A Pause For Beauty:
An artist’s journal.
Below, the Art Journal posts for the month of May, 2023.
April posts can be found here.
How would you describe the current of energy, the life force inside you, that is seeking to grow? Our most important relationship is our relationship with ourself, with our interior world. What do you do to nurture that relationship? How you nurture that relationship will determine the quality of your life.
What we call fate does not come to us from outside; it goes forth from within us.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
There are many pathways in this life and it doesn't matter which one you take, for they all have a common destination, and that is the grave. But some paths give you energy and some take it away.
- Cervantes
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The Eighth Law Of Living Life On Your Own Terms: Create something beautiful. This rule only applies to those of us not engaged in creative work in our day job. If we do creative work in our day job, it may be best to let the field lie fallow, to read or meditate or sleep during our downtime. Downtime nourishes creative work. Burnout is a real thing.
If however your day job involves doing something best described as uncreative (see Rule 4: Do something unique and important in some small market) – important and unique though it may be, a creative side line, a creative work of love, can add a huge amount to your life. It will nourish your life. It will give your life an element unattainable any other way.
It could be painting. It could be improvisational dance. Making clothing for people you care about. Making guitars, or violins or making music with them. Create beauty in some aspect of your life.
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You need a sanctuary on this path. My thought is create your home with simple, beautiful things. Handmade things. Things someone poured their soul into during the process of creation. Handmade things made with love. Make a home that celebrates natural things and natural beauty, artistic beauty.
Simplicity is important, at least to me. I like sparseness. You may like bric-a-brac. More power to you. I have a collection of arrowheads and scrapers that I’ve found in the woods or that friends have given me. To others, the relics of ancient peoples are probably bric-a-brac.
Each to his own, but we need, on this path towards our soul, a refuge where we can go to restore our energy. Where we surround ourselves with things that are, to us, sacred. Where we recuperate from life’s bangs, which are inevitable.
And a poem by William Mawhinney, “Admiring Cold Mountain,” after Han Shan. Also J.R.R. Tolkien on the problem with adventures -- they make you late for dinner from The Hobbit, and John Burroughs on simple homes.
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No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.
- Walter Bagehot
A long interval of still and musing meditation is expensive. To come to fruition, a great work needs a reserve so that it can survive the inevitable setbacks, crises and mistakes.
An independent entity, a creative person or any self-actualized person who wants the freedom to pursue innovative projects should have at least three reserves.
· A financial reserve.
· An energy reserve.
· A mental reserve.
This Pause For Beauty explores the role of a financial reserve in living life on your own terms and creating innovative work. The reserve serves the work, and contributes to its ability to add something unique, important to the lives of others.
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Who are you? How would you describe yourself? Who do you want to be? How do you account for the difference? What is keeping you from living the life you want to live?
And so, the Fifth Law of living life on your own terms: Know whether you are following your bliss or attempting to exorcise the demons of your childhood. Journaling can be an invaluable aid in thinking this all through, in identifying the patterns – those that have been helpful and those that have repeatedly been associated with setbacks.
Imagine your life as a person, and ask it the questions below. Imagine a friend, someone who knows you well and loves you deeply, and who wishes only the best for you. Ask that person, imaginary or real, the questions below. If the answers you get back are uncomfortable, that’s good.
Journaling Questions
● What are you living for?
● What do you want to live for?
● What is keeping you from living fully for what you want to live for?
Somewhat related, though only tangentially, for those engaged in creative work:
● How would you describe your creative work?
● If your creative work was everything you think it could be, how differently would you be describing it?
● What is keeping you from creating that potential?
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As I've been working on this book ("The 45 Laws Of Living Life On Your Own Terms"), I've been reading old journal notes from ten and twenty years ago. I came across notes from 2011, when Heron Dance was falling apart, and it kind of blew me away. So I posted it on the Heron Dance website.
There are a couple of hundred dictums there. Here are five no more or less meaningful than the others.
• The processes of life co-exist with the processes of death. Good health, and life itself, are temporary.
• Society is a contrived reality. Expediency is valued; truth is not.
• Elements of a quality life: live simply, do quality, beautiful work that is not rushed, avoid waste, live below your means and keep a reserve. Set aside a substantial portion of your time for leisure.
• A close relationship with nature brings joy and peace to a human life.
• Know who you are and live it. Befriend yourself.
. . .
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Within each of us, there is a silence, a silence as vast as the universe. And when we experience that silence, we remember who we are . . . It is a paradox that we encounter so much internal noise when we first try to sit in silence.
— Gunilla Brodde Norris
Combining journaling and meditation is an act of self-love, self-referral and self-healing. Friendship with yourself, with your quiet interior, is the basis of resourcefulness. A friendship with your quiet interior allows you to better understand the patterns of your life. A special power comes from diving deep into that world and accessing the wisdom it contains. It is a place of wisdom and peace but our relationship with it requires nurturing. . . .
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If we cannot wait,
we cannot know
the right time to move.
If we cannot be still,
our actions will have
gathered no power.
- Friends of Silence
The source of your power is your still point. Your power comes from harmony with your inner world. That relationship is nurtured in silence, in solitude, in reflection.
Also an excerpt from T.S. Eliot's poem Burnt Norton about the still point, and Ralph Waldo Emerson on silence and universal beauty.
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Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not. - Ralph Waldo Emerson Furniture-maker Sam Maloof started each day’s work by giving a quiet thanks. Maloof derives his strength from resorting to something outside himself, from an appeal to an honorable code of conduct, an elevated sense of order, to a deep, abiding faith. He lives an ethical, right-minded life and cites integrity as the most important part of his work and of his creativity. Sam believes in the unseen influences that guide him. That is the source of his risk taking, of his courage to create. He gives a quiet thanks, he shows respect, he behaves in the most correct way he knows how, and then he sits down to make a piece of furniture. - Uncommon Genius by Denise Shekerjian. And excerpts from the first chapter of my upcoming book, the working title of which is "The 45 Gentle Arts Of Living Life On Your Own Terms". And an excerpt from a Doug Peacock interview. . . . Visit here to read the rest of this Pause For Beauty. Visit here for April Pause For Beauty posts.
But praise. By any name or none. But praise
the white original burst that lights
the heron on his two soft kissing kites.
When saints praise heaven lit by doves and rays,
I sit by pond scums till the air recites
Its heron back. And doubt all else. But praise.
- John Ciardi, The White Heron (1958)
Also Frederick Remington on the dignity of old Indians and my discussion of the use of guides in journaling, and the story of one.. . .
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My goal is to live the truly religious life and express it in my music.
- John Coltrane
There are always new sounds to imagine, new feelings to get at. And always, there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we've discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are. In that way, we can give those who listen to the essence, the best of what we are. But to do that at each stage, we have to keep cleaning the mirror.
- John Coltrane interviewed by Nat Hentoff, 1966. Liner notes to Meditations. . .
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Faith is always an adventure.
- Elsie Chamberlain
Balbir Mathur, founder of Trees for Life, on gratitude, forgiveness and surrender.
I call my boat Surrender -- complete surrender to the will of the Greater Power. My two oars are instant forgiveness and gratitude -- complete gratitude for the gift of life.
I serve. I do the dance I must. I plant trees but I am not the doer of this work. I am the facilitator, the instrument. I am one part of the symphony. I know there is an overall scheme to this symphony that I cannot understand. In some way, we are each playing our own part. It is not for me to judge or criticize the life or work of another. All I know is that this is my dance. I would plant trees today even if I knew for a certainty that the world would end tomorrow.
- Balbir Mathur. . .
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Love
Love, love, love. That is the soul of genius.
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
A person's life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.
- Albert Camus
Journal Question: Where did your heart first open?
. . .
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A field of wildflowers swaying in the wind. The hush of an old growth forest. The wonder of birds in flight, the beauty of their song. The mystery of a flock of geese floating across a wilderness lake at sunrise. We came from wilderness; we evolved in wilderness. A part of us still resides there.
Silence, serenity and harmony are the basis of the stillpoint, of a life of purpose and power.
The role of journaling is to help us achieve clarity about murky issues such as the current that underlies each of our lives, and that guides us without us realizing it.
. . .
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What are the core beliefs around which you have built your life? Have they served you well?
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
- Albert Einstein
This Pause For Beauty explores the message of the Shepherd in The Man Who Planted Trees, and the power of a clear vision.
. . .
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Sam Cook on putting the map in the knapsack and going. Up north.
What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
The Lake Isle of Innisfree by Yeats.
Journal Notes: Retreats from a life of quiet desperation, both imaginary and real.
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The ancient masters of the Way
aimed at the indiscernible
and penetrated the dark
you would never know them.
- Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, as translated by Red Pine
. . .
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In orbiting the sun, the earth departs from a straight line by one-ninth of an inch every eighteen miles – a very straight line in human terms. If the orbit changed by one-tenth of an inch every eighteen miles, our orbit would be vastly larger and we would all freeze to death. One-eighth of an inch? We would all be incinerated.
- From Science Digest
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Listen, God love everything you love -‑ and a mess of stuff you don't. But more than anything else, God love admiration. . . I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.
- Alice Walker, The Color Purple
. . .
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I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
- William Wordsworth
. . .
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What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and returning to the world of our daily experience to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget it has a bearing upon our everlasting self which is poetry.
- Basho
. . .
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What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and returning to the world of our daily experience to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget it has a bearing upon our everlasting self which is poetry.
- Basho
. . .
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If waters are placid, the moon will be mirrored perfectly. If we still ourselves, we can mirror the divine perfectly. But if we engage solely in the frenetic activities of our daily involvements, if we seek to impose our own schemes on the natural order, and if we allow ourselves to become absorbed in self-centered views, the surface of our waters becomes turbulent. Then we cannot be receptive to Tao.
There is no effort that we can make to still ourselves. True stillness comes naturally from moments of solitude where we allow our minds to settle. Just as water seeks its own level, the mind will gravitate toward the holy. Muddy water will become clear if allowed to stand undisturbed, and so too will the mind become clear if it is allowed to be still.
– Deng Ming-Dao, from "365 Tao, Daily Meditations"
. . .
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When you know God, you know peace, and when you know peace, you know God.
- Donald C. Curtis
I interviewed Jeff Casebolt, then a Colorado Outward Bound Instructor, in 1994, before Heron Dance was a publication.
He had travelled the entire west coast of North and South America -- kayaking from Alaska to just north of Vancouver and then, from there, cycling to Tierra Del Fuego on the tip of South America. He started the interview by probing me, trying to understand if I was living life and coming at the interview from a “non-hero worship” kind of place. The intensity of his gaze startled me. The first thing I asked him was why he did the trip.
. . .
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I think over again
My small adventures
My fears
Those small ones that seemed
so big
For all of the vital things
I had to get and to reach
And yet there is only one
great thing
To live and see the great day
that dawns
And the light that fills the world.
- as recorded by Knud Rasmussen in Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, Vol 9 (1921-1924).
. . .
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Journal Notes: Sunday, April 30, 2023. A walk in the woods and saw a thousand trilliums. Some were some there yesterday but today, this a trillium riot.
Then grocery shopping.
I’m moving back toward more vague, impressionistic images in my art. An artist whose work has been inspiring me lately: Isabelle Malmezat.
We’re watching “Chimp Empire” on Netflix.
The chimps that live a long and happy life seem to have a distinguishing characteristic: they’re good at relationships, at forming social bonds.
The sacred requires sacrifice. The sacrifice of the group life is compromise, overlooking the faults of others. The sacrifice of the loner is loneliness, and perhaps ultimately the will to live.
The loner though has perspective. The loner can often see truths that are not obvious, and not seen, by the group. The loner has a perspective on the emerging reality.
Of course, nothing is black and white in this. Loners generally have some social bonds, and well-connected members of the group have some independent perspective.
Still, we need both.
. . .
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