Equinox: Balance

Daffies, oil painting 8x12" (available)

It's the between-season of Equinox, a time of endings and beginnings, the balance-point when night and day, rest and activity, light and dark are equal. How does that reflect in the balancing act of your life and creative process?

Are you taking enough time on and time off? What about lights and darks--is there a bit of strain from always looking on the bright side, or perhaps a weight of over-confronting the difficult? Are you exploring the full range of contrast available to you? Or are you more into the mid-tones of moderation?

Three Daffodils, fabrics

If things seem to be on tilt at the moment, it might help to remember that most guidance systems (e.g. navigation systems on planes) function by being off-course almost all the time (and correcting). Every step we take involves a tiny tumble through space in free fall, teetering from one foot to the other. Being on-target is made of being off, balance is created from imbalance in motion.

Two Daffs, fabrics

Did you see the wonderful TED talk by Harvard brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor on what she learned when she had a stroke? (You can watch it here). She experienced a blissful, creative expansion of awareness from her right hemisphere when her left hemisphere was damaged. Then she spent 8 years recovering her power of speech so she could tell us about it.

Creativity depends on allowing the linear, verbal, conceptual left brain to relax its dominance over perception. (Read more about this in the article Looking). Then the intuitive, present-moment field awareness of the right hemisphere can express itself.

The left hemisphere serves by negotiating practicalities and execution. The right brain is quantum physics, the dreamy don't-know world of possibilities and potentials; the left brain is Newtonian, down-to-earth, cause and effect. Creative process dynamically juggles both in an equality that doesn't even need to compare and contrast.

To those in the Northern Hemisphere, Happy spring. Here's hoping your creative life is blooming

The World Oracle

The World Oracle

Ask, why? to hear because;
ask, now? for yes or no.

How also works inside out,
like this: how do I make money
out of lazy bones and short days?
Try: how does no-money unmake me,
in willing boneless long nights?

Is it over? Did it start?
Am I getting warmer?

What do you really want to know?

Does love choose?
Do cats ever blink for effect,
or do they always mean it?

Don’t be silly.
Hold your question
like carrying water
in your hands to drink.

Next, be still and walk about listening.
Circulate like the child navigating
the whole room while all the obedient
ones close eyes in prayer. In stealth
and glee and solitude wait unknown
for some one thing to speak to you.

A pebble glittering with sunshards
in a hoard below a drainpipe
told me, “be wealth.”
The schoolbus from behind
said, "wait to learn."
Sidewalk cigarette filter said,
“it's over: drop it.”

The world oracle flashes, terse and true
like fish shadows in windy moonlight.

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Moon and ocean are in love year round; proof is in the tides.

Solstice

Winter Solstice, fabrics 12x33in

Winter Solstice: the lowest sun, the longest dark. The end: surrender.

In northern New England, we throw long shadows at noon this time of year. The sun arcs in the lower third or so of the sky, never overhead. The concept of lengthening days from here on out to June is utterly unconvincing in the face of current experience. For now, winter has moved in for its annual eternity. It's internal burrowed-down time again, sacred and still, while the hectic buzz of holidaze froths on the surface.

I like to wave hello right across the big ball of the year to the improbability of Summer Solstice, six months ago, maybe six months ahead. The highest, outest sun, the brightest long lingering evenings, the bursting busyness of the intense growing season ...remember?

Summer Solstice, fabrics, 11x14in

I started the piece below, Solstice Invocation, right around Summer Solstice, while at a workshop led by the amazing teacher/artist Elizabeth Busch at Haystack Mountain School. Elizabeth's fabric painting methods blew my mind with a fresh wind, or maybe a gale, a small hurricane.

The piece is over 5 feet high. It's still a work in progress. It was inspired by a photo of my sweetheart, singer-songwriter Kathleen Hannan (see end of the post Looking ). She was leading a song up to a high note, at the Interfaith Celebration she'd organized the previous Winter Solstice. So the piece invokes both solstices at once--made in summer, picturing a peak winter moment.

I'd painted before, plenty. I'd occasionally sewed on a painting or set it in a frame made of fabrics (Still and Rapid). But I had never really found a satisfying fusion of painting and fabric art. For 25 years I had worked in fabric collage without ever altering any fabrics. I loved the hunt of finding a piece that worked, and it seemed like it would be almost cheating to paint or dye my own to suit. Not any more. Elizabeth had us painting on light canvas and on black cloth using different fabric mediums and pigments and paints and pastels, and soon my scissors were flying, on fire, cutting loose. Light paint on dark fabric, dark on light, singing wild harmony.

As I said, it's a work in progress. It needs more compositional tweaks, then hours of patient follow-through, sewing and tending to getting the edges square, and I just haven't gotten to it. It's folded up, not even on the top of the pile right now. That kind of breakthrough summery rush, flying into a heat of creativity, doesn't come around for me very often--it would be a burn-out if it did. But I notice there's a habit of mind that wants to identify with that high time of the cycle, saying, "Now that was some Creative Life! What's with this ho-hum fallow time?"

Trying to pin a pendulum to the up side of its swing never works, in art or life; (the image of pinning a pendulum up is from Adyashanti's Emptiness Dancing, where he speaks about addiction to seeking spiritual highs). Trying to stay up when it's time to go down just invites a frazzled, strung-out, hollow, faking-it state, like a kid jazzed on sugar and tv way past bedtime. That's no holiday, no real celebration.

Parenting educator Jean Illsley Clarke is currently working on the issue of over-indulgence, a timely holiday topic. I heard her speak many years ago, about developmental affirmations: age-specific gems to say to children, including inner children. One of them always stuck in my mind: "I love you when you are active and when you are quiet." Very sweet, compared to the "Get moving!" or "Settle down!" commands (or worse) that harried (inner) moms and dads often dish out.

I love you when you are creative and when you are not. I love you when you are introverted and when you are extroverted. I love you when you are working and when you are goofing off. I love you when you are cloudy and clear, winning and losing, faking-it and real, naughty and nice. I love You when You are dark and when You are light. Always: Now. Pass on a little of the ol' Unconditional, and call it good.

Dark Moon

Waning Moon with moonstone

We're almost to the dark of the moon, as we also near the time of longest night, Winter Solstice. So often we extol light, making it a metaphor for good, but rarely even acknowledge the Still, the Unknown, the Invisible, the Dark.

December Sun (fabrics) 6x10" (available) '01

Fear of the Dark is old and deep with many of us. But what a fertile moment is there, in the not-knowing, not being able to see, when dark is surrendered to. What a blessing to be able to let go, when we can, to let go and be done, complete. Byron Katie says, "You know what I love about the past? It's over."

Letting Go Altar Cloth, fabrics

"My face in the mirror looks like my face--it is the face I know best. The light rushes into the pupil of my eye, carrying with it the information that is within range of my vision, carrying with it the world, but what I see when I look at where the light goes in is blackness, deep and velvety. Light goes in and darkness looks back at me. " -- The Speed of Dark, by Elizabeth Moon

Dark Moon Release, fabrics, '96?

Star

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This 12 inch mixed media Dancing Star is for a Penquis charity auction December 7 to raise money for heating fuel to warm Mainers this winter. Many different artists contributed wonderful decorated tin stars for the auction--you can see them here. You can even bid on them on-line before the auction.

A friend passed along this space weather site--great for star-gazers.

This piece was made when the Hale-Bot comet came traveling by. I hear current Comet Holmes is called "the oddball comet." A comet after my own heart.

Here are some other stars I've made:

Star in the East


Two Stars



Three Stars




Constellation/Community

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