulness from books. Reading about mindfulness is a lot like talking about music. You can find plenty of words to describe what music does, or how it makes you feel, but no amount of discussion can convey the true experience of music. It's all secondhand.


My first experience with mindfulness was secondhand. About six years ago, I started reading books by Western Buddhist teachers like Surya Das and Pema Chodron. I loved the words, which felt like spiritual poetry to me. Mindfulness seemed like something to aspire to, something beautiful and pure, beyond my everyday experience.


Two years later, in my first weeks as a graduate student at a Buddhist university, I became a true student of mindfulness. In weekly meditation classes, I learned how to meditate Tibetan-style: shamatha-vipassana (calm abiding / clear seeing), which is an eyes-open awareness practice. When I took a seat on a cushion for my very first meditation session, I fell into the struggle that epitomizes true practice.


And boy, was it a struggle. I had thought that I knew what resistance felt like. But sitting practice showed me the true depth, color, and texture of my resistance, all the layers of experience and fear that had brought it into being. Sitting on the cushion brought me face-to-face with the specificity of my own experience. I began to understand that mindfulness happens in our willingness to be in relationship with the gritty, uncomfortable, awkward details of our inner lives. (I also learned that avoiding the actual act of sitting, out of fear or overwhelm, does not result in one's self-awareness mercifully going away. But that's a story for another day.)


In merely reading about mindfulness, I had been gazing longingly at a postcard of the ocean. But when I became an active student of meditation--on the cushion and fully engaged in relationship with myself--suddenly I was standing barefoot at the edge of the world in the stinging salt wind. When I finally stepped up to meet the ocean, I knew for the first time exactly how small I am, and (yet / also) how vital I am within the complex web of human connection.


But what about those days when we feel too defeated to even try to practice? If you're like me, you get frozen into inaction by a desire to practice perfectly. What helps me is to reframe practice as being less about mastery--what is there to become perfect at, really?--and more about just showing up to maintain a friendly relationship with myself. Know, too, that what you do as a practice is far less important than your intention. Although I do revisit shamatha-vipassana occasionally, these days my mindfulness practice takes many different forms. Instead of sitting, sometimes I do several minutes of savasana (“corpse pose” in yoga). Some days I do a little Shiva Nata.** Some days writing is my practice, and some days it's making art. Some days there is no intentional practice, and I am merely a student of the moment-to-moment: noticing what's happening inside, knowing that I can choose how to react, and just coming back to my breath as needed.


Whatever your practice or not-practice, if you're showing up with love, then you're doing it just right.


(**That's not an affiliate link, y'all. I just like Havi Brooks an awful lot, and I want more people to know about the amazing work she does.)

To-day I Am On Bird Time.

bird time by verdissage on Polyvore.com

I start my mornings with a cup of coffee and a notebook, writing morning pages on the sun porch. Most mornings the trees just outside the windows are filled with a variety of birds, who move quickly beyond the canopy of green leaves and can be tracked only by their songs. They call to each other as if that singing is the most vital and immediate action the world needs in this moment.


Watching birds go about their business, the vital right-now business of perching in trees and searching for food and communicating with other birds, changes my relationship with time. Bird Time is right now, neither fast nor slow, just exactly what it is. On Bird Time, I find myself: mind and body and spirit, right now, just as I am.


I've been wanting to write something here about mindfulness. It's relevant to my art process, my art therapy training, and my everyday experience. It has utterly changed my relationship with myself. And it's hard for me to write about.


So what is mindfulness exactly? And what isn't it? Is it a thing you do (technique) or a way to be (perspective)? And what's the point of all this?


After three years of mindfulness training (as a foundation of my graduate school coursework), I have a pretty good sense of what mindfulness means to me. But it is very much a sense--a visceral understanding, a somatic knowing. Like the classic example of riding a bicycle, it's stored in muscle memory. It's difficult to translate the fullness of that visceral sense into words. I find myself stumbling vaguely around the concept, saying only that it's about what I notice, what I'm aware that I know and don't know: my relationship with Self in every new moment.


Other people have created fabulous explanations and definitions and examples of mindfulness. I'll link to some of them in a moment. For now, the closest I can come to describing my relationship with mindfulness is this: it's like being on Bird Time.


It's not just birds who are inherently present-centered, of course. So are all wild creatures, mammals and fish and insects. So are dogs and cats. So are young human children.


Birds don't live in the future: they're not making a mental grocery list or wondering how the weather will be for migrating next season. They don't live in the past: no ruminating on regrets or perceived slights. Birds are fully embodied in present action, vibrantly alive in the now.


And sometimes, when I slow down and listen, so am I.




Five views on mindfulness:


Havi Brooks on harbor seals


Jen Louden on sensation (not more effort)


Cathy Malchiodi on mindfulness and the creative spirit


Sparky Firepants on blauthenticity


Carrie Newcomer on letting it be