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January 17th, 2019        Photos I

 

        

 

 

 

 

 

‘This is a photograph of me’ by Margaret Atwood

It was taken some time ago / At first it seems to be / a smeared print:                                                                       blurred lines and grey flecks / blended with the paper; / then, as you scan
it, you can see something in the left-hand corner / a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging / and, to the right, halfway up / what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house. / In the background there is a lake, / and beyond that, some low hills.

(The photograph was taken / the day after I drowned.
I am in the lake, in the center / of the picture, just under the surface.
It is difficult to say where / precisely, or to say / how large or how small I am:
the effect of water / on light is a distortion. / but if you look long enough
eventually, you will see me.)

Also, you may like to check out Catherine Just’s site and view her work at: http://www.catherinejust.com/

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Quotes

‘One love, one heart, let’s get together and feel alright’ Bob Marley

In a previous post I had quoted Gretchen Rubin who wrote ‘Recently, I made a list of some of my favorite lines from classic children’s picture books. This is my favorite kind of thing to do. I love quotes, and I love picture books’. I have also loved both. I remember writing inspirational lines from books and poem stanzas on the covers and front pages of books, in scrap books and on school bags in High School. At the beginning of each new school year we were provided with our new school books for free and because they were paper backs we were encouraged to cover them so that they could last us the whole year and endure the ‘wear and tear’. One year it was plain brown wrapping paper, another it was collage with newspaper or glossy magazine bits, gift wrapping paper, or a transparent plastic adhesive covering.  I would always incorporate quotes, lyrics and poems. Then throughout the year I added a few more on the first few pages. There was also a trend to write things, sew images or fasten badges with messages mostly about peace and love, on our school bags, especially, on our army type satchels and shoulder bags that we bought in the central flea markets downtown. I clearly remember one poem that always found its way on my books and bags was a poem by Constantine Cavafy with the title As much as you can. Later I pinned quotes and poems on notice boards and on the fridge. They usually reflected what I was reading and what resonated with me at the time. They were little hits of wisdom, inspiration and hope or small containers where the writer’s spirit came to life for a little while. Authors like Jack London, Dostoyevsky, Maxim Gorky and Leo Tolstoy had an influence on me in my earlier years. One quote from War and Peace by Tolstoy, which has resonated with me over these last few years is about been torn out of our habitual path and despite the suffering not wanting to return to being who we were before because often the process of diminishment awakens us to more of who we are at a personal level and the depth or breadth of human nature, to societal structures, dynamics and lies, and also, to an intrinsically interconnected reality. In some sense the journey also awakens us from a kind of mass consensus trance, where we mostly live from a state of consciousness, based on what we have been socially conditioned to believe as true as opposed to what we may have realized to be true. There are many people that are not only working on making a difference in the world, but are also committed to awakening and to co-creating new patterns of being in the world. Tolstoy wrote: “They say: sufferings are misfortunes,” said Pierre. ‘But if at once this minute, I was asked, would I remain what I was before I was taken prisoner, or go through it all again, I should say, for God’s sake let me rather be a prisoner and eat horseflesh again. We imagine that as soon as we are torn out of our habitual path all is over, but it is only the beginning of something new and good. As long as there is life, there is happiness. There is a great deal, a great deal before us”

Today’s post includes a drawing of Bob Marley which I found unfinished among old drawings over the weekend and then decided to continue working on it by adding a few more layers to it. Drawing can be a meditative sort of experience. Once the outline has been drawn the process of bringing it to life through layers of colour and playing with light and dark can become almost automatic, and in that empty space of presence insights and ideas can surface. This is how this post came about. The line above from Marley’s song that popped up contains a message of Oneness. It seems he was awakened to what Quantum physics is also showing us, the fact that we are all interconnected in more ways than we often imagine and that we are all in this together. Today, this line rings truer to me than all the times I listened to the song in the past because of my journey. Finally, one last quote on peace and the transformative process that I will be sharing today is from a conversation, originally recorded in 2008, between Father Thomas Keating and Tami Simon. It seems relevant to me because at the beginning of each New Year many of us reflect on our personal desires and dreams, maybe resolutions and goals, but also on concerns, wishes and hopes for more peace, kindness, freedom and health at a planetary level. He says:

“And the terrible horrors of our present world situation, it will not be cured in any other way. In other words, only utmost love can overcome utmost violence. Violence is rooted in our animal nature, and until it’s integrated into our neo-cortex, and our human brain, and the further levels of consciousness that that rational level opens like a gate into a whole new aspects of human life, until that happens, I don’t know what’s going to happen to society. The last hundred years have been absolutely horrendous in human brutality and violence, and the technology is now far exceeding the moral judgment onto its justification. So, as technology develops greater and greater weapons of destruction, we really risk the loss of human civilization as we know it. If someone starts escalating conventional weapons into nuclear, or chemical, biological weapons, and there are people already present in the world who think this is the way to defend yourself. If that was a way of defending of oneself in earlier times, it doesn’t work anymore. There is no just war, because you can’t help but kill an enormous number of innocent people. The statistics are that if there is a war, the safest thing to do is to join the military, because most people who are killed now are not soldiers, but civilians. What does that say about justification of war?  ……….and perhaps the greatest contribution we can make to society at this time is to commit ourselves to the transformative process and to the divine therapy in a non-conceptual form of meditation that can heal the emotional wounds of our lifetime, and enable us then to manifest the love of God in our behavior, in so far….  Each one of us has an enormous accountability for being human in this moment of time, where what we do with the rest of our lives can actually save this planet, or not”

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Inner maps

The pictures today are pages from a smash book journal. Smash book type journaling allows me to use any kind of material, have fun crumpling up paper, to be messy, to overcome perfectionist schemas and not focus on end results. When using a pre-existing book or regular notebook, we may need to prep the pages so that we can write, paint and glue. One way of doing this is crumpling up pages and then sticking pages together to make them suitable for gluing or painting. So our journal or book ends up with fewer pages, but much thicker. This particular entry in this smash book has to do with inner child themes and material. It contains a layer of writing, a quick drawing covers the words and then I have added crayons and undiluted acrylic paints using my fingers. Finally, I have glued paper images, a small piece of fabric from a pair of old shorts and a poem by Clarissa Estes Pinkola. In some sense I create shifts in the story and inner experience as I add layers. Interestingly, as I was engaging with this I remembered a chapter in Bessel van der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma (chapter 18), in which he refers to the process of RESTRUCTURING INNER MAPS that involves projecting our inner world into the three-dimensional space of a ‘structure’ or tableaux, which enable us to see what’s going on in the theater of our mind, and this, can often give us a clearer perspective. In some sense, our spatial brain via the ‘structure’ allows us to visualize our implicit map of the world.

Bessel van der Kolk writes that through the process of positioning ‘placeholders’ – that is other people in the group that for a while will represent  the important people in our life – we are often surprised by the unexpected memories, thoughts, and emotions that can come up. He writes ‘you can experiment with moving the pieces around on the external chessboard that you’ve created and see what effect it has on you’. In his book he describes how the protagonists become the directors of their own plays and as the narratives unfold, group participants are asked to play the roles of significant people in the protagonists’ lives, such as parents and other family members, friends, etc. So, their inner world takes form in three-dimensional space. Then group members play the wished-for caretakers who could provide the support, love, and protection that had been lacking in past occasions. The psychomotor process allows you to feel what you felt back then, and to say and do what you could not at the time. It’s like going back into the movie of your life and rewriting scenes and creating supplemental memories,

Maybe one reason I made the association between the type of journaling I described above and the creation of ‘structures’ is the fact that in both cases we can potentially project our inner maps on paper or through the creation of tableaus. These outward projections of our right hemisphere cannot only be quite precise of past dynamics and emotions, as B van der Kolk, suggests, but also allow us to transform old inner narratives by making the invisible visible, and through feeling emotions and harnessing the power of our imagination.