Autonomy in this regard is something I'm still learning, seeking, discerning. Maybe I will be my entire life. That seems okay to me. In my spiritual life it means that I get to walk in partnership with my higher power and discern what is a better path for myself. It means that if I'm paying attention, that things happen to direct me. And also when I'm lucky enough to trip over the obvious things that are given to me like gifts because I wasn't able to pay attention. I have spiritual ADD, so I often ask my HP for guidance and to please please make it obvious. The Divine Artist often accommodates that request. I guess if I'm still missing stuff it's because I'm truly walking around as Buddhists describe as being a sleep walker. I'll own it. I enjoy a good delusion. And a good fantasy. I think it's part of my job as an artist to appreciate those two things. But it's really hard not to get trapped there.
I think autonomy has something to do with this. Being willing to be present to what resonates with me, and acting on that, wakes me up a little more. It snaps me out of that spiritual ADD into some focus, even if it's just a few minutes. I find in those moments that I'm given gifts. I'm given the gift a quiet mind. Somewhere I learned that I can't be alive without a running commentary in my head. Narrative, my friends, is everything. Well... nope. It's so nice when it stops. When the stories I tell myself stop, the things around me seem to be in sharper focus, the air smells cleaner, whatever I'm doing seems more real, more connected to my body and to my spirit, and the ever appalling self-judgement and judgment of others shuts off. It's like leaving a loud, crowded heavy metal concert and walking out into the quiet of an evening at the beach.
In 12 Step programs, coming to terms with ideas of higher power include spiritual awakenings of one form or another. The Big Book talks about folks who have those on the road to Damascus type experiences, where the addict sees the light of Spirit, falls to their knees, and never takes a drink again. But even the book owns that "most of us" get spiritual awakenings of the educational variety. In my head, that means it takes a village - awakening through experience, through other people, through acts of service, through trials, and through good times. This makes sense. I have had a few small whamo! type spiritual experiences in my life. And I feel like I have had many of the educational variety.
I remember coming to terms with the fact that I saw religion and spirituality as two very different things when I was in early high school. I said this to someone (one of my mom's friends) early after I had embraced it, and she looked at me totally baffled and said "What do you mean?" I thought I had just figured out what everyone else knew. It hadn't occurred to me that this would be news to anyone. Not that I'm trying to say I was having an original thought. I was just shocked that other people in my life seemed not to be thinking about this. Why weren't other people wondering about it in a place where a basic intro goes: "And you are? And your daddy is? And what church do you go to?" This thought process is one of the things that lead to the first college class I ever signed up for being World Religions.
I read something recently that added a new layer to this idea. I'm currently reading Awakening to the Sacred by Lama Surya Das. In this book, he talks about the spiritual versus religiosity. He also draws a distinction between mysticism and enlightenment. Frankly, I didn't think they were the same thing, but honestly I didn't think that they operated without one another. I love that I was wrong about this. His explanation is that the mystical is the awareness of the higher self, the Buddha self, Spirit, whatever you want to call it. He says that it's connectedness and awareness only. A mystical experience doesn't have to be enlightening. Awareness can just be for the importance of awareness; it doesn't have to bring any further understanding. He also said that something that is especially enlightening doesn't necessarily have a mystical component. Understanding and awareness, i.e. awakened connectedness, are not inextricably linked. Um. Whoa.
I think this actually explains why sometimes visual artists don't have words to go with what they have created. I got told in art school that if you don't know what you made and why you were making it you are copping out. I believed that even though it didn't quite resonate. And it kept me from making things for the pure joy of making. See, there I was again, not trusting my own sense of self. But again, that's part of learning too: Try it on, see how it fits, wear it to sleep in because it's so awesome or stick it back on the rack and keep looking. I still struggle with this idea actually but I'm making strides in showing up to the camera, the sketchbook, and to the easel. without that aforementioned heavy metal concert coming along to steal the show. And so, now I have a different feeling when I have a friend who can sometimes better articulate what I've drawn that I can. It's her view, but often she understands what I was doing at the time. The process of making work that I'm really following is like singing. It feels like singing feels to me - connected, filled with emotion, in the flow. I don't always have words once I'm out of that space. Art-making can be a mystical experience. It can be an incredibly enlightening experience. And it can be both. Again. Whoa. It's the mystical ones that I struggle to explain. They simply felt right when I was making them. And it is an embracing of autonomy that lets me admit that now.
One of my awesome artist sponsors and I had a discussion about artistic process and faith. He is a painter and has this amazing sense of being and staying in that flow of creation from some higher place. He describes this as having the time of being connected with his higher self and with the spirit realm. Things are coming to him faster than he can articulate even in thought, so it comes out as a painting. And the moment between "oh! I should make that" and taking the step to make it, is this profound silence. The silent thunder is what he calls it. Because it's in that moment that the art work is really born. The artist takes the leap of faith to pick up their medium and make it happen. I remember him telling me something similar to this nearly a year earlier. I didn't have the faintest idea what he was talking about. But now that I've been actively walking my spiritual path, I understood this better. I know that for me that connecting to the flow is quick. I don't dwell there in a way that I recognize and can actively dip into like he does. It just happens and passes. But when I have my camera/phone in my hand, that is what photography is for me. When I think too hard, my pictures look like I was over thinking them. But if I show up and just listen before I click, happy things happen.
Another thought on autonomy is that the art world and western culture especially loves the notion of the original. It isn't great if it isn't new and hasn't been done before. That's a tough demand. Eastern culture, especially Eastern art training starts with a attention to the traditional. There is honor in doing what has been done before. And then you can take that and reflect your own experience in it. I think art education in the states values what has come before and wants students to see the greatness in those from before. But often it comes in the form of a warning: this has been done before. Or a criticism: that is derivative. And so it dangerous to dance with the fact that what has been said and done before can still be profound on repeat. Allowing myself to stand in the same spot with 50 other tourists at the Grand Canyon with all of us taking pictures of the same thing doesn't take away from the fact that making that picture was, for me, a profound moment. What is lovely is that I get to be a part of other people having an experience like mine but also all their own - a separate experience profoundly shared. I think spiritual experiences work like this too. Enlightenment and mystical experiences some times feel to me like the most profound DUH!. But the key is being profound not the uniqueness of whatever it is. The profundity lies in the newness to me and the shared experience that I can now have with others because of it.
I'm working on a body of work that comes out of meditative places with both photography and drawing. I have a sketchbook ap on my phone that I love. And this fancy stylus I bought in the San Francisco Airport in February. This body of work started when I went to a conference exploring the intersectionality of art, activism and spirituality called Be/Art/Now at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. This is definitely an intersection of spirituality and art for me. I make these drawings often in meetings. That is the closest thing that I have to church (other than being in my studio). This work connects me when my pen meets the page and often a photograph. When I'm making this work, I connect to mind, body and spirit more, and consequently, also connect more radically with the people around me and with what is read and being shared.
After asking you to read such a long post, I thought I would share a little bit of this work with you.
This work is called spiritual [precision]. The photos, brushwork and pencil work were all done on my iPhone.
"The soul never thinks without an image."
-Aristotle
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