Guided Meditation
To my creative friend,
You have grown weary of words for good reason. The last few weeks have been full of noise. Our minds have been overtaxed, constantly filtering the flood. There is simply too much and like Eliot said, humans cannot bear very much reality. You are not meant to hold this much. You never were.
When we work so hard with our minds, our hearts begin to insulate themselves. They prefer the quiet and will recede to self-protect.
Of course you want your heart to stay present with you. You want to be openhearted to the beauty and pain of each and every experience. We were made to swim the depths and traverse the heights. We welcome it all, letting the amplitude between the two grow.
How do we hold this paradox? How does our heart’s capacity for love increase while we protect it against too many demands? What gentle space is between the two?
“Guided Meditation” (2024). Check availability of this artwork and others.
In this recent image, titled Guided Meditation, I think about the space within us where words roil like waves. Our minds become awash in white noise, sea foam formed by colliding stories. There they are, taking up the majority of our pristine blue selves.
Down below there is the cold, smooth stone. It is an obscured form, like fog slowly beginning to thicken or dissipate. There is mystery here, something that is real and tangible, but unformed and elusive. It has no barrier, no container.
We are situated between the two. With loose lines, the central figures remain tethered to a noise they’d rather leave behind. Despite the strong, bold lines separating the ocean of words and the quiet below, some sounds still trickles down. In fact, the barrier cannot hold everything at bay.
These faint lines, made with pencil and incense, reach towards the figures. They are like finely spun spiderweb, thin and strong. They will blow away with the slightest wind. They will hold our weight and more.
It is these lines that intrigue me the most. How do they connect the central figures, and to what are they connected? Are they suspension lines, whips of smoke? Are they there to help us feel safely tethered to the noise we’d rather not hear?
In my heart, they are necessary for now. It would cause too much pain, too much grief to let go all at once. But there are safe havens below the words, closer to the mystery. There are alcoves where we can be with one another and the world. Lowered into the still space until we, too, begin to blur our borders with the world waiting to welcome us.
