a whole world of sticky pigments

Several weeks ago, Venerable Hojin, an ordained priest from Zen Mountain Monastery, came down with Ryushin Sensei, the abbot, to lead a workshop on campus. Ryushin Sensei was giving a Dharma talk that evening, but Hojin was facilitating an introductory workshop to spirituality and art.

Ven. Hojin is a painter by training, and she continues to work mostly with paint. She started us out with a color exercise, intended to help us engage color in a more nuanced, and very importantly, attentive way. Working with watercolors on postcard-sized pieces of good paper, we were instructed to chose one color and fill the paper with it. The picture below is a close-up of that workshop’s first exercise.

I hadn’t played with a set of watercolors since I was in elementary school. Lots of the usual demons came out to play along with me: the “I don’t know how to do this” demon, the “Hers is better than mine” demon, the “I don’t want to do this if I don’t make something good” demon. Ah, demons. Always around, wanting attention. I try and think of them as small, hyperactive pets, or ill-behaved but basically decent children.

After the watercolor session, Ven. Hojin led us outside and instructed us to find colors in the environment. She showed a piece she had begun earlier on her way to the campus: splotches of deep maroon and violet occupied a corner of the paper. They were flowers and leaves she’d found on her way, and rubbed into the paper. Away we went, too, in search of color. That workshop opened me up to paint and to color in a radically different way. When I make photographs in color, I don’t consider the color as a quality of an object that I can draw out on its own and work with as a singular subject. I did an entire photo-poetic journal one winter around the theme of red, but red was the theme, not the subject. I was attracted to this practice of color, even though I wasn’t very pleased with my first results. I really enjoyed playing with the watercolors, though, especially with the relatively simply injunction to work with one color at the beginning.

Today, I needed to make some cards to send people. I tried painting a couple but really didn’t like what resulted (“too much thinking,” which turns out to be as much a problem with paints as it is for me when making photographs or writing; more intuition, more attentiveness, less artifice, is not only a very different process but also a very different piece). So I took paper and fingers and eyes out with me today, and found colors. I started with a tulip tree and some dandelions. I added pansies, daffodils, periwinkle, red maple, grass, forsythia, and more whose names I don’t know. The results are as you see here. The first picture is today’s exercises piled one on top of another on the kitchen table; the two photos below are close-ups of two different pieces.

In between making the piece above and the one below, I attended Friday prayers (jummah) with the campus community. In the wake of the tragedy in Boston, I’ve been struggling as I struggled 11 and a half years ago to make sense of things, and to find constructive and healing ways to address my own pain and confusion, as well as reach out to the greater faith community. I asked our Immam if I could attend Friday prayers, and he invited me to come. What happened in Boston—I’ll be honest. I don’t want to go into it. I went to jummah out of sorrow and hope and the belief that by being together and praying together something positive will result. The Muslim Students’ Association coordinator, a young woman, brought an extra scarf for me to cover my head, in a plain beige.

The call to prayer and the chants pierce straight through me, every time. I watched the women pray. The physical postures of prayer, so different in the details and so similar in the general attitude, moved me to reconsider and re-enliven my own physical prayer. It also delights me to no end to look at the various colors and patterns of their headscarves. I live in a largely monochromatic or at least visually restrained religious environment, and it fills me with a child-like pleasure to see the many-colored scarves the women wear, and to both watch them pray, and pray with them. I can’t be anything but a bit of an outsider, but they invited me in, made a space for me. Afterward there was a community lunch, and a small group of us (including the young Jewish classmate who emailed the Students’ Association coordinator, a friend of his, to find me a hijab!) chatted and nibbled. Then I left to go drop off my alumni auditing application for next fall, so that I can officially audit courses.

All along the street were colors and more colors. A whole world of sticky pigments I’d never explored. What amazes me yet again in looking at the pictures is how textured and layered the pieces can become. In some ways, plants behave like pencils; in other ways, like paint. I mostly played around with “brush” stroke direction and layering colors, and working with my timidity and fear of making something “bad” by making big, bold strokes and creating large patches of color before filling in with other colors. The color of a petal or sepal isn’t always the color you get on the page. A lot of experimentation and discovery happened today, which was exciting. I’m incredibly grateful to Ven. Hojin for introducing me to this; it’s replaced the camera on some outings, asking me to understand the essence of something as not manifest through its form, but through its color. It’s also encouraged me to make journal entries that are color-scapes instead of notations, the various plants used in the making of an exercise serving as the cues for where I went, and what I saw or touched.

Compline, Christ Church, Palm Sunday

I wrote you a poem because
I don’t believe in spells or prayers;
it was all I had.

from Twelve Simple Songs by Dave Bonta

The embryo of song, a single note. The ancestor of narrative, a single voice, first, against the smokey incensed dark. The ceiling has beams they are like ribs, this church is a body and the lights are dying low. I am dying low. In song words unfurl and with them meaning unspools like a dropped bobbin, rolling away to echo ping against the floor. And still the single voice holds tenuous but holds. Flicker. Shadows: tenebrae. This is love. This is not love. A single note is no longer held but falls. Before it resurrects into silence another voice catches, carries on. This is love. Still no resolution. Sound preceedes words, a lengthening spine of vowels and knobby consonants, a body that is all blood and muscle and no joints. Words do not coagulate into meaning. Hemophiliac love. Blessed are the poor in spirit. There is a draft from the door. The flames flicker but do not go out. Now the voices swell full. The Laozi said what is empty is full, emptiness is fullness. Barren. I am poor as an abyss, poor as the cracked land, brittle as the first skin of ice on the water, fragile as ash. Vowels and consonants don’t spell the words but they carry us over the long dark between the vault and the pricks of votive light. Was that a prayer? This is love.

small stone (225)

Compline. Candlelight and incense, shadow and smoke. Prayer becomes an enlarging ache echoing in the space between voice and silence.

each thing called up dissolves

And what is prayer

but a way to teach—

Luisa A. Igloria, Solar

Each thing called up slowly dissolves, like foam. A word testifies, then silences itself. Something in me rends like wet paper tearing, and then prayer spills all over like a tide.

Years of lighting candles in the dark with the sharp sulfur of matches pinching my nose. Agony is only a story I tell myself. Salvation circumscribes the globe of my heart like a horizon. What lies beyond is a sea of light falling into dark falling into light. Prayer never lifted me in ecstasy. Living did that.

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Night prayers. The rising smoke curling like a dancer’s hand. The shadows of the altar, pockets for unspeakable and unspoken things.

night prayer

The stars in their soft August beauty emerge from both the black velvet sky and the charcoal fur of smoke from the forest fires that has settled along the horizon. There is a “light pollution” ordinance in this small mountain town forbidding porch lights and such in the neighborhoods, and so even the Milky Way is visible. It is 10:30 p.m. The mountains rise from the smoke like the creamy shoulders of a sleeping giant, visible against the sky. I stop in front of a long canyon field that, by day, is gold with ripening grain and flows back between the mountains. By night it is a rustling presence. An intimation of openness. The mountains loom up, the stars populate the sky, and I stand in a sea of night-sounds.

For MF and JL, MP, Mssr. R., SR & MR, MS … I know so many people whose first name begins with an M. The ill, the recovering, the frail, the hurt. I don’t receive many requests for prayers. Sometimes I offer to include people, when it seems appropriate. Blessing is what we do; and while it may be that those of great holiness can more effectively bless, I try not to let an acute sense of my own failings and limitations stop me from offering prayers of healing and hope. I see prayer and blessing as most fundamentally a reaffirmation of our connections and shared existence. An honoring of our mutual and shared life. What other metaphysics work through these prayers and blessings I neither second-guess nor overly concern myself with. To be wholehearted requires both understanding, and suspension of understanding.

May all be well, free from suffering. May all be whole, without illness or disease in body or mind. May we all be at ease, in peace and comfort.

The stars above, Cassiopeia and Cepheus, the deep promise of Quigly’s Canyon between the mountains, the rustle of the grain. Night prayer. For us all.

cold mountain (22)

Spring again. The ancient and the new stitching their hands together, like the binding of a book. The pages hold a story in verse. Musa, mihi causas memora, how last year became this year. All winter I prayed with the windows closed, the shutters fastened, breath hanging in the subzero interior air. Now the air warms and quickens, and my prayers unfurl with it. All around the balcony before dawn, invoking the old gods, and afterward I stand to watch the still-sleeping city. Spring means an end to the bitter cold dark that drove me indoors for months. Even the bell sounds different, deeper, not so sharp, and each strike to the bronze sets her resonating. Write that into the book of spring, how even the bells begin to breath again, how I stand chanting in a sing-song under the park’s lamplight, how I joyously welcome the season as one who is learning how few remain can.

Chinese and English pp. 50-51, here.

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roads don’t reach Cold Mountain

I slip through church doors and under the arches of mosques like the sun creeping around a corner on a summer morning. At St. Genevieve’s they prayed in polyphony, and I wept like I could slake my thirst to join the music with tears. In Denver the immigrant African women let me sit in a corner, and so I learned to bend to Allah with them. In Helsinki all I found were Protestant churches, as spare as snow but still knowing, like cathedrals, a thing or two about letting in light, and I stood and watched the late afternoon reflected off the gleaming rows of silent pews. Among others. Among many. There is no road to the places I have been. There is no gate either.

For the Chinese of the poem, and Red Pine’s English translation with notes, see here, pp. 46-47, number 16.

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During his memorial, four grandkids ran around the Hall. Pounding feet louder than moktaks, shrieking laughs louder than prayers.