heaven will be dripping...

An almost perfect day...

Up at sunrise...

Pick up little sister... (and she's ready to go!)

Breakfast burritos and coffee to begin...

A long drive filled with talk and laughter - boys, school, more boys, more laughter... my own troubles are left far behind, and I am able to be fully present in her life, in the moment...

We arrive and spend a few hours in this...

Yes, the UPickIt field of raspberries.  Heaven.  Literal heaven.  The field worker flirting and warning us not to eat too much (but they don't watch, we try not to be lil piggies), the rows are slightly squishy from the rain during the week, but the weather today is divine - not a cloud in the sky, a light breeze, the grasshoppers and bees have come out to play.  And in this bright green field of orderly rows under a perfect blue sky, haphazard dots and dots and dots of raspberry red, just waiting for us...

Then when we've tasted and picked 4 pounds and wandered the property and visited the store and picked 4 more pounds, we drive home.  We stop for ice cream as lunch, and we play the banana game (slap your friend in the arm if you see the yellow car first, and shout "banana!") and we add an orange car variant and we listen to new music and decide which we like....

I take her home and leave her with 4 pounds of raspberries, her little brother trying already to get at them, and then I drive home with my 4 pounds (let's guess how long they last... tomorrow?  maybe the next day?  if they're lucky...) and I carve oars and feel the sunburn start to sting on the back of my neck and think about making a raspberry charm...  silver raspberries, how lovely that might be...

I believe heaven will be dripping with raspberries.

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why Shambhala is related to creativity

I remembered to ask my teacher yesterday.

Courage.

Shambhala is about courage.

Making art is about courage.

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how to float

I am a visual thinker.  For the most part, I can't understand or learn anything without seeing it. When I was trying (and failing) to learn Spanish, I had to visualize the words and sentences in my mind in order to comprehend them.  My teacher, who was very good, cautioned the class against doing that, but I couldn't help it.  Consequently, I got as far as the conjunctive tense and felt like I couldn't go any farther.  Maybe someday, I'll try again.

So, I have a tendency to mentally see things in visions or imagery, but not in a predictive or supernatural way.  Not even usually in a dream, although these things come to me sometimes just as I wake up.  It's just the way my mind functions.  It's how I understand and process things, lots of visual analogies and metaphors.

This is the vision from the weekend.  I pictured someone in the bottom of a well.  Terrible.  Dark, slimy mossy walls, damp, a circle of daylight and sky above faraway out of reach. Cold. Then the well started to fill up, water seeping in at the bottom, wafting around her shoes and creeping higher and higher.  Touching her hem, rising, rising.  She panics, starts to claw at the walls, trying to get a grip, but the rock and the moss are unyielding to her fingers.

The water gets higher, more volume, so it's swirling around her, and she's frantic, and suddenly I realize!  Don't panic!  It's water!  Don't struggle!  Just float, and it will raise you closer to the top...  float...  FLOAT... please...

I realized later, this is what I hope this Buddhism study does for me.  I hope it teaches me how to float.

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I have started listening to some lectures that are offered by a local Tibetan Buddhism center online.  I liked what I heard, so I have gone ahead and contacted them about a meditation class. I start next week.

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The rowboat is the result of a similar vision.  I'll go into detail about that one when I finish it, and post it for sale.  As I move forward in this charm business, I have the feeling that many of my pieces will have stories like this attached to them.  I have already added a "well charm" to the list - the ever-expanding list! - of charms I need to carve.

A bit of a backwards step working on the rowboat over the weekend though.  I attempted some texturing, I'm not entirely happy with it, and I may have made it too thin for casting.  I may have to start over.

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wrestling with roller coasters

Listening to the radio has become a joy!  Where I used to flick the television on to see if there are any disasters, now I flick the radio on when I go downstairs in the morning.  I hear music instead of commercials and chatter (mostly), and it's oriented around my town, instead of New York, or Los Angeles.

Yesterday, listening to the local public radio station, I heard part of an interview with Natalie Goldberg.  I was busy doing other things, but I caught a section where she talked about making her creativity part of her practice.  Very interesting... I already have her "Writing Down the Bones" ...  OH!  I just checked.  I have "Wild Mind" in my creativity library as well...  Yay!  Hmmm, I suspect the next few evenings will be quite busy re-reading these.

Anyway, I decided to go to the library to see if any of the available books of hers were directly about creativity as practice, and if I could maybe translate her writing instruction to my wax carving of silver charms.  I found two books.  One called "Thunder and Lightning", which seems more directly related to questions of writing, and a book called "The Great Failure".

That title grabbed me.  I have had some major failings in personal relationships recently, and I was hoping, hoping, hoping that her failure (was this about her failure?) could help me with my own.  It did.  I read the whole thing in one evening.  It also helped open up my perception about the Pema Chodron and Shambhala reading I've been doing.

"We spend our life on a roller coaster with rusty tracks, stuck to highs and lows, riding from one, trying to grab the other."

Yes.  I need to buy this book now.  I think I'll get some Beyonce too... "to the left, to the left"...

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The rowboat is almost complete.  I need to refine the shape a little more, carve the oars, and texture it, and then it's off to casting!
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the void part deux, or illusion illusion all around

Not long after I posted the last post about the void, I went back to Start Where You Are and almost immediately came upon a section that deals with dualism.  I realized, my whole void spiel could lead to a sense of duality, which is not where I wanted to go.  (By dualism here, I mean an idea of separateness, a convenient setup to categorize one thing as an "other", or different.)

I also chanced to look out the window, and the shadows of the leaves dancing on my roof made me think about the void being present.  Not outside my little sphere, not somewhere else, but the void is here too.  Shadows are absence of light - they can be seen, but are they manifest?  Are they... something?  So many things are not manifest, not "here", but are - thoughts, emotions, for example.  They are causations, certainly - we say we do things because of them.   But are they things?  Do they have existence?  What about the soul?  What is that?  Or spirit?  Or personality?

Yeah.  My little sphere of what I can hear, touch, see - it's an illusion.  If nothing else, it's as full of the void as what I imagined outside of it.  Nothing can be put safely away somewhere else.

I had been thinking of what was in the void, what I would have liked to relegate to the void.  Out of sight, out of mind.  Death.  Death practically equals the void.  The boogie monster, or whoever that is who is hiding under the bed/in the closet/beneath the stairs to the basement.  He lives in the void, and if only I could find a way to keep him from leaping out at me when I least expect it!

Never.  Never is of the void.  Never has become the scariest word in the English language to me.  I hate never.

But none of these things are really in the void, just as the void really is not somewhere else.  The void is right here, by my side.  Shadowing my every step.  Containing the monsters and the demons and the never.  They don't need to leap - they are right there.  Not a far distance at all.

And back I go, trying to learn how not to struggle anymore.

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I had my first after-school-let's-do-the-homework session with my Little yesterday, and I'm already fail!  We worked on science, not math, because the science was mathlike and she didn't have her book to do the math.  It was fine, until we got to the extra credit problem.  She said, "I don't have to do that", and I said, all enthusiastically, "Oh, but we do, it's extra credit and it's practice and it'll be great!!!"

Then we proceeded to stare at it for half an hour, until she finally said, "Maybe I should just ask my teacher..." and I had to concede I couldn't do it.  Now I'm determined to figure it out.  I know someone who is going to laugh at me heartily when he hears about this.
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Today I feel like a cork bobbling on the surface of a slightly wavy ocean, wondering where am I going and how is this going to all end up?

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the void (or the sphere of sensibility)

Dealing with some loss, and the griefing process, and also still with Shambhala and Pema Chodron,  I've had some.... not depressing thoughts, but... um.... thoughtful thoughts.

I'm not sure when I started thinking about the void.  Maybe it was last week, when I decided to cancel the cable.  I used to be a rabid television watcher, but the first part of this year I stopped almost completely.  (BP?  Oil spill?  Huh?)  Going back to it this summer, I noticed I wasn't really watching it, so much as endlessly flipping through the channels in search of something TO watch.  There was not much interesting to see.  And WAY too many commercials.  Plus, Comcast has added a crawl on the bottom of the screen, something about "digital improvements" blah blah blah - which will either cost me more money per month, or it means I have to buy a new television because mine isn't... digital enough, I guess.

I called Comcast to find out, and the customer service woman implied that I was stealing channels - getting channels that I wasn't paying for.  As if I had hacked it.  Which I didn't.  I can't help it if they can't keep track of what gets piped into my home.  Anyway, she made it very easy to cancel it in an indignant huff.  Plus, I'm getting a new ISP, so I think I'll be able to stream most shows I want to see.  And I have 464 movies on my list at Netflix.  There will be plenty to watch.

Still, there is a sense of losing a connection to the world.  The ability to see things in real time - watching the news on September 11th comes to mind.  But for the most part, it doesn't seem to be information I need to know, or that has any real bearing on my life, or that I can't access elsewhere, like the library or the internet.

It does, however, seem to make me be less present to what is directly around me.

I had this thought, a few days ago, that the only things I can truly know are those things directly in my line of sight.  Or smell, or taste, or touch, or hear.  As if there is a sphere of sensibility that surrounds me, and moves with me, and that is what I can actually know.

And it is all I can know.  Everything beyond, or outside of the sphere, is essentially void.  I cannot know it, I cannot possess it, I cannot control anything outside the sphere.  I have to trust, as I move around, that my body carries the sphere of sensibility with it, so I can be present anywhere - but then the other stuff no longer in the sphere becomes void.

The visual of it is not unlike the photos of the planet Earth as it drifts in space.  All the blackness of the void.  Kinda scary :(

These electronic things - cell phones, internet, television - seem to extend our sphere of sensibility.  Little thin lines of electrons spewing out to and fro, circling the world.  If you are very active... well, there's a reason they call it the web.

Yet, the digital age is so ephemeral.  Not like when you used to get a postcard, or a letter.  If it were special, it gets a pretty box, and the letter lives in it, and the box lives in a special drawer.  Go to the box, open the drawer, take the letter out and look at it again.  Hold it in your hand, and show it to other people.  Eventually, it would show the wear and tear, the patina of the journey, developing a worn spot where your fingers touch it, and a fine progression of wrinkles where the paper bends as you turn it over time and time again.

Now, in our digital age, when the line is cut, it's gone.  No evidence that it - the feeling, the thought, the memory, even the person - even existed.  Disposable.  Don't even have to carry out the trash.

Poof.

It's one reason I think I am really going to like this business that I am starting - silver charms for charm bracelets.  Little shiny memories, feelings and thoughts you can roll around in your fingertips.  Keeping the void at bay.

I know, I know.  That's an illusion, too.  Paper doesn't last.  Silver doesn't last.  In some ways, maybe the digital age is more honest.  The void is ever encroaching, bigger than our powers can comprehend.  

As I said elsewhere, it is why we must be brave.

Sound depressing?  It could be.  But I realized this morning - what Shambhala is trying to teach me is that the only way to live, the only way to keep the darkness at bay as a human being, is to remain open.  To know and accept that the void is there, to shine the light as bright as possible, and to expand the sphere - this gift of existence that I have been given - as much as I can.

Ephemeral or not.  :)
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messages, thoughts, and beliefs

I am ruminating about Shambhala, tumbling the words over and over in my head, which seems to resemble a rock tumbler...  complete with rocks.

There is a section in Chapter Nine: Celebrating the Journey, the part about the bow and arrow, and messages.  When I read it the first time, I had great trouble with this section, but it seemed very rich and full even though I didn't understand it, or know how to incorporate it in a practice.

I was thinking about messages, and thoughts and beliefs today.  I verbalized for myself the idea that it is not the thoughts that are troublesome.  According to this book, you just label them "thoughts", and allow them to float away.  To this end, I like to visualize my thoughts being written on little scraps of some sort of melty paperlike substance, and I catch them and pin them on the inside of my skull and let them dissolve, rather than let them float around.  It gets clogged in there if I don't pin them down.

But I have the habit of letting thoughts solidify.  They become rock hard, then immoveable.  Or sometimes they become brittle and then they break and become shards and stab me with their little sharp edges.  It's not the thoughts that are troublesome.  It's my habit of making them solid. They become beliefs.  Big, beefy, heavy, sharp, brittle, rocklike beliefs.  Even if they aren't true. Then I eventually do something neurotic because of them.

So, thinking these things, I went back.  I looked up "messages" in the index of the book, and found that section again, and there were these words that leapt out at me:

"You want to look at every situation and examine it, so that you won't be fooling yourself by relying on belief alone..."

Maybe I am absorbing some of this book after all!  That whole section now makes a kind of sense to me.  And it's great.  I love these kinds of books - so rich, and so deep, and you can go back to them year after year and discover something new.

In case anyone is wondering, this book does have something to do with creativity.  I'm not sure exactly what yet...  but I was originally introduced to it by one of my art teachers.  She assigned it as the text for a previous jewelry-making class, two or three years ago.  If I remember, I'll ask her when I see her next week (I am currently in another of her classes.)

If nothing else, I am hopeful that it will prevent me from making neurotic art.

To that end, work progresses; here is the lil boat today:

lil boat

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results with sun

So... here is final result, with new setup, midtone background, and natural light:

Not bad.  Look at the detail in the towel!!    At least one can see what I meant in publishing the photo.

I need to revise the rowboat design just a little.  Time to carve!

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