Sunday, April 20, 2014

Drawing Papers

drawing of papers by a window; (c)JudeSpacks2014
Those Papers I've Been Meaning to Deal With For Over A Year

Before giving this prompt to my Awakening Vision Course, I tried it myself: Draw something you feel negativity or rejection towards--anything from boredom to aesthetic disgust. (I asked that they not choose anything oozy or smelly). 

An experiment: Could aversion survive the beam of unbiased attention that engages with the act of drawing? Nope, not this time for me, anyway. My area of paper chaos had been evoking a mild cringe of shame and obligation every time I walked by it. Now this has simply dissolved into light and dark contrasting.

In class, I read a snippet from The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon (A No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency Novel by Alexander McCall Smith): "If Mma Soleti thought that Daisy Manchwe nursed an undying hatred towards her for stealing her husband, then she was probably right. She would have seen the daggers in the other woman's eyes; daggers in the eyes were always visible, sometimes even through sunglasses."

I urged people to look at their object with daggers of rejection in the eyes to start with, and to let that energy transmit right onto the page--no holding back, no trying to accomplish results.

What we noticed: it's not easy to maintain daggers in the eyes. Starting that way can liberate some people from a notion of responsibility to
make things look good which stifles direct involvement with what they perceive. But eye daggers naturally and quickly transmute into pure, keen attention, and even these not-worth-looking-at items began to glow on everyone's pages.

My papers remain unsorted. I walk by with a friendly smile for them.

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“Drawing...it is the best thing that i ever do. First of all because it gets me to be so silent. To not be blurting out what i think about this or feel about that. Second, I become an open observer, jotting down visual notes about something i see. And third, it puts me in the world of praise. To be looking upon an object and taking the time to sketch it is an innocent, unaggressive, and grounding act. It is where bliss resides. It is pure BEING. “

--D. Price in Moonlight Chronicles