July 2010

Acrylic on paper, July 2010

Go for the house on top of the hill!

Lazing, Acrylic on canvas, 12X16, July 2010

I like painting quietly.

For two nights now I’ve been experimenting with a new medium…acrylics.  Water-based, so I can paint indoors, yay.  Dries super quickly, so results are almost instant.  Very interesting possibilities, but trade offs are: not much blending allowed and can’t mix big color batches in one go (the paint dries up quickly!).  Challenge is to work on color mixing, and mixing the same shades again and again.

Just the same, excited for the many adventures ahead.  I have a new toy, time to play play play!

Ink on Paper, May 2010

Although we try to keep a proactive mindset everyday, at some point we do catch ourselves waiting. Waiting for inspiration to hit, for new opportunities to arrive.

This slipping–for days to become better on their own, or for elephants to fall from the sky–is there a constructive or win-win way of doing it?

When does waiting shift from being passive to active?

Ink on Paper, May 2010

Ink on Paper, May 2010

Ink on Paper, May 2010

One of my favorite questions, and also one of my favorite answers.

When I am lost or confused, it always boils down to it–I go by Truth, it is my radar.

I found these old cards I made for friends, maybe in 2000. Never got to give them away, would make for a good surprise now, 10 years after.

Interesting to see how I saw them then, and also how we related to each other then.

Reminds me of a passage I read in Julian Sleigh’s “Friends and Lovers”, that there are three things going on simultaneously in any friendship, and they are worth recognizing:
1. the changes going on within person A
2. the changes going on within person B
3. the changes going on within the actual friendship between person A with B

Sometimes we get stuck on just one of these sets of changes, and we fail to see objectively what the situation with a certain person presents, and what it demands of us.

I hope it’s not too late for these well-wishes to be received with the same love they were created 10 years ago 🙂

Hugs, friends! 🙂

Gouache on board, July 2010

I tried meditating seriously for the first time last night, and I saw this. A dark enclosure–me within it–and a faint light peering in. Or maybe it was the opposite. It was the darkness carving its way into the bigger lightness around it.

It was pleasant and inviting, and I hope to visit that place again.

Gouache on board, July 2010

Sometimes we are guilty of beholding people we admire, and wish to emulate, and we fail to recognize that what we hold so sacred and highly in them is just a shadow of the light that they themselves hold sacred. When our quest is to behold Truth, to come face-to-face with the Greatest and Indescribable, we will inevitably come across people who have gone ahead of us, and who will help show us the way.

But to have a real familiarity with God, to know God, to be intimate with God, we must come to the source ourselves, and behold God ourselves. There is no borrowing, no making do with secondary light. We can’t live in the borrowed faith of our mentors. We are all built for the Lightest of Lights, we must not insult it and ourselves by settling for less.

Gouache on board, July 2010

I went from God to God until they cried from me in me, “Oh thou I!”

-Bayazid of Bistun

Last May, two of my best friends “sat” for me, and I had the chance to draw from real life for the first time.

I tried rendering these pencil drawings using oil pastels on wood, unsure of how to do shadows and lighting, but was quite pleased with what came out:

Now the bigger challenge is to transfer them onto canvas!

Gouache on paper, May 2010

Labels have always been a tricky topic for me. On one hand they limit, in the same way a photograph limits a memory. They put boundaries or definitions on something that, really, cannot be bounded or defined.

On the other hand, there is something lost when something is not called by its true name, in the same way something is gained when a true name reveals itself.

We are always wary of putting labels on romantic relationships–dating, exclusive dating, MU, boyfriend-girlfriend, friends with benefits, “it’s complicated”–and often I’ve wondered whether all these options are really necessary. Or if they are truthful. Or a more pressing concern, if they are self-fulfilling. Maybe relationships these days are complicated precisely because we’ve created spaces for these complications, by giving them names!

Friendships, in contrast, are simpler, and less debated. I’ve written about the freer dynamics of friendship and how it “marks a life even more deeply than love,” and I still love rereading that post.

Julian Sleigh, in his lovely book “Friends and Lovers”, writes:

There are warm places in every person’s soul.

These places can be filled with feeling for others, and those others can be aware of this feeling.  Something passes between persons who carry in themselves a warm feeling for each other: Feeling itself flows through those souls and unites them.  And openness towards this power of feeling enables the warm places in each person to be alive and active.

Friendship can only exist in such warm places.

A basic yet warm and fuzzy definition of a friend. Someone you’d share hot cocoa with on the quietest of Christmas mornings, when soulful conversation and affection are most valued:

* “something is weaving between you and me”
* “I feel good in your presence”
* “I feel reassured by you even when you are not near”
* “there’s something radiating in us which I like and cherish”
* … and this “something” can’t be explained… we “see” each other; we have mutual “regard”, you enable me to feel valuable

* “You meet me but do not invade me”

We long to be met, even more than to meet… and this allows us to accept ourselves and to open ourselves to our own inspirations, personal inflow of ideas…and in this state of reassurance, we have a healing experience.“

But what makes a friend a best friend? What else is there between two friends whose friendship will withstand time, separation, and the lowest of lows?

Be aware of karma and when debt is released– a moment of joy! a chance for a friendship that is free and not out of obligation, based on love! This is friendship in the level of spiritual essence of a person, deeper and more constant than the personalities of the friends, and not jeopardized by daily circumstances and passing fancies.

That last part is critical, because I think romantic love or a young friendship stays in that lower realm–personality-based, flighty, very changeable with every passing fancy. A deeper love (some would say, the only real love) is something more constant, explained further below:

* deep relating, person to person
* meeting and being met
* “I” to “I” in safety
o in unwavering loyalty
o in deep understanding and support
o in full regard for the eternal in each other
o in total reliability

* possible to men and women who are free individuals, self-actualizing, rounded personalities, congruent yet aware of their shadows and weaknesses
* able to soar in their truly spiritual selves to the heights of nobility and love, and touch the truth in each other, undisturbed by sexual and emotional self-indulgence,
* and then descend from the heights bonded by a covenant they will never break: for they have dared to meet the good in each other, and the beautiful.

A best friend is someone you feel safe with, someone you can do the most stupid things with, launch the most insane ideas to, and still feel whole, respected, and not judged. There is no mommy-ing the other–you are both adults, each in your own stage on your journey, each going at your own pace.

This kind of intimacy, this sharing of self, Sleigh calls spiritual love, and its only agenda is tohelp a person to be free to be himself:

I like you as you are, with your personality…the most important gift I can give to you is to believe in your own true self and never to let it fade from my mind. When life is tough and when you are feeling down, I will try by my very closeness to reassure you of your infinite value–to me, to the world, and above all to yourself. And I know you will do the same for me.

Who can you say this to, sincerely?  Who do you already say it to?