When I Learn - Life Drawing

I've started to notice incremental, tiny improvements in the way I think and how I draw. The acronym Jeff Watts often used is SIPDE. Scan, Identify, Predict, Decide, Execute. This way of drawing and thinking when drawing is much more effective than a chaotic, freestyle approach. Of course, there is also some practical use of not being rigid or of letting unplanned changes manifest themselves. It's a catch twenty two, in a sense.

Many people that I encounter draw in a messy style, without much thought about each stroke before, after and during the mark being made. That's not going to make the best drawing. Also, too much thinking will stop any happy accidents of occurring. A happy accident is something that turns out nice even though it wasn't a planned addition to the drawing. It may be a hand movement that wasn't what you were trying to do, but it looks better than what you aimed for. Or, at least, it looks good and you're glad it's done. It may have been less good than what you were aiming for, but perhaps what you visualized is not one hundred percent accurate for what was possible in that single stroke. Meaning, I might visualize something, draw something else that's good, but what I'm visualizing might still be better than what I drew. And in a way, I hope it always is, so I have an idea of how to improve my drawing no matter how good it is.

As I draw, my process of visualizing what I see, what I want to see and what I'm able to draw is all growing, mixing and changing. It's becoming more refined with each drawing session and with all the lessons I'm taking, digesting and applying into my daily practice. I gather a little more sensitivity and intelligence with my practice each day. How am I learning? What am I thinking? What state of mind am I in?

Listening, watching and playing. There's a whole movement to thought. All our changes of mind, constantly streaming through. As I draw, I have to be aware of this movement and see its benefits, but not get lost in it as one of its thoughts. There's a balance to observe and drawing is my tool to see it. My awareness contains these reflections, like a baby in a mother's womb. The mother is not the baby. She nurtures it and is ultimately the one who feeds it. We have to see how we feed our minds and what we feed, and know that our feeding is not the wholeness of what we are. The act that observes this feeding is whole, but the feeding itself, the movements of thought, are bit by bit. We can't think everything at once, just like we can't bring up the whole drawing at once. It is bit by bit, drawing the leg here and the head here.

We are an awareness that sees beyond patterns and recognition. We can see something new when we observe without an idea about the thing. Then we are learning. We are perceiving without the perceiver. When I draw from a live model, I know when I'm observing him without analyzing, or when I'm seeing the knowledge imposed over top. It is in experience. I can be present with the moving, living organism that exists there before me and put a mark down or I can be thinking about it in terms and knowledge. This Reilly abstraction here, this geometric shape there, this mark there... SIPDE. How is this mark? How is this representing what I remember about this anatomical form? Both are necessary to make a good drawing. We need to both see clearly and think clearly. They go together yet are in contradiction when relating this to making a beautiful piece of art, because beauty is not in the art, but in the one who sees.

Beauty, it seems to me, comes from a cultivated sense of awareness, clarity and care for everything. It does not actually have anything to do with a nice drawing. Beauty is inspired care. I'm learning art to have well cultivated aesthetics in how I see and in my execution of it. That's my knowledge and I can use those skills to express beauty as I feel it. However, just attending to nature as it is, including human beings, we are full. There is a completeness in observation that empowers oneself. It is both the mother and the baby nurturing each other. It is not one giving direction over another. It is a freedom in being beyond recognition. It is truly a miracle just to be alive and awareness as that. Freedom emptying into freedom, continuously.

- Anthony

Living Every Moment

Every moment is an opportunity for enlightenment. We graze the grass, hug the trees and see that in every single beat of the heart, inhale or exhale of the breath and sensory exchange, we are able to see a little clearer, with a little more joy.

I don’t know the truth for myself, let alone anyone else. I do have moments where it seems clear as to what is helpful to abide to the universal laws of nature and to deepen my connectivity with life, in contrary to increasing my disconnect or divisiveness with it. It happens through the breath, it happens through the body, it happens through perception. My scars are silhouetted into elements of a harmonious whole and what is realized is unity. Things that are causes of my misery vanquish when I’m in tune with what is wholesome. Then, I feel better than I did. I feel whole and unique in this wholeness, like a child playing in a bathtub in a world huddled to itself, free of the chaos and confusion on the other side of the curtain. We’ve unraveled the veil here, just a little bit, to see that it is really all “rainbows, smashed to smithereens,” and we are happy.

To express this authentic joy is to be it, to feel it and to live it. We don’t need someone else outside of us to attain it, but inspiration comes from those who are examples in their own action and perception on how they have peaked through their own ignorance. I am grateful for these people, and many are my friends, each having his or her own unique moments of unveiling day by day. I’ll admit that I’m a learning, wandering, lost-at-times being sharing the same questions we all have. Yet we all have the moments of clarity where we see beyond the veil into our selves of purity. It’s wonderful to witness the changes. Life is constantly changing, so to be alive, so are we. It’s a process. Observation is taking place. The moment ceases to have meaning when we contain it rigidly. Selectivity in one manner can help us define the things we carry with us on our path. However, too much and we are like a comic strip, trapped to the panels on one page, when it is every page that accounts for the context that gives us meaning and the framework from which to begin our discovering. One page is enough, when we know how to read it - how to see beyond the expression into the expressing and into the source of joy that inspires true freedom and authenticity.

Let us not be caught up in the mundane, trimming branches, when the root remains rotten. For anyone seeking freedom, dive into the way you see the world and yourself. Dive into the things you take for granted, positive or negative, these are the things you don’t usually notice. Each thing unnoticed is one passing piece of life that may offer some tools, context and enhancement of what can be reflected on. This is also not something to search for, because your attention is full already. What is it full of? We can offer our energy to fruitful, wholesome qualities, or demonic, destructive, unwholesome qualities. We are all containment of both. Human beings are examples of both and what we create and live in either state is our example to ourselves and the world. It is our framework to see whether it’s benefiting us or others. So each moment stands at the precipice of seeing or ignorance, reverence or concealment, light or darkness. As map, compass or flashlight, the tools are ours right now.

Here is something I wrote on a typewriter recently:

You are a master of limitation.
To think that you of knowledge and of time are bound to this creed.
Where bountiful freedom abides, there rests all unlimited being.
Bewitch the be-witcher, a guise of misery and complexity.
Stand where freshness begins and all form is in communion with this direct observation.
This seeing is truth without reaction. It is life unencumbered.
"It sees the false in the false and sees the truth in the truth."

“Even now, the world is bleeding. But feeling just fine, all numb in our castle, where we’re
always free to choose, never free enough to find, I wish something would break, cause we’re
running out of time.” - Overcome by Live

Find your freedom. Don’t choose it.

Joy to you all,
- Anthony

750 words a day - free flow writing

At the start of this month I began a free trial on 750words.com. The website is set up for a writing exercise that was inspired by the 'Morning Pages' from Julia Cameron's book, "The Artist's Way." It also blends in nicely with a simple exercise I learned from Natalie Goldberg's book, "Writing Down the Bones." The basic premise is to write in a quick pace for a certain number of minutes or words and stop when you are complete. As a writer, I tend to nit-pick words and their placement in a sentence. This exercise of writing without too much indulgence in sentence structure, proper punctuation or even clear ideas gives valuable insight into discovering new ways of writing, explaining and getting to the root of what it is you are saying.

(Piles of my notebooks and writings.)

This example given in 'Writing Down the Bones' describes how our raw language can be edited to lose all the magic it once held in its spontaneous, flowing nature as it came fresh to the page. The line she wrote was, "I cut the daisy from my throat." The inner censor that avoids the risk of, "Someone will think you're crazy," would instead say, "My throat was a little soar, so I didn't say anything." Proper and boring.' We like to swallow our hearts with our minds and hold back any sensitive, authentic wisdom that urges forth through us in sobs, aches, 'imperfections' and emotion. I say 'we like,' because we do it seemingly many times before learning not to. We polish our shoes, cars and houses, tighten our ties, appointments and attitudes and run down the rabbit circle we call progress. Ready for battle against all that naturally springs forth from the goodness that children, bunnies and flowers embody, we destroy sensitivity in ourselves and lose the understanding and faith in why it's so valuable and calls true to our essence.

As I wrote 750 words mostly every day of the month, my free flowing mind became less tight and I could write without concern. As I've stopped doing this practice as consistently, I've noticed the difference in how it is to write this blog post. The words are a little more like heavy rocks in the river of my mind, being weighed down for a while before drifting on with the flow again. The timed writing practice is the same, where instead of setting a limit on how many words you write, the limit is set with a number of minutes to write for. Essentially it is the same exercise. Get out of your own way and let the raw information and processing of all that you can write about show up on the page to re-shape the way you approach writing anything, be it a blog post, novel, article, essay or comic strip. The exercise is a freeing way to open unexpected doors, explore unexplored thought patterns and cultivate a discipline dedicated to the process. In some ways, writing in this fashion is like therapy. I imagine it would be hard to write every day and not naturally come to a reasoning of, "I'd like to be less of a jerk." Timed stream of consciousness writing is an open door to face ourselves without 'ourselves' getting in the way before the meeting, fresh and without make up.

Joy to you all,
Anthony

An Honorary of Vipassana Meditation

Why I meditate is obvious to me. It declares in clairevoyance that traces of the mind, back to the past or into the imagined are like clouds in a sky. We could never keep up. It’s either beauty like a rainbow, or black clouds like the storm before it.

These clouds are ever flowing, changing movements inside and outside our human experience. We cannot control them or cling to them. The more we try, the less we live free. The analyzing won’t do us any good either, for how many more clouds are there and for how long can one be analyzed? Let’s be quiet, ripple-less, and see what reflections show up in the water. There it is, the moon, a symbol of floating, effortless harmony.

Clouds are the continuous thoughts. In Vipassana, the aim is not to quiet thought, it is to relinquish suffering, or to see suffering as it is and through direct understanding we can cultivate eloquence, serenity and adequate action in ourselves and in the world we gracefully and reliably inhabit. With a discipline of two daily sittings, I devote discerned time to be aware of the fact that my mind and body are impermanent. This is through observation of the physical sensations that I experience directly. Without reading, observing nature outside myself, or hearing from another, I can still feel the change as it happens without it becoming second hand knowledge. The directness of truth cannot be dissected in a manuscript. Though words at their best inspire intuition and wisdom beyond their descriptions, there is always time to analyze, judge, divide and doubt. The freedom of true listening is doubtless, because no boundaries are known in a complete act of attention. Instead, the sky is empty and the whole of mankind wanders in and out of view. To observe objectively the sensations, we find ourselves touching at the very root of the communion of mind and body, self and other, and the many measurements that we distinct.

Without the calculated mind that thinks in steps, procedure, and movements dictated by the past knowledge it records, we can begin living each moment with perspective and service. There is no turmoil in impermanence. There is only change. When the plan is the action itself, there is never time to think we have made a mistake in how we proceeded. It is respect for ourselves to water the garden of free, unperturbed innocence. Change takes place and we either have the perspective of equanimity or reactivity. The change itself is neutral, like the weather. It is our projections that can cause problems to the contrast of our expectations, false to the unknown, paradoxical nature of existence and the universal laws of nature which can be felt and experienced directly within oneself. The breath is always there, at the beginning of someone living their life instead of solely thinking it. There is no division here. We can renew life and incarnate now, fresh and lively, with no despair. All it takes is ourselves. The garden of goodness within grows with the light we give unto it. Each is responsible for this necessary cultivation of peace in the frontier of a new life, beginning each moment. Meditation brings this absolute truth and these qualities of reverence into action, which I am choicelessly practicing each day due to the credence shared with me by the teachers and community of this practice, a fellowship practicing to live in responsible harmony with every living thing.

To write in plain words is difficult when speaking of the untouchable, the real, the truth of direct, objective perspective of my own life and the lives of all living things connected to this that I am. It is deeply transparent in all I do. The practice has integrated into my life over the last five years with tremendous force, energy and immunity. It is a well I fill each morning and night that spills out jewels as bright as the full moon and as ineffable as the sky. I am like a budding flower and to those who listen, you are the bees who spread my wonderful seeds of Dhamma. It is our garden. Together we are the world that makes the difference. Together we walk anew with every breath, as every sensation compels us to feel the subtleties of how life is so perfect, no matter what we think. Don’t waste your time, sweet bees. Touch the realness that you are, the perfection that you are. Now, or in a hundred years, our abilities of perception will be just as readily available to discover a truth unbound, unhurried, unplanned and unified. Don’t search for galaxies outside. Look within every day and live as you are. It’s so simple, but we tend to complicate things. Don’t give up. Don’t be idle. Rest and be in (y)our freedom.

(All photos by When Anthony Was)

All the best,

Anthony R.