Reflections on Peace, Programs and Projects: Dynamism and Selectivity

In recent weeks, I've participated in a program facilitated by a friend and mentor of mine. She guided a group of eight of us through a booklet to educate ourselves about ourselves. In other words, we met week by week and would focus on some aspect of life, arranged week by week in the program to add to the previous week and build a supportive, integrative, deeper understanding of how we can be the change we wish to see in the world. At the beginning of this program I was reading a book by Paul R. Fleischman, m. d., called "cultivating inner peace." The book was inspiring on many levels. Paul is a teacher of Vipassana meditation and also a retired psychiatrist, poet and reader. His language is diverse and influential and he inspired my intention for peace, purity and the program. The other important aspect of my goal was to bring this peace into more productive work on my personal artistic project, a story which inspires the same spacious clarity that Paul's words do. Cue the sticky note collection.

Now, how do I approach beginning to summarize this book and remove these sticky notes growing out of it? No easy task. Necessarily, I had to review the entire program's booklet as well as Paul's book to fully articulate the new intentions the program has asked me to create in its final week of exercises. Throughout the nine week program, I've noticed several changes in myself. In summary, I have been more attentive and less judging, more spacious and less time-bound and planned as well as more spontaneous and less mentally abrasive. I set out on this quest for peace long before this program, but a little tap on the shoulder every week has brought to light some new insights and approaches to unlearning patterning that conflicts with fresh, desirable perception and harmonious creating of freedom. I also used these weekly exercises with a selective acuteness to accomplish my goal. At the beginning of this program, I set an intention for it. I wrote it down as follows.

Goal: To continuously re-energize a committed relationship of dynamic participation and reverence in peace and purity that permeates every moment of engaged life.

Quite a mouthful, but it hits a mark. "Cultivating inner peace" begins with a personal quest, at whatever pace you read, and in life. No matter the place, "always invisible, but present, peace is seen in messages from the cosmic ray of gratitude." As I reflect on both the program and the re-reading of my sticky-noted paragraphs, I am grateful for the "peace in friendship and in all things," and for my attraction to seeking it. I seek it in daily life and in the work on my personal artistic story. Is it contradictory to seek peace? How can one seek the "miracle of freshness?" Once the door is open, it is something to continually return to with care and diligence. I do this through meditation daily as a fail safe, but also as much as I can in every moment. Peace is a way of life and therefore our path to it is the pace of our lives. It is in our clear seeing and "courageous confrontations with suffering" that peace matures.

"Our lives are feelings, unfolding slowly with an invisible tempo." In recent months, I had to slow down my directed art practice of 40+ hours a week. Rest, care and attention were the dynamic components to an arm that's doing much better now. As "peace is the result of solution: getting things to mix and flow," I was forced to return to a simpler pace to balance my life. Peace is dynamic. It is "not an absence of problems, but a set of tools to properly deal with them." A tool set changes as our context does, and it is "necessary to have a dynamic relationship to your mood and idea of peace." With a refreshed returning to art practice and with the guidance of Jeff Watts' critiques, I feel more confident that my success as an artist is inevitable in practice. As the book Mastery by George Leonard states, "practice is a possession." I feel that I am possessing it more deeply with "respect for life . . . simplicity . . . a quiet pace, with time to wonder, ponder and observe, persisting in quiet, steady triumph with deep personal satisfaction." This attitude of reverence accomplishes much more in the creation of my story than I could plan.

(Yet writing a story still takes file organizing, however intuitive.)

"To concentrate on peaceful enterprises is doubly calming, from both the process and the content of focus." As I re-engage with my art and story, I know that it is not when it's done (result), but when it's done (process) that satisfaction must be actualized. An example in Paul's book is the Shaker people, who had "no division between daily life and worship. There was only the sacred world, no profane - the Kingdom of Heaven was to be actualized on earth." As we confront the old programming, we must select the new from a cultivated awareness and equanimity. "The first step is envisioning beyond each troubling circumstance in the direction of peace. Peace is interwoven with the character virtues of faith and persistence." Someone cannot live their whole life without peace and expect peace at the end of it. We create our karma and the universe matches you.

To create something new, I must feel new. The context of my life is dynamic and simple enough to provide the safety to listen, appreciate and receive instead of living in a biological mode of fight or flight. I'm grateful for that support. I select it to be so and it allows for these meditative hours to explore and accompany any suffering. Suffering makes me look deeper to learn what truly harbors unity and spirit to nurture this returning to attention, care and wonder. "The capacity to choose and sustain objectives of attention, to gate out the irrelevant, and to appreciate what one has, are aspects of self-regulation that enable both action and satisfaction. Satisfaction means to feel you've done enough." Recently, I had felt that I was not doing enough, artistically and in creating my I.P. It is in the realization that I am good enough to take the next step that I have abundance. It is in playing that I feel the nature of my process and success, the two uniting in one another, like the yin and yang. It is not later that I will have peace, but now that I have begun to walk. It is in a shared studio environment that I continue mastery as a way of life, not as a goal to be reached elsewhere.

(A joined work space with my brother. Two double monitor set ups and everything we need.)

To quote some peace-living examples from Paul's book, "The Nearings coupled a deep inspiration toward peaceful living with a dynamic sense of the process itself. The value in doing something does not lie in the ease or difficulty, the probability or improbability of its achievement, but in the vision, the plan, the determination, the perseverance, the effort and the struggle which go into the project. Life is enriched by aspiration and effort."

"Because peace can't be grasped or held constant, faith in its possibility and resolution to actualize it are its recurrent preconditions. The dynamism of peace precludes absolutism, rigidity, finality. Peace isn't accomplished, never endures beyond a moment, and must be reborn, recreated in the next. Peace is atomic."

Thanks for reading,
- Anthony

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