On an impulse, I joined Brian on the trip down the Turnagain Arm, past Beluga Point, to the pull-off where we gather the mountain’s gushing water into our bottles for drinking. He agreed to sit in the car with me for an hour so I could draw. During the drive down, I became aware of the oneness of the sun with its reflections on the surface of the earth. The recognition within myself of that unity (which felt like an act of will)  seemed to render strength to my mind and body. I knew that this awareness must inform the drawing process.

The currents in the Arm are turbulent and chaotic, related to the movement of the tides, the shallowness of the Arm, and other factors I don’t know about. I drew the near shore, the far shore, and the currents. I was especially aware of the sun’s myriad reflections on the shifting waters. It was time to go and I would have to finish the drawing at home. This made me uneasy, because I like to be looking at the place I’m drawing.

When I was meditating the next morning, it became clear that it is possible to energetically return to a place and reconnect with it. So that’s what I did as I continued to work on the drawing at home.

I had also been reading a book that I had purchased at the recommendation of my friend Dianne Iverson– *Life, Paint, and Passion: Reclaiming Spontaneous Expression, by Michell Cassou and Stewart Goldberg (with a forward by my writing teacher Natalie Goldberg). The method can be briefly described as allowing images to come from the inside and go onto the paper uncensored, but with a conscious connection to yourself and the tools being used.

Under that influence, the challenge was to let go of my attachment to composition and to allow what wanted to come onto the page to come. The feeling of aliveness within me was the touchstone for how the ink shed itself upon the paper. If I hadn’t had years of writing practice with Natalie, it would have been a lot harder than it was to stay in the spot that kept the censor at bay. Thank you, Natalie!

I did kind of marvel at what came onto the page. There was a voice saying that this is silly and this is not what I am “supposed” to be doing with the assignment. But I knew it was a voice I should not give my attention to. In the upper left, the trees became dark figures moving; in the past I have “seen” similar moving figures on the surface of the inlet waters (although they were radiant light rather than dark).  A different kind of figures appeared in the water. On the edge of the shore, right against the huge chunk of drifting black snow/dirt/ice, someone else appeared, totally unexpected.

Perhaps the first unexpected happening was that the sun wanted to skip across the horizon. I thought, no that’s not accurate! But clearly the sun wanted to present itself in this way. And who am I to say this is wrong? That opened me up to the rest of the goings on.

So there we are! I have no idea what will happen next.

*When you let these images take form in their own unique way, you are in touch with something beyond yourself. The universal is not separate from the personal. On the contrary, the universal uses the personal to manifest.

— Life, Paint, and Passion: Reclaiming Spontaneous Expression, by Michell Cassou and Stewart Goldberg

Hmmmmmm…

… the noun hiki and the verb hiku both  derive from hi (sun), meaning ‘to draw back.’ In Japanese, there are other words carrying the same vibration which are derive from hi, such as hiki-yoseru, meaning ‘to draw something near to you’…

— Meishu-sama, Foundations of Paradise

August 2014– Wayne Vaman David Robinson saw a bear skull on the beach at this very spot! Another verification that this is REAL.

This is interesting, as I felt that by perceiving the sun as one with its reflections, I was drawing the sun into myself.

14: 388– This union of the soul with God is like the light of the sun which extends from its reflection in water right up to the sun itself.

— Jnaneshwar’s Gita: A Rendering of the Jnaeshwari, Kripananda

The flu made an unexpected visit, tempering my patience and enforcing some type of “subterranean” process that my thinking mind wasn’t completely able to access. When I recovered my strength enough to draw, this is what materialized.

I had been thinking about how someone once told me that the trees in our neighborhood are related to one another in a kind of community. Certainly many of them were here before the homes were. Who knows what their whisperings to one another across the street and fences are? I took the attitude of the tree world, eliminating the structures and leaving the spaces they occupy– save for one lone mailbox. The mail man walked down the sidewalk while I was drawing.

There is something not visible here, something that occupies the snowy space in the picture. I’m not yet sure what it is.

This drawing began as a tribute to my Sorrel boots of 38 years and still slugging along. Jaguar appeared in a dream. The roof icicles seemed appropriate to the season and what we don’t see bared in Jaguar’s mouth.

Regarding my inner experience of the drawing process, when I drew the Sorrels I felt enveloped in a cozy warmth and feeling of pure contentment. I was, after all, drawing some old friends that have served me well since I came to the frozen North in 1974. The self portrait was easy to do, as I had no need to make myself look good, but only to connect to my own soul as I looked at my reflection. Jaguar added the mystery of the void and made it all feel “right.” The roof-cicles were the icing on the cake.

This drawing was done at three locations. It began in the home of a friend one evening; I drew her portrait as she sat in her recliner. There was a table to the side with a little angel candle holder, a pitcher and a bowl. The next day I drew the lilac tree in our yard with puffs of snow upon the branches; the chickadee graced me with a visit. The third day I drew the mountains as I sat in Ben and Anda’s house looking out through a frosty window as the cloudy day dimmed into night. The moon rose in my memory of other evenings when I had watched it playfully pop up from behind the Chugach Mountains.

Here it is: the first drawing of a series of fifteen drawings. The commitment is to do one drawing a week.My assignment is to find the mystical in the ordinary.

Regarding the effect of the drawing process on my inner state: After spending several hours drawing, I am aware of my breathing as it gently washes around and through my entire body. I feel that the substance that I breathe extends beyond me and connects me to a larger world of which I am a part. It is very calming and I am in a state of peace.

1. I hearken back to this quote, which is on the first page of my book of drawings On the Way to Cushendall:

Peace mounts to the heavens, the heavens descend to earth, earth lies under the heavens, everyone is strong.

–Victory Song of the Morrigan, Book of Fermoy

2. I also find inspiration in a story from the Kikuyu people of South Africa, which Laura Simms has retold in her book Our Secret Territory: The Essence of Storytelling (http://www.laurasimms.com/marketplace/).

Here is the story in a nutshell:

There was a farmer who cared for his cows as if they were his children. One day, for no apparent reason, they gave no milk. So he took them to greener pastures. Still they gave no milk. The third night he spent the night in the field with them and he discovered what was going on! Three beautiful sky maidens slid down a rope with calabashes and milked the cows. He was so astounded by their beauty he forgot the milk entirely and he grabbed one of them. The other two escaped, but he held on to the struggling third. She would not stop struggling until he said, “I want to marry you!” Then she stopped struggling. She said she would marry him if he promised that he would never look into her finely woven basket until she gave him permission. He agreed and they were married. She was a good wife and even took care of the cows. But the farmer’s curiosity grew until he could not contain himself. One day he looked into the basket. There was nothing there. He laughed out loud! When she returned she asked him what he did that day. He boldly confessed that he had opened the basket. Quietly she asked him what he saw in there. Boldly he said, NOTHING!!!!!!!!!  “Oh, you saw nothing. But everything is in the basket, all the beautiful things of the sky for you and me. If you had waited, I would have taught you how to see. Now I must go.” The woman from the sky took her basket and went back to the sky.

The Kikuyu storyteller added, “It is the same today; mankind still thinks the things of the spirit are empty.”

3. Speaking of the Void (the state of the formless Absolute):

Always, Mark Strand

for Charles Simic

Always so late in the day
In their rumpled clothes, sitting
Around a table lit by a single bulb,
The great forgetters were hard at work.
They tilted their heads to one side, closing their eyes.
Then a house disappeared, and a man in his yard
With all his flowers in a row.
The great forgetters wrinkled their brows.
Then Florida went and San Francisco
Where tugs and barges leave
Small gleaming scars across the Bay.
One of the great forgetters struck a match.
Gone were the harps of beaded lights
That vault the rivers of New York.
Another filled his glass
And that was it for crowds at evening
Under sulfur-yellow streetlamps coming on.
And afterward Bulgaria was gone, and then Japan.
“Where will it stop?” one of them said.
“Such difficult work, pursuing the fate
Of everything known,” said another.
“Down to the last stone,” said a third,
“And only the zero of perfection
Left for the imagination.” And gone
Were North and South America,
And gone as well the moon.
Another yawned, another gazed at the window:
No grass, no trees…
The blaze of promise everywhere.

4. Mahasunya, the Great Void, is a transcendent state in which the subject has merged with the object. (The Doctrine of Vibration, Mark S.G. Dyczkowski)

5. All of creation, and the vibrational sounds associated with it, exist in the vast silence of mahasunya, the Great Void. It is from this silence that they will emerge into boisterous activity. (The Splendor of Recognition, Swami Shantananda)

6. When I was a child,  an impression (I can’t say it was a thought, as it was not a creation of the intellect)  came to me time and again– usually at night after I had been tucked into bed– that the world may not really exist. The child’s mind was puzzled; there was nothing that could be done with it. I never spoke of it to anyone. I’d forget it, and  it would come back after weeks or months had passed– and again leave me in it’s wake, feeling something ineffable.

7. When I was a child, I could walk to my Grandma’s house. There was always a place for me in her kitchen. I sat on the step stool next to the stove and watched Grandma cook. Sometimes we talked, but it was the kind of talking with spaces in between. The spaces weren’t thought-filled ones where each of us disappeared into our own worlds. The spaces were characterized by a sense of togetherness. There was an unspoken bond. Grandma had a quick and irreverent sense of humor, and if I had mentioned this to her later in life she would have made some kind of quip. But it is becoming more and more apparent to me that Grandma and I had something deeply in common that defied words– a deep and profound silence of communion.