stinkwanink

Recipe for Deciding

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:15:00 +0000


*No Dichotomy*

I can modestly say I'm pretty good at Flying By Seat O' Pants. But sometimes it seems like a little decisive foresight might do a world of good for the home team. In the game of life, it can help to pick a card, any card, and go from there, without back-talk.

Consequently....

Here is one of my fave current mind toys:

Ingredients: paper, pen.

1. Make a list of "Things I might want to do" related to the decision-needing topic.

Drop any concern with How? or Why?
Abstain from But... and Because...
Include the silly, improbable and fun.
Include variations on themes, different configurations of possibilities.
Don't pre-qualify. Go for speed and quantity.

2. Do something else for a little while.

Take a 10 minute Field Trip. (Get the free e-book and audio guide for this mind-refresher by signing up on the upper right of this page).
Or: hum a tune
Get a little snack
Take a walk
Pat a resident pet.

3. Recall a recent satisfying decision, big or little. How did it feel?

Confident? Playful? Light and energetic?
Did the decision seem to make itself without resistance or second-guessing?
Did you sense this would be a fine move for all concerned?
Did you feel like if it didn't work out, you'd just try something else?

4. From the feeling-state of happy deciding you just recalled, read each item on your list, listening to your heart and gut.

Cross out, ruthlessly, anything that makes your energy sag. Be a warrior: the pen is your sword.
Circle anything that has a lift, a whiff of enthusiasm, a Yes.
If you truly Don't Know yet, write DK next to the option.
Let yourself be surprised.
Move quickly. Don't linger or cogitate.

5. Acknowledge:

No=Yes. No is yes to you, to your truth right now.
Don't Know=Yes also. Are you willing to whole-heartedly Not-Know about this option for now?
Don't Know is a place to stand and step on from, just like No and Yes are.

Voila! You have made decisions. To continue....

"If it's not a Hell, YES! it's a No."--Marie Forleo

6. Pick a circled option, a Yes–preferably a 'Hell, YES!'

Make a list of small, clearly-defined actions you could take to move towards it.
Clearly-defined means you can tell when you've done it, and it's within your power to do on a day of average wattage, not genius. Time limits often work well for defining actions.
Do something else for a little while. Mental sorbet. Clear the palate.
Come back and circle and cross out those actions....
and do one of the Yes's

Repeat as needed. ;-)

Difficulty at the Beginning

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 21:09:00 +0000

"Times of growth are beset with difficulties....But these difficulties arise from the very profusion of all that is struggling to attain form. Everything is in motion: therefore if one perseveres there is a prospect of great success, in spite of the existing danger."
--I Ching Book of Changes (Hexagram 3, Difficulty at the Beginning) Wilhelm/Baynes trans

After the sluggishness of a creative mud season, what a relief to get a fresh start! Bright, sparkly, new ideas jostle for attention. The mind zips around like a crazed puppy, trying to sniff everything at once.

In this phase of beginning anything, so much is in flux. We may feel scattered and breathless at the variety of all that wants to zing into being. The strands of different possibilities intersect and tangle with each other, making it hard to see what comes before what.

When you're blessed with a springtime of creative growth like this, how do you skillfully handle the storm of confusion and chaos that can roll in with it?

The I Ching suggests we "arrange and organize the inchoate profusion of such times of beginning, just as one sorts out silk threads from a knotted tangle and binds them into skeins. In order to find one's place in the infinity of being, one must be able both to separate and to unite." (Wilhem/Baynes).

We need persistent patience to do our part in helping things sort themselves out naturally. Sometimes the best way forward is to hold back from seeking quick results.

"Restless action interferes with the creative process unfolding. If we can persevere in non-action and disengagement, the Creative will resolve everything correctly."
--A Guide to the I Ching, (Hexagram 3, Difficulty at the Beginning) by Carol Anthony

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Would you like to consult the I Ching about a difficult beginning in your life or work? Jot down what you're curious about. And pick a number between 1 and 6. Below, see how the advice beside the number you picked might apply to your situation. Would you tell us in the comments what you find?

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1. If you meet a hindrance, don't act just for the sake of action. Dissolve inner obstacles within your beliefs and attitudes. Without abandoning your goal, pause, take thought, and don't be too proud to ask for help.

2. In the midst of challenges, something unexpected happens. You can't tell if it's a windfall or a set-back. Be cautious about premature solutions. Avoid giving in to pressure to make a deal that might compromise your integrity and independence.

3. You will not be able to find your way without more perspective. This isn't a time to try to wing it or slide by. For now, stop seeking resolution, ask for spiritual guidance, and wait for clarity.

4. Relax pride and reserve and take the risk of being the first to reach out for a connection. You need help in order to make real progress; there's no shame in this. Collaborate. All goes well.

5. Your good intentions are being misunderstood; explaining them won't help. For now, continue in the background, modestly, step by step, until the situation gradually clears up and the way is open to proceed on a larger scale.

6. You aren't getting anywhere--you can't see any momentum. The difficulties seem like too much, and you're understandably discouraged. Sometimes things don't work out. But do not indulge in an attitude of resignation and defeat. Rid yourself of the effort to shore up a self-image. You have nothing to prove.

Entering Retreat

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:11:00 +0000

Self Portrait, markers, Jude Spacks 2012
(See younger self-portraits and reflections on arting about less-than-sunny stuff here).

This year for my birthday I gave myself a big present: a 10 day creative retreat at home.

I've taken six other open-calendar periods like this in the last few years, and I'm starting to get the hang of what kind of structure supports me in risking unpremeditated new work (or just humbly returning to art practice when rusty).

This time, as my own private retreat leader, I wanted to take more conscious care with entry and exit practices.

I remembered a moving story from The Art of Possibility by Rosamund and Benjamin Zander. At a competitive university, students in a music performance class were given only one requirement to get an 'A'. They had to write a letter at the beginning of the course, pretending to look back on the experience from the perspective of themselves at the end of the class, explaining why they deserved their excellent grade.

Something about that appealed to me. The students' letters are full of authentic discovery of their own passionate commitment to their craft. But my own commitment, my own edge, has to do with retreating from the incessant habit of anxious self-evaluation which asks, "Am I doing the right thing? In the right way? How about now?" So projecting why I might "deserve" any evaluation, even a positive one, at the end of the retreat seemed a little off.

On the first day I brainstormed a list of things I might want to work on, and decided on a very attainable minimum to ask of myself daily. Then I found myself writing a love letter to my embarking self as if from myself on the final day. It felt like a great way to get oriented. It surprised me. Here's what came out:

Dearest JudeNow StartingRetreat

Thank you for being so honest about what you want. Thank you for your courage to take a retreat without really knowing what it would be about. Thank you for risking that I would be somehow disappointed or feel let down by you and do the sigh of Not Enough.

I'm so sorry for all the times I've done that. Of course it makes it so confusing how much to "take charge" and how to find the privacy of really resting into I Don't Know.

I am so grateful for this time we had together, Precious. It was so grace-filled, so full, so beyond enough! I love your willingness to keep experimenting with what structure helps us know freedom, and when resisting can be bondage.

I love how spacious this time was. I love how refreshed and sparkly-alive I feel. Thank you for this gift, Beloved!

Love,
FutureJude of Post-Retreat

It all came true!

Today, post-retreat, I wrote this report:

Was SO happy with the Conditions of Enoughness (Jen Louden's term) I'd set up for retreat. As so often, the main challenge was to wholeheartedly agree to the 'enough' part. And even partial-heartedly cooperating was actually enough in itself, too.

I don't need "Not Enough!" to vanish quicker or never appear again. I just want to hypnotize myself less often into identifying with it. As long as I don't turn that crank, that pattern is harmless (actually, it's an artifact of early adaptation that is simply a form of love). I am not a victim of this habit of anxious attention. I am not the long-suffering roommate of inner havoc-wreakers and meanies. I'm the space, honest to god. Just the space, the alive holy space of it all....
---------

What would be in your love letter from a future to a current self on the borders of beginning and ending something?

Get Out!

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 17:23:00 +0000

This time of year, the SoMuchToDOOOO voice can amp up to screech. A frizz of hectic rush skitters on top of the vast quiet of the Northern Hemisphere's dark time. Can you feel both at once? Just below the surface, the unmeasurable stillness of this moment in the wheel of the year?

I had been inside for I don't know how many cold rainy days, my head in the screen, pushing to get something done. It felt like I couldn't quit until I reached an end point.

Suddenly, I'd had it. Before even deciding to, I'd popped out the door for a wet walk. You can, too. That end point? It's now if you say so.

MysteryMind Course in Creating is open for enrollment! We'll have six months to meet the beginnings, middles and endings of the creative process while you bring what you're called to make now into form.

Stopping to Start

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 16:21:00 +0000

The Neuropathway Not Taken
34x46in Jude Spacks 2011 (available)

My rapid neighbor was already whizzing away after our chat, when she called back over her shoulder, "I'd like to start writing again, myself--but I never get to it. Sometime, could you tell me what to do?"

Putting on an imaginary white coat and a take-two-aspirins-and-call-me-in-the-morning tone, I answered, "Everyday for a week, write for 10 minutes or 5 sentences, whichever comes first, and then stop."

She scooted back towards me, shaking her head. "Oh, no, I have to write at least a page...that's what I used to do."

"Well, fine, but have you written that page lately? Try 10 minutes or 5 sentences, then stop. Later you can do more--you'll want to. But the first practice is the stopping."

I didn't have time to elaborate--about how she'd Stop Not-Writing (briefly) and then StopWriting OnPurpose (also briefly, til the next day). The combo might warm her up by shifting the pattern she was in and reminding her, in actual experience, of her real freedom to write or not.

She looked intrigued. As she hustled away, she said, "I can always use practice stopping!"

Most of us can use practice stopping, especially when there's some resistance to starting something.

What would you like to stop?

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Soon registration will begin for MysteryMind Course in Creating, where we'll be experimenting with a kind, effective practice called Mighty Mini Moves to help you get going on your next project. People on my mailing list will be the first to get invited. Sign up for Insightments on upper right.

A Walk

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 21:49:00 +0000

(A version of this post appeared in Jen Louden's Savor and Serve Cafe program).

Jen Louden wrote this wonderful post asking us to walk with her in considering, "with lightness and love and curiosity," our own use of resources, bearing in mind the potent statistic that if everyone alive consumed at the rate of Americans, we'd need 8 more planets. Along with more than 100 others, I commented; Jen asked me to write a guest post expanding on what I'd said.

I got abashed and tongue-tied. I boinked my head, hard, against my tedious old writer's blocks. I so wanted to say something positive and real, something from the unified Field "out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing" that Rumi talks about.

But all that came was a brain tangle about brain tangles. The writing floundered like an oil-slicked bird with a plastic 6-pack ring round its neck. I wasn't much feeling the lightness, love and curiosity.

The Best Thing I Could Do At The Time

So I decided to go for a literal walk, to do a practice I call The Oracle of You.

Here's how it goes: You start with a question that you're willing to stop seeking answers to. Then look around and find some thing or scene that attracts your attention. You might ask this thing that tugged on your awareness your question, and listen. Or you can interpret what you saw like dream imagery, by identifying with different aspects of it and exploring personal definitions and associations about what you noticed.

My question was about how to write the piece. I let go of trying to solve it.

Do it Right and the Listener

I walked around the park, where there were many sights to see. Soon I'd forgotten all about The Oracle and my question.

Passing the basketball court, I heard a middle-aged man jeering at a teenaged boy with shoulders bunched up around a short neck. The older guy was probably a father or uncle, had a similar body type. He seemed to feel he was doing a great job of mentoring the sullen kid. He crowed, "I am now going to prove to you that you just don't have it!" as he rushed in for a basket.

Nearby, I saw a graceful younger boy sitting poised on a basketball, listening alertly to a man speaking to him from the driver's seat of an idling car through the open passenger-side window.

As I passed, I heard the man saying, "…so she just took off. That was the best thing she could do at the time…"

Around the curve of the path I could still hear the man on the court, repeating loudly to the teen, now attempting a free-throw, "Not like that! Do it like you did the other time! More control! More control! NO!"

Bright Being

Further along, a small boy appeared, sitting on a ball, smack dab in the middle of the path, with a happy, boisterous family playing nearby.

Wait. There had been another boy sitting on a ball earlier! This must be part of my answer, I thought, remembering the Oracle, which had come up with this second boy-on-a-ball as a nudge.

He saw me seeing him, as if he recognized and shyly welcomed me. I was no longer an invisible observer, a non-participant passing through.

When I got near, he picked his feet up off the ground and tried to balance on the ball for a second, his eyes twinkling. As he tipped and caught himself with the toe of one sneaker, he gave hint of a quirky smile, smaller and more filled with delight than Mona Lisa's. It transmitted a bursting happiness.

As I walked around him, I said in a gooey adult voice, "That's a neat trick!" His face fell just a little, and immediately I was sorry. I felt keenly how the reflex of praising him had interrupted a moment of communion full of acute joy with this little guru.

Out of habit, I had pretended he was showing off, seeking my approval. But really he had just invited me to join in an ordinary instant of love meeting itself--as we balance and tip, or sit in stillness, on this amazing ball of a planet together.

Waking Dream Interpretation

It was easy to see myself, with a wince, in the mirror of the Do It Right guy heckling the kid he was trying to teach. When I'm pushing myself with criticism to do the "right" thing--about what I consume or what I write about that--the motive is something about seeking "More control!" --especially over how I see myself. And I usually wind up proving to myself that I "just don't have it!"

I'm likely then to take off, to find some way to escape from the whole overwhelming mess. But I'm also that Quiet Listener--the first boy-on-a-ball--so centered, taking in the compassion of acceptance and forgiveness in "that was the best thing she could do at the time."

Seeing myself in the mirror of the second balancing boy was harder somehow. That sparkle in his eyes felt blindingly bright to fall into. It shows me a closeness, an open tenderness within myself that I fear even as I long for it.

What the Oracle Said

I took some notes about what I heard from the Oracle:

Listen very alertly to the kind voice that tells you about the best thing you could do at the time, even though you're in earshot of a voice pushing you to do better by having more control.

Trust the little complicit smile of the child balancing on the ball and enjoying falling off center. Give up on finding a formula for balance. We are always falling, always failing, and that's the play, the practice.

Don't interrupt the delight of communion and recognition by evaluating performance and offering praise, much less blame. Praise and blame are the same coin of separation.

(Am I doing this right or wrong? Well or badly? Am I doing/being enough? These questions don't serve me.)

You can accept this welcome to be here, exactly as you are. You can brave opening to full union now, being this intimate with your own beloved Self, with your whole round Planet, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health.

What do you really want?

There's an ever-renewing resource of creative intelligence found, through practice, or grace, in the Field of our own innocent wholeness. It leads us beside still waters and restores us to sanity.

This intelligence moves us into fresh, useful action with the power of unresisted aliveness. It leads us into the exact next steps that harmonize our individual part in the great dance.

The old ways, of DoItRight, of individual ego blame and praise, can they meet the need we see all around us for a rapid, creative, evolutionary change of consciousness and the action that follows from it?

Let's meet ourselves in this Field, now, where the world is so full, and walk along considering together from here.

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The Oracle of You is one of the potent practices for reconnecting with creative wisdom that we'll explore in the next MysteryMind Course in Creating program.People on my Insightments mailing list will be the first to hear when enrollment opens! (Top of right column to sign up).

Patriotic Peace-Monger

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 17:56:00 +0000

Here's a button to wear in your 4th of July parade--if you have a button machine, feel free to print and use this design!

Who's the Doer?

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Sun, 29 May 2011 02:52:00 +0000

Just Asking

This is the second of a series on making friends (!)
with the snarky voice that demands to know
"Who Do You Think You Are?"
when you're reaching for a larger scope in your work and life.
(You can read the first article HERE.)

The Doer Image

The idea of being the Doer is built in
to a WhoDoYouThinkYouAre? snark attack.

I can't doubt my capacity or worthiness
to pull off some audacious plan
without already believing that I'm the one
who's going to do it (or be unable to).

If I imagine myself doing it badly:
shame on me--I get a worsened self-image.
If I think I did well: Gold star! Better self-idea.

That's the carrot/stick deal I've signed up for.

Either way, I get to identify more strongly
as a mental evaluation, a self-image
of being the one little ego-I who did it
(or didn't) all by myself.

-------------------

"The feeling "I work" is the hindrance.
Ask yourself, "Who works?"
Remember who you are.
Then the work will not bind you,
it will go on automatically."

--Ramana Maharhsi

-------------------

No One Here

Have you experienced times of working at peak capacity
when you became one with the work itself
which went on automatically?

In the heat of creative inspiration we're
so present and enlivened,
so absorbed in the unbounded work,
that we lose the effortful habit of thinking-who-we-are.

There's no little-ego-me idea right then
busy taking credit or blame for the doing
which is simply happening in the moment.

Times like that, you feel complete,
like you're moving from your truest self.
And yet right then, there's no story of who that self is.

Only an open channel for the mysterious
gift of the work to flow through.

Later, a self-image might return,
along with the familiar human notion
of claiming and evaluating the doing.

But while there's no idea of the Doer,
we are that unnamable Mystery
where inspiration originates.

Then no self-idea separates us from
being and acting as universal genius
creating through our particular life-form.

-------------------
"The most beautiful thing we can experience
is the mysterious.

It is the source of all true art and science."

--Albert Einstein
-------------------

Albert Einstein, pictured in 1953.
Photograph: Ruth Orkin/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Fear of Space

Yet, as much as we may long to experience
that mysterious, alive, undefined, creative spaciousness,

still, we so often clutch for a role to inhabit instead--
squeezing ourselves into an identity
which we can then compare with
who we imagine others to be.

We think our shifting theater of identifications
will help us gain a sense of control and power,
or the comfort (even the discomfort)
of the known and familiar.

So we struggle to improve these self-images
to manipulate ourselves into feeling better.

This can be so habitual that we don't realize how stressful it is.

We don't even notice that
we've tricked ourselves into believing
we are the mask we're wearing.

Miz Goody Two

No Big Deal

The work which goes on automatically
coming from no idea of Doership
may be very ordinary.

As ordinary as the work of rain
or sunlight, as sure as a leaf unfurling.

What just moved your eyes along this line of type?
Did 'you' do that? How utterly brilliant!

The endless showering of gifts from Mystery
goes on even when we're very confused
craving more validation and approval
from other people for what we did.

Miss Understood

The Restlessness of Doership

As long as we're ego-identified as the Doer
we have to keep doing, doing our own selves,
prodding and renovating without rest.

It's fine to make self-improvements. Why not?
But can you find a peace, an at-homeness,
that's already here before you do
anything to tidy up the place?

-------------------

You might think,'Now I am going to meditate
so I can experience pure peace.'
But who said that pure peace
should be the next thing you experience?

Do you see the arrogance in this kind of thinking?

You will find yourself interfering,
manipulating yourself, splitting yourself.
Since we know this is going to happen,
we practice with it. We see it, we let it be
and we don't do anything to it.

If you don't do anything, you might begin
to feel kindness in response to
the suffering involved in the meddling.

--A.H. Almaas, edited from The Unfolding Now
-------------------

Just for a moment: Don't do anything

My snarky WhoDoYouThinkYouAre? voice
calls me out for arrogance.

It's got a point.

(But not because I shouldn't aspire to big
audacious doings that it fears are beyond my scope.
If those aspirations are here, who am I to deny them?)

When I'm believing who I am
is an anxious imaginary Doer
who has to single-handedly manage everything just right
so as to earn an adequate self-concept--
I have lost touch with an essential humility.

Humility grounds me in the reality that:
I don't have to know what I don't know,
I don't have to do what I can't do (of my own little ego-self),
In fact, I don't have to do anything.

And I don't have to pretend to be defined by any image.

What could be kinder than to remind me of that?

-------------------
"Humility is the celebration
of my God-given excellence"

--Bitsa Turner
-------------------

So, who do YOU think you are?

Who Do You Think You Are?

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 13:06:00 +0000

When you set intentions, or worse,

start making actual tangible moves
towards taking on a big creative challenge,

do you risk hearing
SnarkVoices jeering:

"Who Do You Think You Are?"

Voices
(digital self-portrait by Jude '10)

Talking Back

Along withWhoDoYouThinkYouAre?
my SnarkVoice likes to point out
that I'm Too Big For My Britches.

(Where does it find these quaint expressions?)

"So?" I say defiantly, "I'll get britches that fit!"

(with an elastic waist, appropriate to
my queenly middle-aged middle).

You Will Never Amount To A Hill Of Beans, it retorts.

The Queen
(digital self-portrait by Jude '10)

No Way Out

But even if I score a point now and then,
it's stressful to defend against a
snark attack like WhoDoYouThinkYouAre.

(Maybe not as stressful as buying into its
shaming viewpoint, but stressful nonetheless).

When I try to make it shut up and go away,
I'm fighting against a part of myself.
So I tense up with inner conflict.

I'm trying to force myself feel to better while
I'm actually feeling divided, scared and small.

Uh-Oh
(digital self-portrait by Jude '10)

Shut-down

From that position of defensiveness,
it's harder to evolve, harder to access
originality, openness, and creative expansion.

Fighting snark makes it harder to live large and feel free.

So in the moment that I push away WhoDoYouThinkYouAre,

I actually experience even more belittlement--
just the kind of feeling I was trying to escape.

So what to do? How to respond?

"As long as our orientation is toward perfection
or success, we will never learn about
unconditional friendship with ourselves,
nor will we find compassion."

—Pema Chödrön

Bright Idea
(digital self-portrait by Jude '10)

Why not just answer the question?

It's a good question, a spiritual classic, even.

Try it in a tone of real curiosity:

Who DO you think you are?

(Right now?)

And are you who you think?

Can you really be defined by the ever-changing
flickering of thoughts through your head?

If we're living from the standpoint of
a self-image of who we think we are
we can have a good or bad self-image,
one that feels better or worse.

As long as we're taking ourselves
to be an image in our minds,
even if the image is positive,
we don't feel completely authentic.

However you define yourself, if you see
it's just an image, it's just an idea,
and you peer underneath it,
what you find is no image, no idea of yourself.

Not a better image, not a worse image,
but no image.

Are you willing to enter that space,
that casts no image, no idea?

Are you really willing and ready
to be that free and that open?

-- Adyashanti
(condensed from Falling into Grace pgs.22-24)

It is audacious to pause from fighting
voices like WhoDoYouThinkYouAre.
We're afraid that without defiance
or attacking with our therapeutic fix-it arsenal,
the mean tone of humiliation will swamp us.

But if you do pause to really consider
the question Who do you think you are?
you might find the snark carries a gift,
hidden in plain sight:
An open invitation to the humble freedom
of recognizing the real you beyond any image,
untouchable by any success or failure.

Continue to Part Two:
Who's the Doer?

Nobody Special
(digital self-portrait by Jude '11)

Two High Priests were sitting on a bench.
Suddenly, one had a flash of enlightenment.
He fell to his knees, crying out,
"I just realized I'm Nobody! I'm Nobody!"

A few minutes later, the same thing
happened to the other priest.
"I finally see! I'm Nobody! What a relief!"

Then, a Lowly Streetsweeper
who'd been working nearby
dropped his broom, and shouted,
"I'm Nobody, Halleluia, I'm Nobody!"

One High Priest elbowed the other and snorted,
"Now look who thinks he's Nobody!"

--adapted from story told by Eckhart Tolle

Waiting

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 02:33:00 +0000

"This hexagram shows the clouds in the heavens, giving rain to refresh all that grows and to provide mankind with food and drink.
The rain will come in its own time.
We cannot make it come; we have to wait for it."
--Hexagram 5, I Ching Book of Changes, Wilhelm/Baynes trans.

What are you waiting for?

To finish something so you can get on to something else? For a lucky break? To find out what happens? For an ordeal to be over? For a danger to pass? To get to the head of the line?

Waiting has been on my mind. This fall I worked on a picture about the dark side of waiting. More recently, I've been waiting to find out whether something I really hope for will happen. Waiting is only a problem when my impatient mind rushes ahead trying to stack up future decisions on the shaky foundation of this unknown.

When I wait impatiently, I wheedle for insider information from the Universe--come ON! Give me a hint? My hungry mind is like a kid badgering for candy at the checkout. This is tiring and not nourishing. The I Ching reminds me to conserve my energy for later when there's something to do

"We should not worry and seek to shape the future by interfering in things before the time is ripe. We should quietly fortify the body with food and drink and the mind with gladness and good cheer. Fate comes when it will, and thus we are ready."
--I Ching Hexagram 5 Wilhelm/Baynes

A Quick Way to Fortify The Body-Mind

Sometimes good cheer isn't so easily come by during a wait. Here's something that always seems to help: Instead of trying to drop impatience, simply bring attention to the space behind your back.

No matter what's filling it, there's just as much space behind as in front of you (and above and below and to the sides). Give attention to that back space, and allowing the body to settle into it instead of pressing forward and up.

Get comfortable, exactly where you are. Breathe quietly. Let me know if this works for you, too, to restore some gladness.

Waiting Patiently With Halo
(digital self portrait by Jude '10)

The saintly approach

It is also possible to wait too patiently--to put your life on hold in the hope that if you endure in limbo for long enough, passivity will somehow be rewarded and you'll get your way without ever having to do anything.

Circumstances don't often bend to fit this kind of fantasy. The antidote the I Ching advises? Self-honesty--get real.

"One is faced with a danger that has to be overcome. Weakness and impatience can do nothing....It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any sort of self-deception or illusion, that a light will develop out of events, by which the path to success may be recognized. This recognition must be followed by resolute and persevering action."
--I Ching Hexagram 5 Wilhelm/Baynes

----------------------------------------------

Consult the oracle

Think of something particular that you're waiting for. If you're willing, jot down a question about handling the wait.

And pick a number between 1 and 6.

Let's play with a way of consulting one of the world's oldest advice columns (the I Ching). It won't foretell the future, but it might give you useful pointers on how to best wait in your situation.

Read the suggestion corresponding to your number and see how you can relate it to your question or situation. I'd love to hear in the comments what you discover.

1. A challenge is coming, but it is not yet close. Go on with your life in a simple, alert and open way. Don't waste your strength on anticipation or rehearsals. Enjoy your present.
2. Impending change is stirring up some insecurity. Take care not to indulge in blame (especially self-blame) or defensiveness. Remind yourself that it really is ok to not know what is going to happen yet, even if you don't like it.
3. Don't hold back from fully completing a needed change. Half measures will not work now. Be vigilant about not following fearful or despairing thoughts or acting from their influence. Fears can make things appear stuck or impossible.
4. There is nothing else you can do right now. Stop trying to force solutions or to figure anything out and remain calm, trusting in heart knowledge to get you out of danger when the time is ripe.
5. Even though everything isn't resolved yet, now is a good time to pause and enjoy yourself. If you are waiting for something to be over with, you may be missing the true nourishment available in the present. Everything can't happen at once.
6. Your good fortune may come in disguise. Question the thought, "I have to do it all" and remain alert and available to receive help in unexpected forms. All goes well in the end.

-----------------------------------

Are you waiting to dive into your Next Big Thing until the new year? Mystery Mind Creators Colony might offer the support you need to move into real creative action with less self-sabotage this winter.

My suggestion: don't wait to check it out. This small, unique coaching group for women is already half full. If there's even a chance you might want to join us, fill out an application and let's talk about whether this fits and is timely for you. Mystery Mind Creators Colony

Retreat Report

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 05:40:00 +0000

Pond Prayer
(painted canvas and silk threads) Jude '10

I gave myself four creative retreats this past year, of 10 days each. It seems miraculous in retrospect that this was possible.

One thing I hoped to work on was a fresh way to integrate painting with the fabric collage process I worked in for 30 years. I've experimented with this plenty of times before. But even though some approaches have been satisfying, a breakthrough had eluded me.

The first 3 retreats had been pretty much a flop as far as finding this opening, though none of them felt at all like a waste of time. I wound up with more pictures of water--worshiping the pond that is one of my all-time favorite gurus. And I made the self-portrait eyes that went into the header for my new coaching website at www.selftreasuring.com .

(Actually, the first retreat had resulted in the Self Treasuring name, which came about from working on nests--you never really know what you're really making while you're making it, in a way).

The final retreat of the year, in late fall, had the earnestness (or recklessness) of endings about it, a now or never feeling. I really wanted to try something different.

But I found myself digging out something old--a piece I'd started in fabric collage 15 years ago and never finished. It was based on a drawing I'd xeroxed from a book of art created during the Holocaust--I'm still trying to track down the artist's name.

Woman Waiting sketch (artist unknown)

Here's where I'd stopped with the fabric collage 15 years ago:

Woman Waiting 1 (fabric collage)

As I went back into the piece, I felt in collaboration with two other artists--the person who'd done the drawing, and the artist I was 15 years ago--along with the energy of the woman portrayed in the sketch. I was being all of them at once as my hands picked up pieces of cloth, the iron, glue, the paintbrush.

I heard anxiety in the mix: a WhatWillPeopleThink? voice, worried about making something unpretty, not 'uplifting'--something no one will want to see. I heard a deeper thrum of the fear of the injustice, loss of control and death represented by the Holocaust. I heard the dreaded gremlin MizSpiritual trying to levitate above that fear, sometimes grousing about hadn't we evolved past Hard Stuff pictures?

And all the time, that feeling of being carried, of choice-making happening of itself, that no-self experience of giving over into a creative process which feels so profoundly at-home. How should I know what I'm to make? It was being made. There was a fullness of gratitude that can't be expressed. Making light of hard stuff without even trying to.

When I could stand back from it and let the finished piece teach me, I witnessed something fiercely beautiful after all. I saw how light just pours out of us, even when we're angry and afraid and hurting, even when terrible things are happening, and we're waiting for something worse. Every moment, everybody is just such a beacon.

Even when nothing terrible is happening, sitting in front of a screen, just witnessing and connecting--maybe like you, now. Making light.

Woman Waiting
(fabrics and paint on unprimed canvas)

I don't really make anything--making happens through me--but all I ever want to make is something about that Light. (And that's not MizSpiritual talking, it's just the facts, m'am).

Now that the paint/fabric intersection is happening in a new way, I'm ready to go back into another piece that started during the summer retreat, a portrait of Ramana Maharshi, who radiated the peace behind and around and within every beauty. I'll find a way to open time for this in the winter, when that Stillness is so palpable in the north.

: Ramana Maharshi eyes and photo

This winter, I'll also be leading a coaching group for 9 self-aware women who are ready to meet the creative challenge of their Next Big Thing (even if they don't know what that is yet). Might you join us? Read about the Mystery Mind Creator's Colony here.

One Holiday Behind

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 22:03:00 +0000

What are you?

This was my headgear for answering the door at Halloween, asking friendly metaphysical questions concerning identity, "What (or who) are you?" while dishing out candy to children in outfits. (Hat by the amazing Syd Rhoads of WendyBird Hats soon to be on Etsy--I added the fabric eye, temporarily, to make me look more discerning).

There's no hesitation about answering: "A witch!" "A hockeymask monster!" Funny no one ever answers, "A kid in a costume."
-------

A while back a sort of obvious realization gave me belly laughs followed by a zingy bubbly energy that wouldn't sleep. I can't quite remember now what struck me as so funny about it, but I'll give it a try.

Here goes: the "I" thought is the same thought in each brain. Hilarious, huh? (Maybe you had to have been there.)

This thought "I" elaborates itself out into endless flourishes and intricacies, but it's all coming from the same root. Before adding "am..." and all that follows, there is only that one "I" thought, pretending in each person to signify a unique and separate reference of experience.

Something like 75 trillion cells make up a human body. There's almost 7 billion of these aggregates of cells on the planet. Every one of them (give or take) calls themselves, in whatever language, "me" or "I."

I never quite saw before that in each one the same "I" idea lives. This "I" thought that our lifeform hosts and serves, that we believe in as our very own, it's everyone's. Such a laugh! Joke's on 'me'.

There are 20 times as many bacteria, with their distinct genes, living in each human body, as there are mammal cells. (More about that here). Do we count them in as "I" too?

So, aside from a chuckle (perhaps) what's the benefit of this awareness? For me, it gives an instant's break from all the striving and effort to maintain, track, update and improve the I-identity, through everything "I" do or don't do, think, feel, etc. When 'I' is seen as only a concept, one shared by everyone, simply a mental artifact--it lets us off the hook. There's nothing to do or be. Just for now. Breathing happening, reading happening.

No one here! Just an idea-someone. And yet...there's still this lifeform, and what animates it.

Who's that? Who's still here, unidentifiable, laughing?

Time Truce

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 19:57:00 +0000

What if time weren't money?
Can you invest 3 minutes to stop the war with the clock?

Blessing?

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 01:24:00 +0000

I spoke with a gloomy friend on the phone a few weeks back, when the lilacs were first out.

Nosing lilacs gives me shiver-thrills. It's the scent equivalent of listening to Wilda's purr, a direct drink of comfort and joy.

As we were ending the call, I said, with a touch of the Mary Sunshine Cheer Up Vibe that sets my teeth when I'm grumpy, "Well, I hope you at least get to smell the lilacs sometime today!"

"Uh, yeah..." he said, sounding dubious.

"Don't you like lilacs?" I asked, relentlessly peppy.

"It's just that I'm deathly allergic to them. If I smelled a lilac directly, I wouldn't be able to breathe, at all."

"Oh. So basically I was signing off with a curse--I hope you at least get to suffocate sometime today. Not exactly what I meant...."

"I know what you meant," he said, with just a hint of a smile in his voice.

-------
Here's a first attempt at a video, of Herself, purring.

Mud Season

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:03:00 +0000

Occasionally the most thriving
creative life
gets bogged down, stuck and stagnant.

Don't know what to do?
Has "the true way been wholly lost"?(Dante)

Welcome to Mud Season
of creative work/life

Just beyond the winter
and just before the spring
--Kathleen Hannan

The Seasons in Maine:

Brief summer, gorgeous fall,
winter, more winter
and mud season
(followed by a couple weeks of spring).

Mud season isn't pretty.

Everything dead and unlovely
hidden frozen beneath snow
starts oozing into the open.
Impatience for soft breezes and flowers
makes time feel sluggish.
It seems like nothing is happening
except deepening ruts.

a beginning, a muddle, and an end
--Philip Larkin on structure of novels

The Surprise of Stagnation

In the uncharted middle of creating something
--a painting, a conversation, a business plan, a book--
sometimes inspiration wanders off for no apparent reason,
taking momentum and confidence with it.
You feel confused, out of alignment with
the clarity of your Source.

In creativity's mud season, all you want
is for the standstill to end, to welcome
the new green of productive work again.

The creative powers are not in relation
all things are benumbed
confusion and disorder prevail...

--I Ching Book of Changes, Wilhelm/Baynes trans
Hexagram 12 Standstill/Stagnation

Consult Jude's I Ching on Standstill/Stagnation

Get Going

You probably have good ideas about what might help--
maybe more outdoor exercise, less internet, cleaner diet, etc.

Sometimes just moving into action freshens things up.

You can find simple, small steps to take.
They don't have to relate to the area that feels stalled,
and you don't even have to feel like it.
Worth a try.

The Futility of Impatience

But activity doesn't necessarily bring clarity.
It can bring wheel spinning instead.

A command to 'just snap out of it!'
simply can't hurry spring.

Do you have the patience to wait 
till your mud settles and the water is clear? 
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?  

The Master doesn't seek fulfillment.
Not seeking, not expecting, 
she is present, and can welcome all things.

--Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching trans Stephen Mitchell


 

Meet the Muck

How do you find patience
when you're feeling anything but?

For a moment, try just stopping
the mental activity of seeking improvement.
Welcome the whole of what's here, mud and all.

Relief begins with willingness to be present
with what's actually happening now.

The quickest access to Truth, and also to beauty,
is when you are totally intimate
with all of experience, the inner and the outer,
even if the experience isn't "good".

When you are being intimate with the whole of experience,
the divided mind has to let go
of whatever its project is at the moment.

Whether the qualities of the experience
are unpleasant or beautiful,
as soon as you are intimate with the whole
of experience, there is openness...

and whatever is happening tends to resolve itself.

--Adyashanti in Emptiness Dancing

Good Reasons to Be Here

Mud season is an essential transition time.
It accelerates decomposition into fertilizer
and softens the ground that tender shoots
will need to push up through.

What if a creative mud season comes
for similar good reasons?

Is there something that's been frozen in you,
held feelings, outworn approaches
misunderstandings, habits,
old stuff that hadn't fully composted?
Maybe it's dissolving now.

This could nourish future work
beyond what can be imagined.

When we stop agitating, even for a moment,
for things to start moving forward and looking up,
we can directly experience looking down, and in.

Unexpected treasures may be found
right under our feet.

More about ordinary treasures in Nesting

See Jude's ugly-beauty photos in Looking Down

Why Not Wallow?

Wallowing has a bad reputation,
(way worse than mud wrestling).
If permitted, it seems it might never end.

But if you're suffering through a long mud season,
you may want to risk some conscious wallowing.
How better to get intimate with the
whole of a muddy experience?

For me, what makes wallowing conscious
is open listening to the burdened aspects of self.

Let the Swamp Creatures in you express
what's bothering them, perhaps with
the help of a coach, friend or journaling.

Try to simply listen, without blaming, defending or correcting.

Thich Nhat Hhan on compassionate listening:

You listen with only one purpose:
to help [someone] to empty his heart.

Even if he says things that are full of wrong perceptions,
full of bitterness, you are still capable
of continuing to listen with compassion.

If you want to help him to correct his perception,
you wait for another time.
For now, you don't interrupt. You don't argue.

You just listen with compassion and help him to suffer less.

--Thich Nhat Hahn in O, the Oprah Magazine, Feb. 16, 2010
(read the full interview here)

Don't Control, Relate Instead

The I Ching identifies the time of Standstill
as one when the creative powers
are not in relation.

Listening is relating.
It may bring conflicted aspects
of the situation and your response into harmony.

When you become this kind of compassionate listener
you already enjoy the patience that lets your mud settle.

This patience has no agenda, nothing to wait for.
It trusts the power of non-action.

The clarity of the compassionate witness
is already here, available to notice
the next right action arising of itself.

You'll know it when you see it.

Doodle: Scruffy Before-Spring by Jude Spacks

Standstill

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:15:00 +0000

The creative powers are not in relation
all things are benumbed
confusion and disorder prevail...

--I Ching Book of Changes, Wilhelm/Baynes trans
Hexagram 12 Standstill/Stagnation

Is there an area of your life or work that doesn't seem so creative lately? This hexagram addresses stagnant situations where there appears to be no progress.

Want some oracular advice? Before reading further, think of a particular situation where your inner guidance and inspiration seems shut down, sluggish or simply absent. If you can persuade yourself to, write down a question about what you'd most like cleared up. Then pick a number between 1 and 6 and jot that down.

"When we perceive that there is no progress...
tension and inner conflict arise.

The remedy is to disengage from looking at the situation.

We abandon neither our principles nor our goals.

When we have re-established inner calm,
the clarity needed to put things into perspective becomes possible. Until then, nothing can be done.

In all striving the ego attempts to find some
way to make things work in order to stay in control.

If we can accept that we are meant to patiently persevere,
then, by itself, Fate will indicate the way."

--Carol Anthony A Guide to the I Ching, Hexagram 12 Standstill/Stagnation

The hexagram as a whole counsels a retreat from trying to force solutions. Fruitful activity is temporarily impossible, because fundamentals are out of relationship with each other. Best not to focus on externals, even if tempting offers appear. Public action now could wind up compromising your principles. Instead, withdraw, be patient, and allow right action to arise of itself.

------------------------------------

Remembering your particular stuck situation, read the advice corresponding to the number between 1 and 6 that you wrote down earlier.

Keep an open mind, and see if your question's answer reveals itself to you.

(If you didn't pick a number 1-6 above, go ahead and choose one now.
Or, just read them all and see if one feels like it is meant for you.
Or, don't. )

1. Stop pouring attention into the negative situation.
Quit trying to influence it or to strive against it in any way.
Instead, persevere inwardly to stay connected with your truth.

2. You may have to endure self pity, discouragement and mistrust
from others and from your own childish aspects. For the good of
all, don't act on pressures to try to fix or convince anyone.

3. Misunderstandings within and without are beginning to clear up.
The futility of trying to force solutions becomes evident.
Take care not to humiliate or rush those who are changing
their confused ideas for the better.

4. If you remain open, balanced and alert,
you may be called into action by events now.
Keeping free of willful ambition,
you advance as the way opens and
pause if you meet further obstructions.

5. The transition out of standstill has arrived.
Take great caution now. Don't be carried away
into grand gestures. Instead, take small steady steps
to secure the transformation from many angles.

6.Through keeping your inner attitude correct
you have brought about better conditions.
The time of standstill has come to an end.
Creative energies flow into harmony.

Looking Down

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:31:00 +0000

If things are looking down,

and you're sick of trying
to make them look up,
well, just look down!
Look for ugly-beauties
right here on the pavement
under your feet.

Nesting

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 23:25:00 +0000

I've made nests on and off for years, unruly wild-crafted webs of willow, grapevine, and seaweed, among other materials. They became home to some of the little things I can't help picking up and keeping.

Seaweed Nest and Sand Dollars JS '97?

Making a particular place for things, an appropriate container, feels like a fundamental domestic satisfaction. I remember meeting a woman with alzheimer's. Her favorite activity was sorting and arranging beads and buttons in a little grid of boxes. Her daughter said she still recognized her mother, who had been a scientist, in this kind of play. There was something essential to it.

I don't tend to live in an orderly fashion. Plenty of times I cross over from creative chaos into squalid mess. Things are definitely not in their places. And contrarily, sometimes I use housework as a procrasto-gizmo to avoid creative work. (There's a cartoon about people who have to do the dishes before they can art at the end of this Art First post).

At least I don't have all my eggs in one basket.

But maybe everything is really in its rightful place even when it seems out of order. Every place and every thing is impermanent, after all. Form is a giant game of musical chairs.

One-Egg Basket crocheted yarns and threads, JS '07

******************************

This past year I moved out of my own little nest in the sky. I had lived there for 18 years, hidden away in a small attic apartment. It had become an exoskeleton, an extension of myself that I felt alarmed and exhilarated to molt out of.

Before taking apart my studio, I found myself making a little house-shrine. It felt like a meditation on mortality as a change of address--a visual response to the koan, "What was your face before your parents were born?"

Our mother's body is our first nest. Then we live in the temporary container of our own body, sheltered in changeable clothing and houses, held by gravity to our place on the round mother planet, within the moving, living universe. Who or what is contained here?

Before Mother House
shrine with vases and candles, fabrics, paint, mirrors Jude Spacks '08

Interior of Before Mother House, showing mirrors

The front of the piece has curved openings, some of which are covered with sheer fabric. This is participatory art: it needs you to complete it, to bring presence to it. As you look through the semi-veiled openings to the mirror and colorful wall in the rear of the little house, you see only a foggy, mysterious suggestion of a face looking back at you. Who is that?

The flowers offered in the little vases, fresh only a few days, and the hand setting them there, a hazy suggestion of its movement doubling in the curved mirror shapes and disappearing: all the same essence, held so fleetingly.

******************************

Packing meant seeing freshly the hoard of ordinary treasures I chronically save. Some things still held memories of when they appeared in my world. But with most I had no idea how they came to be here. There were some startling encounters with beauty that had been hidden, overlooked, taken for granted, forgotten.

Equally mysterious was the knowing that chose what to let go of, what got thrown back into the ocean, literally or metaphorically, and what got packed to come along.

One day shortly after I began living in my new house, I happened upon a citrine crystal of a very deep burnt orange, set into the top hole of a sea urchin skeleton of cool filigreed silver-green. The citrine glowed with gold flecks inside, like a wise, wild eye.

I used to collect crystals, and knew some of their magical properties. Citrine supports cleansing and ordering, as I remember the lore.

The urchin shell fit around the crystal with perfectly symmetrical grace: curved radiating rows of light dots increasing in size towards its periphery--a divine artifact of astonishing intricacy. In my palm the combination felt potent as a wand. I had to make a Place for it.

The feeling I had was of a grounded mystery, of tangled order, an organic, spontaneous, stillness-in-motion, a secret cave. It took more than a month of working with those colors, deep orange and light grey-green, not an easy combination, looking for the energetic harmonies in 3D that could house them.

Oracle Cave, mixed media with mirror JS '09 (available)

detail, Oracle Cave: Citrine Urchin's padded throne

******************************

In the fall, my sweetheart was getting ready to drive off on a long trip. There were acorns all over the yard. I painted one with a heart in pearlescent pigments, and adapted a matchbox with glitter to house it and her other car-blessing talisman.

There is a cherishing involved in this tiny nest-making.

A week or so later, I saw my neighbor sitting on a big rock with his beloved granddaughter cuddled up in his lap. They were both curved around something she held cupped in her little hands.
"We like to pick up chestnuts," he said.

So then I had to make a chestnut nest. A celebration of the love of mundane treasures. There's a whole potential chestnut tree in there! Miracles abound.

Self-Treasuring Nest, fabrics, shells, chestnut, composition gold leaf, JS'09

I thought also of how common mussel shells are where I live, but how glorious. What's common can be overlooked. There's royalty in the humblest things.

The chestnut is removable--another found treasure could go there, or the gold leaf center of the soft encircling throne (inspired by granddaughter hands) could be left empty and open.

I found myself reflecting (heh!) that there was no mirror in this piece--they'd been showing up pretty much in every other shrine I'd been making. Then I wondered, what if the beauty, dignity, humility, simplicity and miracle of a chestnut is a mirror? Or the Place where a chestnut was... can you see your Self there?

We pick up treasures here and there, and keep them a while,
every one temporary, the memory of what made us want to
gather and sort them fleeting too.
Is it for the sake of the treasuring?
What's precious? The holding itself? The impermanence?
The little girl's hands, the old man's hands,
the chestnut, the breeze around them,
the ground that the tree could grow out of,
the light, the colors,
the whole world holding us all?
So that would include you too, wouldn't it?

******************************

Wilda in Wildanest

******************************

Book Plate

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:21:00 +0000

Librarian Ruth MacIntosh radiated humor, good-heartedness and dignity. Though I only knew her as a library patron, Ruth mattered to me a lot. Any encounter with her always lifted my day.

Ruth had an assortment of playful outfits: full Red Sox and Patriots regalia, a necklace of black bats that came out in late October, and a Wild Things t-shirt that I coveted, with Sendak's creatures dancing across it. They went well with the twinkle in her eye, and contrasted nicely with the aura of unruffled integrity that she always carried herself with.

I loved her lively, intelligent face and asked her several times over the years if she'd let me paint her portrait, or be willing to sit for photos. This request was met with a kind but absolutely emphatic no.

While Ruth was in the hospital, the friend feeding her beloved cat was allergic, and needed to run in and out with just enough time to set down food. I'm known as a cat person, so I was drafted to soothe the extremely talkative, distressed animal. It took a lot of petting and listening, agreeing with every meow, "Yes, I wish she were here, too. No, I'm not her, it's true." but eventually it wound down to purring and even some drooling.

Early this summer I was so honored when members of the library staff asked me to design a bookplate for the collection of mysteries being purchased in Ruth's memory. It's being printed in black and white on labels with a fancy border, so I made the inside part.

We miss her.

Here's a nice article about Ruth from her co-workers which includes a couple photos.

Working Small

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 13:44:00 +0000

Grey Day, fabrics, 7.5x4.75 inches by Jude Spacks '09
Available for purchase.

I'm back into the fabric collage, working small, from small noticings.

Making little pictures seems to be creating an opening for witnessing more of the humble instants when a vision stills the talkative mind, leaving speechless awareness, aliveness, presence.

Trying to show that, however palely and inadequately, becomes worship. It doesn't have to be intense or hyped up with swooning string orchestras and godlight streaming from the sky.

There's something exciting and comforting happening, a cuddling up with how ordinary stuff is shot through and through with love.

This one is a riff on how light organizes everything, how everything visible is made of light.

Streetlight, fabrics, 7.5x6.5 inches by Jude Spacks
Available for purchase

------------------------------------

A friend stopped by with a lively new grandbaby.
I sketched very briefly, didn't get much of a likeness, but maybe just having a pencil in hand allowed the scene to imprint in some heartspace for retrieval later.

I frolicked in fabric with it for days, having a blessed run of that kind of concentration when you can't detach enough to take a sip of water, much less stop for dinner before midnight.

Though I lost some proportions from the drawing, on the other side, a sweet-comic rendition had emerged that I swear looks just like both of them. (Another friend who was there agrees. The grandma hasn't seen it yet, and perhaps will not recognize herself with blue face and pants a color like none in her possession....)

What felt so freeing was to start with a faint sketch of reality and zoom off from it into pure fiction, somehow winding up with something that felt true, maybe truer than a literal photographic version could have shown.

Meet the Grandbaby, fabrics, 9.5x12 in by Jude Spacks 09
Available for purchase

Detail Meet the Grandbaby

Some years ago, this same friend had commissioned me to make a portrait in oils of her mother and a great-grandbaby. The memory of that project gave another layer of association to working on this little one.

My friend didn't want a quite literal rendition of the photograph she gave me to work from, wanting to see her mother in a different colored shirt, among other things. So there had been a challenge of jumping off from reality into a bit of make-believe to find a deeper truth in that piece, too....

Portrait in oils, 24x32in, by Jude Spacks, '02

Green Head

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:45:00 +0000

"Would you help me with my head?" I asked, dangling the stuck-together plastic bag towards the young woman working the counter. My other hand was full of giant lettuce, plus previous purchases.

"What seems to be the problem with it?" she inquired, ushering the lettuce gently into the bag.

"Oh, I don't know, crazy thinking, probably. I thought it might help to just get a fresh head, a nice green one."

Later another woman at the cash register asked, "Just a head?"

I giggled, euphoric from the previous interaction. "Ya, I've been trying to get a-head in life, but I haven't got far. Still, it's amazing what salad can do."

"I like salad, too," she said. "Sometimes I just have to have some lettuce."

Karl Paulnack Speech

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 01:31:00 +0000

Moving truth-telling on the purpose of music and other arts:

Speech given by Karl Paulnack,
pianist, and director of Music Division at Boston Conservatory

"One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn’t be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school—she said, “you’re WASTING your SAT scores.” On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its function.

So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite of entertainment.

Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works. The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture—why would anyone bother with music? And yet—from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”

On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.

At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around firehouses, people sang “We Shall Overcome”. Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heart-wrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good therapist does. I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings—people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.

I’ll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation. Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier—even in his 70’s, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: “During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?”

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.”

Rosa Sat

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 16:04:00 +0000

Fabric Portrait of Rosa Parks by Jude Spacks, '93

Just saw this lovely video of a new song for Barack Obama by Amy Dixon-Kolar

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-0NvkuPHZI

"Rosa sat, so Martin could walk
Martin walked so Barack could run
Barach ran, he ran and he won
So that all of our children could fly."

It set me weeping again. Among people I know there's been coast to coast weeping to celebrate the inauguration. Such a release of the held breath, the grief about how stuck and combative we've been. Welcoming the joy, joy, joy of integration, personal and planetary. We are one, whole, this moment.

Layering

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 01:51:00 +0000

I love the tactile stuff of art-making. I spent almost 30 years messing around with the textures and colors and patterns of fabric art. And I get so excited about the feel of oil paint sliding off a brush, its luscious smell, that it's all I can do not to eat it. So I never thought I'd want to work digitally, by remote-control on a screen, unable to directly touch my picture-in-progress.

10 years ago I was still refusing to deal with computers at all. A lapsed Luddite, that's me. The first week after my computer moved in, I had nightmares about my brain rearranging itself to suit the machine. I kept trying to click on my memories in my sleep.

Times change. I've found myself experimenting in Photoshop lately. I have only rudimentary facility with it, so the process still feels clumsy. But clumsiness might be part of the fun--I don't have so many habits to streamline the raw experience of making.

I get utterly absorbed, if not obsessed. I lose awareness of time, forget to so much as take a sip of water--all the symptoms of surrender to the zone of creativity--even if it is virtual creativity.

I've used layers of sheer fabrics showing through each other. I've made works in chenille, which cuts down through many layers and shows them all. In oils I use a lot of glazes, building up an image from transparent layers of paint. But being able to decide the percentage of transparency I want in an underlayer? Yowz!

Some mysterious, dreamy images have emerged. I've been taking (even) more photos lately. It's not over....

Still Point Turning

This one, and the one at the top, Keeping Still, both started from the same puddle that my friend had dropped a rock into.

The Pause Between End and Begin

The one above evolved from the one below. Both made largely of hay bales....but the Pause used some steam from my teakettle, too, along with the sheep.

More:

Winter Walk

Make Yourself At Home

My current favorite:

Tunnel to the Unknown

Solstice

noreply@blogger.com (Jude) — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 01:34:00 +0000

What Is (Solstice Invocation) fabrics and paint '08

"Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, 'Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?' then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, 'If you will, you can become all flame.'"