Creative Process

The Wisdom in Your Fingers

There is a Rumi poem that begins with

 Your intelligence is always with you,

overseeing your body, even though

  you may not be aware of its work.

  If you do something against

 your health, your intelligence

  will eventually scold you.

I wonder what Rumi would have had to say about the unnatural glow of smartphones on our faces?

I painted this self-portrait to capture what my smartphone sees in my searching of its sickly yellow light. I might be googling something like the pain in my elbow or the latest environmental disaster or maybe both simultaneously. I could be engrossed in the latest Buzzfeed list or mindlessly scrolling through a social media feed. It doesn’t matter.

I say I’m not going to look at my phone before bed. I do. 

I say I am done with Instagram and Facebook. I’m not.

Rumi tells us

You and your intelligence

Are like the beauty and the precision

of an astrolabe.

Together, you calculate how near

existence is to the sun!

If only we weren’t so pulled to the Pavlovian dings of incoming information, we could know who we are, where we come from, how we’re connected to each other, to the intelligence that created us and the universe.

Thirteenth century Islamic scholar and poet Rumi has the antidote:

Now try, my friend, to describe how near

is the creator of your intellect!

Intellectual searching will not find

the way to that king!

The movement of your finger

is not separate from your finger.

You go to sleep, or you die,

and there’s no intelligent motion.

Then you wake,

and your fingers

fill with meanings.

Think about how we take these sacred meanings and shush them with the endless sliding of finger on the glass in our hands. It isn’t the technology that is the problem, it is how small we make ourselves next to it.

He gently reminds us – keep seeking that connection to your intelligence with all your pulsing energy.  There are guides along the way. Use them, he tells us.

Join me in observing the wonders of our intelligence as we move, breathe and meditate this fall. My free Gentle Movement and Guided Meditation class is on Wednesdays from 7 – 8:30 pm, beginning September 22, ending October 27, 2021. It will be delivered on Zoom.  Just let me know you are interested by dropping me an email and I’ll send the link. Then, perhaps

Observe the wonders as they occur around you.

Don’t claim them. Feel the artistry

moving through. And be silent.

Though we’ll be on screen together, we’ll soak up the beauty and precision of the intelligence that binds us.

Negative Space

When I learned to draw, one of the techniques I found so helpful to capturing reality was “negative space, ” paying close attention to and drawing the space around an object, rather than the object itself. It helps particularly with complicated objects and with linear perspective.

Hasn’t this past year been a communal exercise in negative space? We traced the space around the objects that we thought defined us and in that space we found the dimensionality of what we once took for granted and a perspective that was so hard to capture.

As a yogi, when I hear “negative space,” I also think of the Sanskrit word, “dukha,” commonly translated as “suffering.” One understanding of the etymology of the Sanskrit can be traced back to the seed words of “duk,” meaning “bad,” and “kha,” meaning “space.” The origins of dukha as suffering refer to the imbalance in the axle of a wheel, which caused discomfort to a traveler. And isn’t that how we feel when we are suffering? In a bad space, bumping down life’s highway.

One of the prompts I offered to my Art and Yoga class at All Soul’s this past spring was to create a piece inspired by negative space. I wrote this piece for the class, but didn’t share it then, so I share it here. The painting above is an old one done years ago from the “In the Garden” series.

Negative Space

As I drove around the corner and was about to pass the elementary school, I saw a toddler trying to climb the curb on the opposite side of the street. There was too much space around this tiny person, dressed in a dirty pink fleece jacket. She was small enough that climbing the curb meant that she bent to touch the cement to lift her foot towards it.

I pulled the car over and unrolled my window. As I did, I could see an Audi rounding the corner and waved for caution.  The care stopped. I could see from my rearview mirror that the driver was going through the same thought process I was.

Opening the car door, and leaving it open, I asked, “Where is your Mommy, honey?” as I walked towards her. I looked around. No one on the ball field. No one on the sidewalk in front of the school either.

When I picked her up, she bared her little teeth at me in a halfway smile, or in looking up at my face she grimaced to focus, I couldn’t tell. She was young enough to wear diapers or pull ups. She pointed at me and then at the house beyond the curb.

“I’ll drive up the road to see if there are people looking for her,” the man in the Audi said to me as he drove slowly past us.

“Does your family live here?” I asked too brightly and too loudly. I knocked at the front door of house she had pointed to and waited. She slumped on my hip and rested her head on my shoulder. There was no sound in the house.

 The Audi circled back.

 “There’s not a soul anywhere.” The only sound was the car’s idle.

 “I guess we’ll have to call the police,” I said.

Then: movement at the furthest corner of the ball field, in the woods beyond the school building. A woman ran towards us, her hands outstretched, her long blond hair electric behind her. I began waving, pointing to the child at my chest. As she got close, I could hear her urgent sounds as she ran low to the ground, unaware of the mechanics of her body’s propulsion, so single minded in her focus.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” she breathed.

“I found her as I was driving up.”

“Oh my God, oh my God. There. Oh my God! Thank you. Thank you.  My lead teacher is there…” she looked to the school. There was still the emptiness of the ball field. No one.

“She was where?! Oh my God. She…we! She’s part of the school. I’m day care. Special ed. I don’t know how. We have an outdoor classroom. She was gone.”

The woman didn’t look strong enough to handle adrenaline pumping in her slight frame. I was thankful she wore a mask, not because of the coronavirus, but because her fear and her guilt would have been too vivid and sorrowful to witness on this beautiful spring morning.

The man in the Audi drove off, waving at us, his calm smile incongruous with the flames of panic that continued to engulf the teacher.

“Thank you. Thank you. I hate to think…” the teacher said as she took the little girl from me. She clutched the child to her chest as she ran back to the school without looking back.

Later someone suggested that I should have followed up with the police anyway. But having worked at an elementary school for a brief time, I knew the teacher would have to file an incident report with the school and notify the little girl’s family. The negative space this child had created on an early spring morning would leave a permanent scar.

Small Stillness

It was strange to drive a long distance again in my old Nissan. In this pandemic, Tom and I have driven short distances, usually for coffee and a walk in the woods. But the Friday before Easter, I drove to the Eastern Shore to see my father and his wife. To pass the time, I listened to one of the recent episodes on Radio Lab, about the elements of the periodic table.

At Dad’s, we discussed what lies beyond. Beyond this pandemic, this post-democratic world, beyond the mundanity of our aging bodies. Each of us faces an edge we need to cross. We are born, we learn to walk, to talk, we graduate from school, get promoted, buy the house…all the while we think: what is next? And in this question, we also glimpse a reality of who we are. It seems even the universe has an edge beyond which scientists speculate about, an edge that contains a truth we don’t yet know. They call it dark matter, an apt description for anyone facing the “what’s next?” question.

What I found compelling about the Radio Lab podcast on dark matter was how quiet it must be to find it, to get to the edge. There are are scientists working in a place miles below the surface of the earth, trying to hear the whispers of dark matter as it passes through Xenon, the 54th element of the periodic table. This struck me:

It’s Isiah’s call, you know. He’s lying on his mat and he hears the whisper because…that’s for me alone. That call is for me alone, and that’s that sense that this experiment gives to me is that here the universe has been shouting, and shouting, and shouting at us and we’ve gathered all this scientific knowledge out of the shout, out of the clapping, out of the cheers. Now where we’re at in the 21st century is we’re going down to what’s it saying in the whisper, and those whispers go clear back to conception. They go clear back to birth. If we understand these whispers, we’re very close to understanding gestation. 

Radio Lab, “Elements,” March 25, 2021

These were the ideas that swirled in my head as I got a bit of time in the studio last week. I started teaching Yoga and Art at All Soul’s Church Unitarian in Washington, DC the Monday after my visit to Dad’s. It is a zoom class with 8 dedicated and courageous souls who want to explore the realms of their creative spirit. The first assignment I gave them was to create something small — no bigger than 4″ x 4″ or more than 500 words. We shared our creations this week, in a supportive and spirited discussion after a gentle flow focused on the balancing and purifying of energy within.

I began my creation with the cosmic egg. Technically, I wanted to see if I could carve shapes and designs into its edge, to balance it on this spiral, to cup it in dark matter. I worked only with things that I had at my disposal in the studio — a Chemistry textbook from the 1940s, given to me by Marie, and the forms I made of bee hives used in my rubbings last year, the inside of an AirPod box, wire. Tacky glue holds it together, mod podge gives the “sink” its shine.

Big answers come in small, quiet packages. Informal mindfulness practices like art-making and formal practices like meditation lead to a profound quiet, where we can hear the whisper that is the moment of conception, feel the energy that holds us and animates us. Like a top whirling, we appear to be motionless, but we are pure energy, the centripetal force of the things that are outside rooting us to the center.

Truth Moves

This is a detail of my teaching manifesto, done at the request of the yoga teacher training program at Tranquil Space in 2012. Kevin asked all of us to think about why we were called to teach and I felt inspired to do this piece with found objects — a ribbon container, beads, wire, fabric, old foam core, paint, a slide of one of my paintings.

I keep it on my desk to remind me that everybody has a story, every BODY has a story, that my calling is to listen for these stories, breathe with these bodies, connect with my fellow earth travellers in and out of the classroom and share the joy of this practice. (My thought process and my new understandings of this piece are below.)*

That’s why I’m so excited that I have a chance to work with some people who use their bodies as the impetus for creativity in a workshop called Truth Moves at The Lion’s Den this coming Sunday, June 14 from 1 – 2:30.

The Lion’s Den is a community organization providing dance/art/movement/fitness as vehicles of expression where people will feel valued and see real results while being part of an inclusive and welcoming community. She has asked me to come and bring the template of the chakras to their work, as another way into the truth in their moves, their vehicle for communication and creativity in the world. Their work, their lives are vitally important to this creation. I’m  thrilled to help in this very small way.

Dancers know that body movement can communicate, connect and heal. Ever wonder why? Is there some deeper truth to the movement of the legs, pelvis, torso, arms or head that we all share? Come learn about the ancient wisdom of the chakras and experiment with this body/mind philosophy in movement and sound.

I’ve designed this workshop for anyone who has ever felt embodied (not just dancers!). If you have ever felt the embrace of of sun on your skin on a chilly day, the relaxation into a hug with someone you love, the way you could dance all night in god-awful shoes at the club;  if you’ve ever felt something is just not right in the pit of your stomach; or fought a lump in your throat as you struggle to hear or tell the truth, or the prickle of happy tears…I welcome you on this journey.  I’m sure we’ll all learn something from one another. We’ll be doing some movement (and dancers will be free to expound, expand and use these movements towards their own creative ends) but these movements will be gentle and designed for every body and every purpose in mind.

Lauren graduated from the Refresh Yoga Center Teacher Training program (where I am a lead trainer) after she was already an accomplished dancer and dance teacher, barre instructor, entrepreneur and lion-hearted risk-taker. Students and teachers alike were grateful for her authenticity and honesty, the joy she radiated, her infectious laugh and her ability to bring a room of people together in love and some serious asana practice. Even if this workshop doesn’t sound like something you would do, please learn more about Lauren and her organization. I am so happy to work with her in this small way, as she brings her vision to the world.

Some notes about this sculpture, my calling as a teacher, and the TRUTH MOVES that we are all experiencing in our lives thanks to the live saving work of BLACK LIVES MATTER:

*My thought process on this sculpture: the foam core was cut in strips and glued to the outside rim of the large ribbon spool, representing the bones, the silky transparent fabric on the outside of the spool, skin. I liked how the slide of my painting was only visible when you put it up to the light, how the reflections, though distorted, light the dark shiny walls of the tube. For me this was a symbol of the goal of our yoga practice — finding the truth of Self, abiding there — and I wanted to demonstrate that this takes work. In this interactive piece, you have to physically move beads out of the way to see the image. These beads represent the kleshas — ignorance, egoism, attachment, aversion and the fear of death/clinging to life — the causes of suffering.

Here is the original painting: 

How I feel about my manifesto now: I recognize my embrace of the root of racism — making the white body as the supreme standard — all this pink on the outside of this sculpture! Even in the painting, which was modelled on me, I choose to ignore my own darker skin tone for pink and white. I am ashamed of this implicit bias, now glaringly apparent, and thankful that I am beginning to see the light, interestingly just like the body in this painting sees the light on the horizon. This painting was done after the death of my mother, a time when I felt such profound grief, but also the most amazing connection with creation having lived through her death. I feel the same way now — grief, connection, hope. 

Of the several “aha moments” in the past few weeks, the most important for me as a yoga teacher was the interview of Resmaa Menakem by Krista Tippett. I have so much more work to do to understand the way white supremacy shows up in me and in my classes, and that the work of anti-racism begins in the body for all of us. I have missed living into the vast potential of my calling, but as a yogi, I’ve learned that this all is practice — all of this life. We go back and forth between ability and inability to do, see, move, breathe, be. 

Just keep practicing truth. Step into it, desire it, act on it, love it, speak it, see it, abide in it.