The Practice You Need

Collage August 26, 2012

My goodness, here it is Sunday and I haven't posted here since Tuesday.  You don't even want to know why, the chaos around here.  It's a new day, and I have awakened with optimism.  For a long time I have seen Sunday as a free day, a sort of sabbath to rest from the things I feel responsible for, not even demanding of myself that I meditate or exercise, though I do have to follow my elaborate pill schedule and drink enough water and brush and floss and wear my compression sleeve and leg things and shoes with insoles.......Yes.  And glasses and hearing aids.  Just to stay alive. It's not easy being me.  However, Sunday is my day off from all the rest of the catastrophe.  As much as is practical.

A while back a reader asked me to write about my practice.  I'm wary of being specific about it, because my practice suits me in my circumstance and this body, and after this many years along the Buddhist path.  So for now, to start with, I want to more generally talk about what I think that path is - in other words, the overview of the practice.

Based on the prescription attributed to the Buddha that is called "the Noble Eightfold Path," I have three goals:

understand reality deeply
be fully present
behave

Zen compels me to point out that I can't fully explain what I mean in words.  Furthermore, these three aspects of the path aren't separate. If you are entirely present and aware in a situation, that means you understand its nature, and the large nature of all reality, our interconnection, karma; and that means you will  try not to do harm by your speech and actions. These actually all point toward one goal, to practice being awake.

So maybe this is the point to use the word "enlightenment."  When I started on this path, that's what I wanted, and I understood it as a condition of no more suffering.  Of being relaxed and clear and free of stress and all those negative emotions like fear and anger, transcending pain.  I was suffering a lot then so I worked very hard, and after a while had a grand spiritual experience.  But the bliss and ease it rolled in with was eroded by the drip . drip . drip . of  life. I had a lot to learn about my own behavior, how I thought and what I did that made me suffer more than necessary.  I also had to learn that I was not going to be entirely free of suffering, that no one is.  If you read the Buddha's story/myth, he continued to suffer, too.

That learning came about through "spiritual practice," and I have done many kinds, through which I have chipped away at  my delusions and inched toward clear seeing and doing less harm.  I think I'll stop here for now.  It is Sunday, and I want to make it to coffee hour at church.  One of the things I've learned is that you have to have a community in which you feel valued and which shares your values.
~~~~~
p.s.  Had a delightful lunch after church with good friends and getting to know each other better.  But Panera's charges a bit much for a bowl of soup.  And you don't want to know how many calories are in a pastry.  Really.

Domestic Goddess

Domestic Goddess

This morning the collage group I belong to didn't respond to my idea that we create The Porpoise of Art (watch this space), and I think we settled on the idea of balance.  Then, as usual, I went off-road. (You don't have to do the assignment is one of our principles.)  Looking at the array of magazines from which we can cut out images, I picked up a Women's Day dated September 1953. 

That month and year I turned eleven.  This is a moment when a child is anticipating going through puberty and growing up.  Women's magazines like this were my travel guide back then.  An ad for a sewing machine at the front of this issue evoked memories of being a girl dreaming of grown-up life, and the drawing in that ad became the center of my collage.  Everything in the collage  that's black and white was cut and rearranged from that ad.

As I made this collage, I remembered having seven crinolines for under my circle skirts, and I felt the sweetness of the aspiration for femininity and for a well-ordered home.  The dream was only superficially about having a man love you and owning a house and having nice furniture and cooking and cleaning.  It was also about home and family, a beautiful refuge. 

I could write a book about the harm done to me by the patriarchy, especially as filtered through my parents, who never questioned it.  The idea was that the man was a good breadwinner and the woman took care of  their lifestyle.  There was no room in that dream for loving and marrying people of the same gender, or not marrying at all, or not having children, or the two-career marriage, not for most of us. There was not room for women being smart, though a few plain girls were doomed to be.  Despite this prison of expectations, there was something of value in the idea of a home and a dedicated homemaker.  And also in valuing softness and femininity. 

Anyone could tell you I am so far from being a domestic goddess.  Yet, I found as I made this collage, that that aspect of the dream still held appeal for me, and I was glad I recently bought a pink tee with ruffles around the neckline.

What is it that thus comes?

The I

This morning I was led to a little story that I found here in Sweeping Zen.  This is a piece of it:

The Chan Master Nanyue  Huairang visited the Sixth Ancestor, Huineng.
Huineng asked him, “Where do you come from?”
Nanyue   said, “I come from the National Teacher An on Mt. Song.”
Huineng  said, “What is it that thus comes?”
The Master was without means [to answer].
After studying with Huineng for eight years, he finally understood the previous conversation.
Thereupon, he announced to the Ancestor, “I’ve understood what you put to me when I first came:  ‘What is it that thus comes’”
Huineng  asked, “How do you understand it?”
Nanyue   replied, “To say it’s like anything wouldn’t hit it.”

What is this "I"?  Any way you describe yourself feels woefully inadequate.

Then on I went to my collage group, where I created a vertical piece.  I'd like to show you a photo of that, but my computer is refusing to do it.  You could see it if you just picked up your monitor and rotated it so the blue patch is in the upper left. But I found I like it turned this way much more.

What we all love about creating collage together is the non-thinking.  None of us tell stories with what we do; we play with shape and color.  Knowing that art doesn't have to be representational is one of many reasons it's good to live in the modern age.  Our assignment this morning was think quilt.  I am also always reminded of Joe Brainard's earnest advice:  just glue something down.

So I began in the upper left, with that lovely piece of blue handmade paper, my intention being Patchwork.  I thought I would work from left to right, one row at a time, the way you make a patchwork quilt.  We all murmured a bit about quilts we knew as girls, when women made quilts out of old clothes, and their function was to keep you warm.  But soon we settled down and the silence became absolute. So often, art feels like a sacred practice.

It seems that the main purpose of any assignment is to give me something to rebel against.  Sure enough, I didn't get far before I felt my plan to imitate a quilt was boring, so I left it.  Then it got to be fun.  Especially when I found the letter i.  I decided the collage was about "The I" - the self, this one, and its place in the universe.  The last thing I did was put the i in what is now the lower left-hand corner.

There is always a lot of space in my collages; I remain intrigued by the space everywhere, inside and outside this body, the idea that the shape of the empty spaces is as important as the images in it. And also, as I face my often-frightening old age (my back really hurt today), I feel better remembering how small I am, how big the universe, how spacious.  Collage is a somewhat more impermanent art than carving stone.  I like that about it, too.

A note from an old - really old - friend led me to look up this song this morning.  It turns out to be an impressive effort of digital collage, no clue to the artist.  I am studying collage right now, and it made me think how you should never do art for posterity, or for the future, to gain something, because it will very soon be dead and gone.  Do it for ourselves, for the enjoyment of doing it.

Sometimes in art classes or writing we struggle.  There is an hilarious image in the writings of Ajahn Chah, how we have are like water buffalo - we have to be all bound up hand and foot before we will take our medicine.  This makes me smile just writing it, to see myself writhing around, trying so hard sometimes.

And as for the grand self-improvement project, the happiness project, how far have you gotten with it, really?  (See song.)

My personal demon

I tend to think of demons as looking like those little troll dolls that are having a really awful hair day. But this morning I saw this lying in one of Tom's boxes of stuff-that-might-come-in-handy-someday, and I knew right away that it would make an excellent demon.

I bought the little cat thing years ago as a Christmas ornament, delighted with features that my cell-cam can't capture: four tiny teeth, a red tongue, a nose, white-tipped paws. Those round black circles glued on it are supposed to represent a leopard's spots.

I have been annoyed by my demons lately, so I told Tom, "I should carry this thing with me everywhere I go for a week, the way they used to make high-school kids carry a sack of flour as if it were a baby." In the case of the programs for high-school kids, the point was to give them an idea of how burdensome a baby is, though the flour sacks didn't cry pointlessly, endlessly all night or throw up on you. I don't know whether the programs worked, but I thought this demon might remind me to have a sense of humor. Demons are really not so large.

This one is recumbent on the first collage I ever made, and the most enthusiastic. As you can see, the workshop gave me access to glitter glue, rubber stamps and gold (!) ink, and all manner of scrapbook findings. There is much more to the collage, which struck the other workshop participants dumb during show-and-tell. Compared to theirs, mine lacked theme, sentiment, and organization. It evidenced just how busy and eclectic my mind can be. As I tried to explain it, I felt a little bit like a kindergardener who doesn't know how you're supposed to draw houses. I don't know how I know how kindergardeners feel, because I didn't get to go to kindergarden and learn everything you're supposed to learn there. So I put the collage away. I only happened to pull it out today because I was looking for black paper to pose my little demon on.

I don't know. Maybe comparison is the demon. You can't compare your collage to anyone else's. Mine, for instance, has a feature I had forgotten about: the center is a sort of door the curious can lift to reveal a beautiful bouquet. It seems to me that this kind of raw creativity might qualify me as an outsider artist, at least.