Tuesday, September 29, 2015

How does one exist in the moment while simultaneously thinking/planning/dreaming of the future?  Mindfulness is all very good.  Getting oneself back to the living breathing infinity of now to counteract the centrifugal pressures of information overload. 

Sometimes I think it would be better not to keep up with current affairs.  After all, it's always and again, 'wars and rumours of war'.  Humanity hasn't changed, we just wage our wars on a bigger scale and with better news coverage (with instantaneous real time video).  With the continuous onslaught of how horrible we are to each other, to the earth and to all living things, I need to bring myself back to here and now.

There's no better way to do that, for me anyway, than to be in nature.  I'm a lousy meditator and have pretty much given up trying to meditate.  Later on I'm sure, I'll drag out my pillow and set the clock and focus on my breath but after round after round after round of practice with little change I have had enough.

(as an aside:  One is instructed to just be aware of the coming and going of thoughts, like puffs of air on the surface of water, while not getting involved with them.  Even that is beyond me.  When I'm thinking a thought, I'm the thought.   I can't stand outside the thought to observe the thought wafting about on the surface on my mind   It may occur to me later that I'm thinking and I'll let that particular thought go, so I can sense the dichotomy of the thought and me as the thought.  Nevertheless, that little bit of meditation wisdom is beyond my ability).

But in Nature.  That is another thing entirely.  I become like a sponge.  I can almost feel the buzz of life; trees growing, grasses growing, insects munching, walking, flying, eating and being eaten, the continuous hum of life.  The very air seems alive.  My ears seem to expand until they are the size of dinner plates.  I look up and there is the sky.  The Sky!  A continuous look through infinity if we'll just raise our gaze.  And the clouds, like white schooners, solid yet amorphous, drifting over me, me looking up and making them real by seeing them.  How little we take in.  It is much easier for me to BE when in nature.  It is easy not to be defined by thought for all my thought is defined by the boundless Self in Nature. 

Sometimes when I've been inside for a long time and I step out under the sky, I can feel my spirit expand to match the limitlessness of it.  Until that moment I didn't realize I was constrained, constricted and made little by four walls and a ceiling.  It is those moments when planning or dreaming of a future is just a game to amuse the human element.  The spirit is always infinite.

Thursday, September 10, 2015

For weeks I worked on a large drawing, used up a couple of coloured pencils, kept trying to find a way to make it work but it was just throwing good time after bad.  There comes a point when I just had to say it's crap and it's always going to be crap.  So I burned it.

What a relief!  As soon as the paper charred and smoke curled up the chimney a weight lifted.  Sometimes I think the credo to reduce reuse and recycle weighs too heavily so that any art work attempted has to be worthy.  Sometimes frankly, it is not.  Just have to let it go and let go of the demands on myself for *perfection*. 

Art is an exploration, my exploration of my world and myself.  It isn't good or bad, it just is.  I'm not making it for some art buying public, it's not going to a gallery, or even a show (although I have shown).  Of course I'd be lying if I said I didn't care about it not pleasing others.  It's wonderful when someone likes my work.  One highlight of that horrible night when R fainted and the ambulance was called was the enthusiasm of one of the paramedics for  my work.  Such a strange sensation to be chuffed on the one hand and worried on the other.

So I burned that last work and have started on another, shown below.  This photo, taken from our new phone, is a practice run.  Trying to learn how to take photos with the phone and also how to save them onto the computer.  So it's not a great photo but it gets the idea across.  The drawing is coming along.  Hope to upload a finished version - made more difficult because we don't have phone reception here so must take the photo then go elsewhere to send it to myself. 

But I do like this drawing.  Unlike the previous one.  If I don't muck it up.

Friday, September 4, 2015

Life in *Bits*

Must be the new(ish) ways to communicate; Instagram and Twitter and such things for the blogs I follow are no longer active, or only show signs of life every month or so.

Seems we think in bits now.  We consume our news in bits, we talk in bits, we message in bits, we show pictures (at least they're worth a 1000 words) of ourselves.  These selfie bits others taste on this Moving Digital Feast where no one gets a full meal. 

Kind of sad really.

Suspect that as time goes on we will lose the capacity to think anything through.  If we can't grasp it in 140 characters or less we'll just toss it in the too hard basket and move on.  I notice that in myself.  I'll read some editorial on Huff Post, get half or 3/4 of the way through, find my attention wandering to the picture on the side bar of the cobra and python battle and click on that. 

Kind of sad really.

Even books.  I don't read nearly as much as I used to.  I read in bits.  Always getting up to check the computer, or just getting up to do something else.  Years ago I'd stake out a claim on one end of the couch and read for hours.   Or, with a really good book, stay up all night.  Now I grab 10 minutes there, half an hour there.

Kind of sad really.

But what isn't sad is - Richard has joined the gym!  He'd stopped doing yoga, hadn't done any physio prescribed exercises for months and was just curling further and further into himself.  This is a hard thing to see for he had such terrific posture.  Damn Parkinsons!  Anyway, besides the afternoon walk (or walk/shuffle) and any chores he undertook, he wasn't doing anything.  And I had a hissy fit.  Had to stop nagging him as it was making us both miserable and wasn't really doing any good.  So hard to see him scrunched over and not say anything but had to bite my tongue.  I will copy his posture sometimes to show how extremely bad it is; a sort of visual nag, but I don't say anything.  Never nagged about doing yoga, just hoped he would, that he would be motivated to want to fight the symptoms of parky but he didn't.

Hence the hissy fit.  Said not to be so damn selfish and to think of me and the kind of companion I was going to have in the future because he wasn't doing anything today, that he wasn't a self-starter and how did he ever run a successful drug squad without being a self-starter. etc etc.  Then I told him of Wilma's gym buddy, a woman with parkinsons who has experienced a major turnaround because of working out.

So he joined.  Went yesterday and today he is really really sore.

Not sad really.  Not at all.