Month: April 2021

To all experience, Gassho. To all experience, I bow.

“To gassho” means just bringing the palms together and making a slight bow, like namaste.

This drawing (an actual drawing in this case, not digital) was part of an article which I wrote many years ago for the newsletter of the Zen Buddhist group with which I meditated. The article is called Bowing Happens and gives my take on the various kinds of bows, mainly for people who have difficulty with the idea of bowing! A gassho, here, is the kind of palms-together in front of the face little bow, with which many non-meditators also are familiar, an acknowledging, greeting, accepting bow.

The meditating person on their cushion, enfolded in the gassho-ing hands, is in black, because that is what we wear in zen when meditating (in a group). He or she is faceless because when we sit, we are (in one sense) self-less; we are as Buddha-mind. However, in the heart region, the region of compassion,  where there is a face which could be either a Buddha face or a female person (or both!)  this figure is also tenderly cradling a face with tears.   We hold all these factors, these “faces”, in our hearts.  

If anyone would like to read the full article, here is a PDF. Remember, this was just my viewpoint at the time, not a official one!

bowing-happens-aspdfDownload

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Tangled Garden: Ferns

Tangled Garden Series: Ferns

Ferns are one of the oldest plants. They first appear in the fossil record about 360 million years ago, but many of our present families and species only appeared about 145 million years ago.

They are one of my favorite plants. I’m not sure exactly why, apart from the fact it’s interesting to think of how long they have been around and that I tend to like “green” plants more than most garden flowers. Perhaps it’s because they have been part of my life for so long. As a child, I played with friends in an overgrown vacant lot opposite our house, which we called The Jungle. There were lots of huge bracken ferns, now considered a weed, but not to us then. We used to dare each other to swing out on a rope hanging from a tree, over some very prickly bushes, and jump off at the furthest point of the swing to land safely in a mat of bracken, before the rope swung back again! Ferns were also one of my earliest introductions to making art, when my aunts showed me how to make rubbings over fern leaves with my crayons.

Ferns figure in some folk tales and children’s stories, and are the emblem of New Zealand and probably of many towns.

Just bend, just stretch!

This one is to emphasize the importance of exercising. I really miss my weekly Essentrics exercise class at the community centre, and when I had to stop because of Covid, I realized that just walking, though excellent in itself, is not enough to exercise all of our muscles.

If you’d like a chuckle, here’s the photo from which this picture was made.

Believe it or not, the inspiration was my lunch after coming home from an exercise class : a bowl of carrot soup on a pottery dish. A lot of twisting and turning and adding in Photoshop and Just Bend arrived. That’s how far my artwork gets from the original photos!

A City Called Life : Alley Cats. Feasting on what can be found

From A City Called Life series: Alley cats: Feasting on what can be found .

This is based on a photo of feral cats looking for scraps one evening, behind a restaurant in Spain, surprised by the light being turned on. It’s old, (1960s) and I am not happy with the quality of it, but it serves well to illustrate the subject.

There have been many “messages” of one sort or another which have helped me throughout my life, from various teachers, friends and traditions. One that really speaks to me is the idea of “feasting on what can be found.” A friend and teacher, with whom I meditated for many years, used to say something like, “If you can’t do what you would really like to do at the time, think about what it is which the desired experience offers you. Then find something else which is available and offers you some of the same.” During this Covid time, many of us do this out of necessity. We can’t go to concerts, so because we need music, we go to virtual ones or play our old CDs, or we can’t travel, so maybe we watch travelogues on TV. Those are obvious ones, but some of our needs or wants take a little figuring out!

One of my mother’s favorite sayings – which used to annoy me as a child, but has stood me in good stead – was, “Enough is as good as a feast !” That has followed me through my life since my wartime and postwar childhood, when substitutions were so necessary. Putting that together with “feasting on what can be found”, today, when due to the pandemic, health issues and aging, I can no longer get around to find or do all I might like to, I don’t have much problem feasting on lots of small joys instead of missing large ones.

Covid Time : Three versions!

Representing Normal Time, pre-Covid

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Covid-Time 1 : Time Stretched

Covid-Time 2: Time Shrunk

One of the odd things about this Covid time is that for me, and for many people it seems, time itself appears to either speed up or to crawl! It’s hard to believe it will soon be Summer when I have hardly become used to the idea that it is Spring .. and what happened to Winter? Some days I can’t believe it when I see that it is only 3:00 PM when I thought it must be at least 6:00 PM; other times, the days speed by faster than ever and there isn’t time to do all the things I meant to. And it always seems to be the weekend again every few days! Strange.

So I thought I’d have a bit of fun and try to depict that visually.

At the top, is a picture which might represent a chunk of normal Time, with all its ups and downs, ins and outs, lights and darks. (Dont take it too literally: perhaps this was a day I spent looking at flowers, waiting at traffic lights, or making a spinach and tomato soup, then trying not to snooze while watching TV) : ) Then to follow there are Time Stretched and Time Shrunk.

All three are made by manipulating the same original picture, just as our brains seem to do with time!

In the Forests of Kefiristan

There is no such place as Kefiristan! This is to show an example of making a picture of branching trees out of something else that branches : dregs of some kinds of liquid, in this case of dregs of kefir (a fermented milk drink) in a glass, turned upside down. Many slightly thick liquids, such as kefir, thin yogurt, some flour-thickened liquids, pea soup, and some paints will leave a pattern like this on a glass or bowl. The photo below is the original, turned upside down.

Both the trees and the dregs are examples of the Branching Pattern found in nature. To read more about the pattern, see the page in the Header: The Branching Pattern in Nature. ( Under construction. Coming soon)

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