Presence without Answers

In my mom’s new electronic photo frame, images from across the decades show up in delightfully unexpected order. Our family keeps it interesting by continually sending new pictures—some recent and some from the past. Yesterday the display showed a fabulous picture of my dad from the late 1950s. He was in his mid-twenties, leaning against his Chevy and looking like he was going to own the world. Then a recent picture of my thirty-six-year-old son came into view. Stretched out on the floor with his baby daughter, his face expressed a more mature kind of optimism. He showed the peace, strength, and love I knew from my father, years after that youthful snapshot.

Seeing the younger generation at a later stage of life suspended my usual sense of the passing of years. It bent time to see the grandson older than his grandpa. The daughter who would be me was not yet born; in that juxtaposition of photos my baby granddaughter was older than I was!

There’s a rare and treasured picture of four generations of mothers and daughters in our family taken when I was a baby. My mother is now about the age of the great-grandmother who seemed ancient when I was young. Somehow, I’m now in the role of grandmother. Decades after that picture was taken (and still many years ago) I took my place in a different photo of four generations, posing on the porch of the same house. I can still hear the ringing metallic creak of that screen door swinging open—a sound that announced love and welcome, remaining constant through all the changes from childhood into my years as a young mother. In this front porch snapshot my daughter was five or six, and my grandmother had become her great-grandmother. My mom in the photo is a little younger than I am now. How can this be? As with so many before me, I understand my elders better with each passing year.

My beloved grandparents passed on long ago. Recently I’ve lost my dad. A friend says one of the gifts of grief is the appreciation of what’s here, of our time with each other, and how much it matters. How brief it is. Another gift is the perspective on what has real weight and what doesn’t. It helps us see difficulties as the passing circumstances they are. It can remind us not to fritter away our energy and attention on things that don’t really matter.

Ironically, it takes a long time to understand how short life is. For much of my life the years seemed to extend far in front of me, and I took them for granted. But it’s not just the brevity of life that we’re slow to appreciate. There is also the mystery and gift at work through the living of our days. We have access to the Source of life, but it usually takes a long time to wake up to that reality.

Regardless of whether we’re awake to it, the Life Force moves and animates us in amazing ways. What unfolds is glorious. Looking back from a distance is like watching time-lapse photography of a flower bloom. In those earlier years I thought that living a life was my own doing. Now I know that my actions were more a matter of Life moving through me. Sometimes I was in the flow, sometimes I resisted it. On my best days, I showed up fully for what unfolded. I responded to the ways Spirit nudged me forward. Am I doing that now? I hope so.

One thing I know is that life is short, and I don’t want to miss out on it by not being present. As I experience time bending, connecting the generations, I see the fleeting beauty of the time that I have. I want to savor it, or at least show up fully for it. And I’ve learned that engaging in some kind of creative work helps.

Creating calls forth our best self. It asks only that we show up and engage. In making art, or taking it in, we engage with Presence. Art doesn’t provide us with answers; it doesn’t have to. Its job is to be present. It invites us to attend to what’s real, and to experience how reality shows up in the beauty that passes away. It helps us hold the questions, and to allow life, whatever it brings, to flow through us.  

Like a Rothko painting, art can be a doorway into a temple. Engaging with art creates a still point in a turning world, the axis mundi that makes an opening for eternity.

Susan Christerson Brown

Fostering New Growth

After a recent morning walk, I lingered outdoors pruning the taxus bushes. The day was already hot, but I had some time and wasn’t ready to sit down at the computer. So I kept to the shade as the advancing edge of sunlight nudged me along the length of the shrubs. I had no idea what time the clock read, or how long I had been working, but the sun kept me moving and helped me work evenly along the shrubbery.  

It’s a long, slow process, making these overgrown bushes into something that fits the space where they’re planted. By the time they came into my care they were crowding the sidewalk and blocking the window. But cutting them back wasn’t simple. They had long been trimmed just at the surface, sheared along the top and sides. Only the outside two inches were green, where the tips of the branches competed for sunlight. The massive interior was bare—a skeleton of a shrub wrapped in a green rug. But they were strong plants, with a will to live.

I’m learning how to work with their natural inclination to grow, and to proceed at their pace. Drastic measures are counter-productive; the places where I tried hacking the shrubs down to size resulted in many lifeless branches. But as long as I refrain from cutting off all the green tips at the surface, I can encourage new growth deep in the thicket of bare branches where light could not enter before. I have a general idea of the size and shape and fullness that I want to bring about, but I have to engage with how the plant wants to grow in order to get there. I pay attention to the places where it’s flourishing, and encourage those fecund branches to nourish the deeper growth that can develop.

This more careful tending teaches me about cultivating a full life. Watching for signs of new growth and then making the cuts that encourage it has become a contemplative practice. The life force in the plant shows what it wants to do. That’s what I watch for and work with. I hold in mind what’s possible as I engage with what’s in front of me.

This approach works for tending creative work as well. Revising a draft, for example, involves working with where the writing wants to go and cutting away what detracts. Doing creative work of any kind, including living a full and creative life, is all about noticing the tiny green hint of a bud beginning to form. It’s finding a way to give light and air to the new possibilities stirring, and pruning what would impede the life force from nurturing this new growth.

To do creative work we must arrange our lives to give light and air to our creative inklings. Letting in light might mean making space in our attention for a new idea, or seeking feedback from trusted others about our what we’re working on. Giving it air might mean allocating a regular time for creative work, making space in the day for tending what wants to grow.

The tender, green beginnings are where all new work comes from. Their growth depends on us giving them the care that only we can give them. Unless we make a way for them, they cannot come into the world.

What we tend matters. Fostering new growth renews the world and renews us. It’s part of being fully alive. Yet even though I know this, it’s something I have to remember, and re-remember, over and over again.

The beautiful song, “Now the Green Blade Riseth,” is one reminder that comes to mind. Steve Winwood’s version is lovely.

Susan C. Brown

Reclaiming Space from Opportunistic Weeds

Lately I’ve been weeding and mulching according to the sun, working when I can have shade in the heat of the summer. By 8:30 my time’s up, and even that is pushing it. Afterwards it feels good to sit on the porch and cool off, enjoying the improving landscape as the sun lights up the yard.

When I dug out a shrub from the front yard earlier this summer, I didn’t do anything beyond smoothing the dirt to reclaim the space it left. I pulled a few weeds then looked away for a moment. Suddenly the opportunistic crabgrass had not only taken over but grew in a mound threatening to replicate the size of the bush that had been there before. Among the spreading fingers a small cranesbill geranium with pale pink flowers bloomed—who knew you were there? But the voracious weeds nearly choked it out.

Nature abhors a vacuum they say. Physicists seem to be saying there are no vacuums, really. Everything exists in a field that connects everything. But our senses recognize that creating a space invites something to fill it.

Putting things in order, clearing space, is enormously satisfying. It brings peace. Then immediately the world presses in. So we need rituals and routines for holding that space, for preventing the opportunistic weeds from taking over and choking out what would bloom there.

It was a lot of work to pull out the crabgrass and other weeds that took over that fertile patch of soil. The job would have been easier if I had jumped on it sooner, but it’s done now. I worked carefully to keep the volunteer geranium intact while I extracted the weeds from around it. This time I covered the bare ground with a layer of mulch to help keep the weeds down. I need that help to hold the space until I get other things to grow there.

Whether it’s in a garden, or on a tabletop, or between the lines of a day planner, holding space can feel unproductive. It’s the antithesis of having an agenda. And yet holding space is about the healthiest intention we can have.

It’s interesting to consider the difference between an “agenda” and an “intention.” Agenda is a kind of willfulness, the imposition of not only what, but how and when. An intention is more expansive. It names a value and leaves open how to achieve it. It’s the yutori of consciousness (yutori being a Japanese word meaning “a space of sufficiency and ease”). There are times when the focus and direction of an agenda is needed—it enabled me to do the work of clearing the weeds. At other times, intention is needed to allow room to breathe and for new life to grow. While an agenda tries to avoid surprise, intention makes space for the unexpected and creates the possibility of delight on the way to where we want to go. Intention holds things lightly.

Creating and maintaining space in our lives claims the fertile ground of our heart and soul. Staying with our creative and contemplative practices protects us from encroachments that rob us of what we need to be fully alive. We don’t have to let ourselves be overrun by crabgrass, whether it takes the form of negative thoughts from within or impositions from without.

At a time when the news feels more oppressive week by week, fear and despair (or the anger and hate that disguise them) are the weeds that can take us over if we allow it. Our lives individually and collectively are too important to allow that to happen.

We have the ability to love one another and to bring love’s healing to the world. We need space in our lives and our hearts to do that work. The gentle intention of holding space is important right now. Holding and tending our heart space, being watchful for weeds and removing them promptly, will allow beauty and healing to bloom in our hearts, our lives, and our world.

Creative Wandering

To step away from daily obligations and wander without a particular purpose is hard to justify. We don’t often grant ourselves permission to be aimless wanderers, and the world doesn’t much encourage it, either. The very meaning of those two things—permission and wandering—pull against each other.

One is about boundaries, authority, accountability, productivity. The other resists those means of imposing order and goes exploring, looking to find what’s out there, experiencing unfamiliar situations, sometimes discovering new aspects of the world and of ourselves. Wandering seems irrelevant to the work at hand, the life to maintain, the deadlines to meet, the goals to reach, the responsibilities to live up to, the expectations to fulfill. Wandering doesn’t get any of those things done, at least not in any predictable way.

 

And yet. To step outside the boundaries of what is required is to enlarge the world. To go where there is no reason to go can mean finding a connection that changes everything. The seeker and the artist have much in common. They fulfill their role by resisting the constant pull of their communities, by not being entirely caught up in day-to-day life, by cultivating the perspective that allows them to offer something of unique value.

But what does it take to slip away, beyond the fence, for no good reason we can name? Is it strength? The strong rarely say so. It’s only recognized as strength when we return with something worthwhile. Is it a sense of calling? Only one that is recognized after the journey has served someone else. Is it laziness? It might look that way when tasks are left undone, though the effort to roam those distant hills requires dedication and perseverance. Is it rejection of the people in our lives? It sometimes looks like that when we require time spent separate from those we care about. Is it selfishness? It looks like that, too, though we spend ourselves on pursuits that have chosen us and not vice-versa, endeavors that may never serve how the world sees us at all. We wander, searching, hoping our work serves something higher than ourselves, and rarely being sure.

In India there are roaming sannyasis, pilgrims who have left home and family to travel to holy sites or live as spiritual seekers in the forest. They are familiar, they are tolerated, by some they are understood and affirmed, or even envied by those who wait their turn for the freedom to make the same renouncements. What do the sannyasis look like in our culture? Do we recognize them? How can we learn from their search, and benefit from their wisdom? Can we learn to be just a little bit like them?

Work is Love Made Visible

Years ago, when I was doing a lot of calligraphy, I lettered a gift for my son’s elementary school teacher. It was a line from Kahlil Gibran: Work is love made visible. As an at-home mother doing unpaid work, I found encouragement in those words. They also spoke to the way this wonderful teacher gave so much of herself to her students. She brought out the best in them, and inspired me as well.

My Calligraphy Tool Drawer

I happened to see her last week at the gym, where she told me that she still keeps that piece of calligraphy on her desk. I’m touched that she still values it after all these years. The idea of work and love being connected remains meaningful to me, though I think about it in broader ways now that my children are grown.

Gibran not only speaks of where the best work originates, but offers a different way of understanding the purpose of work. His is a world view that values the heart more than remuneration. It views life as more than a market exchange, and sees work as an offering, not a commodity.

This perspective is a lifeline when we’re trying to create something new. In a world that measures the value of work by the price it brings in the marketplace, creative effort with no guarantee of reward can look like a waste of time and energy. Showing up to work when there’s no certainty of the outcome requires ignoring the clamor of the buying and selling, and placing ourselves in the service of something else. It can feel pretty risky.

Gibran understands that submitting to the work we are called to do is an act of devotion. We manifest love of life, of other people, of art, and of the divine spark in creation, when we undertake our work. What I’m realizing these days is that an artist’s work, too, is love made visible.

In Matthew, Jesus is quoted as saying, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” Materialistic priorities get in the way of seeking a rich spiritual life, or what he calls the kingdom of God. Over and over, he tries to get people to see that through dwelling more fully in the spirit we find not only our truest self, but the essence of life, and joy, and meaning.

His teachings help us focus on the work in front of us, apart from its material reward: “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”  We can’t make the world praise or even accept our work; we can’t expect the market to validate our efforts. We can only do our best at the effort we’re making today.

We’re all asked to look at the world with love, to listen for the ways it calls us, and to respond as best we can. That call and response depends on where we meet the world, on our gifts and circumstances. It can take unlimited forms.

But in whatever way we respond, answering that call becomes more meaningful, and perhaps somewhat easier, in remembering that we are trying to manifest a spark of the divine—to find a way of making love visible.

Art and Sanctuary

Last weekend I had the pleasure of hearing a folk music performance that happened to be given in a church sanctuary. The setting had me thinking about the idea of sanctuary and how it is created—or at least invited. Even more, as the evening progressed I was able to experience the mysterious arrival of that sense of sanctuary as it permeated the room.

I didn’t know the music of Iris Dement before I saw her perform, but I was immediately charmed by how she connected with her audience. She shared how vulnerable she felt coming out from behind her piano to face the crowd with only a microphone stand and a guitar to “hide” behind. And when she mused aloud about her songwriting prowess, asking “What is the opposite of prolific? Because whatever that word is, that’s me,” I was taken by both her understanding and her acceptance of herself.

The venue was the historic downtown First Presbyterian Church, where stained glass and ornate wood carvings spoke of the long traditions that shape Christian worship. “This pretty room,” Iris Dement called it, in a way that appreciated her surroundings even as she resisted their traditional gravity.

She spoke of her family, and the songs she shared about them honored those lives who so clearly informed her own. She alluded to her spiritual journey, remarking that in reading back through the stories in the Bible, “I found that I didn’t love them as I used to” except for the one she wrote about: the parable of the good Samaritan.

In sharing so much of herself as well as her music, she drew her audience close. She exuded both humility and strength, presenting herself simply as she is. I don’t know her story, but I know that kind of firmly rooted stance is hard-won.

The architecture and design of the space we were in brought forward the idea of sanctuary, a word that sets out the spiritual aspirations for the place. It’s meant to offer a respite from the clamoring world, a place where we can hear the still, small voice that reminds us who we are and where we can find the heart of life.

But on that evening, the experience of a sacred space apart from the world was ushered in by this talented musician whose maturity as a person as well as an artist enabled something rare and wonderful to happen in that setting.

Art at its best creates sanctuary. An artist who grapples with what matters most, then brings skill and dedication to expressing what she encounters, offers work that can elevate our lives. Art in all of its forms invites us into a space apart from the schedules we keep and the demands we meet, where we can be refreshed by the encounter with another soul. It brings the renewal of spirit we sorely need to live our lives the best we are able.

Worship at its best works this way, too. It’s an art form in itself, enriched by architecture, music, language, and dramatic ritual. Good worship depends on good art. Meaningful worship, like meaningful art, is soul work. The encounter that happens through that work, whatever the setting may be, is where we find sanctuary.

Sanctuary is a gift. We invite its presence by the deepest human work we do, but when the spirit of sanctuary descends, with the peace that passes understanding, it is a gift of grace. May we find those spaces in our lives that quiet our minds and soften our hearts. May we know sanctuary.

What to Watch

Still on the vintage jewelry kick, I recently brought home a box from an estate sale for $10. It looked to me like there were treasures among its contents, and finding them is fun. A watch with a band made of tiny links was one of the things that charmed me. Even with its worn finish it’s a lovely, well-made piece that feels good against my wrist. I’m looking for the right way to make it into a bracelet.

I popped out the watchworks and face, leaving just the crystal. I knew that as long as the face remained I would keep wanting it to tell the time. But the design of the bracelet and my own long habits keep me glancing at that clear window expecting something to be there. Something important should occupy that space, but I haven’t figured out what. It needs to reflect light if it’s going to be visible. A pearl shows up well, but that’s not the answer.

Without a focus on time, how to decide? If not the minutes and hours, what’s worth framing? worth watching?

A few weeks ago I wrote about a watch that suspends time. I could wear this one with its empty crystal and accomplish the same thing, but without the option of an instant return to temporal reality—or at least measuring it.

I like the idea of a mechanism that keeps track of the changing tides on my favorite beach, or represents the orbits of planets around the sun, or the spiraling of the Milky Way. Not that I’ve seen such a watch, but it’s appealing to consider time on a more cosmic level.

In the meantime, the crystal is a window onto the skin of my wrist when I put it on—it reads a hair past a freckle as they say. I could leave it that way as a reminder to simply be in my own skin, to not be overly concerned with schedules. But I’m still looking for another idea.

What would you place behind the crystal?

 

 

Time Suspended

Paging through the WSJ Magazine today, I happened upon this charming piece. It seems that the people at Hermès have been thinking about time and longing, expressed in a limited edition watch design celebrating the company’s 174th anniversary. Part of the Arceau collection, it’s called Le Temps Suspendu, or “Time Suspended.”

The slant of the numerals suggests the ceaseless motion of hours and minutes on the watch face, but these 174 specially made timepieces offer something to counter that momentum. They include a feature designed to evoke the sense of stepping outside of time. Press a button and the hands stop their motion to strike an impossible pose (from a timekeeping perspective), holding the “12” between them. Something like prayer position, perhaps. The date pointer hides away beneath a raised level of the face.

Voilá. If time hasn’t actually stopped, it has at least become irrelevant for the time being, which is much the same thing.

And since the time we can allow for not measuring time is limited, the wearer is reassured that a hidden timekeeper within continues to keep track. Press the button again and the watch returns to the correct time. There’s no mention of an alarm to remind you when to rejoin the scheduled world, but perhaps that would defeat the purpose.

I love the idea of a symbolic act that suspends time, shedding the schedule-driven concerns that clutter the mind and crowd the spirit. We’re at our best when we’re fully present, focusing all our skill and intuition on the thing that engages us. That timeless and exhilarating state is described beautifully by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. A ritual that invites that state of mind is invaluable.

When we reach it, time’s movement and measures fall away. The passing of time neither forces nor impedes; we move effortlessly through it. Later, once again inhabiting everyday consciousness, we look around blinking, wondering how long we spent in that heightened state. When was I last aware of the time? What time is it now? How long was time stopped? Only after the fact do we realize that we experienced an escape from time.

For those of us who don’t have $36,200 to spend on a not-watch, or who aren’t among the first 174 people in line to get one, there are more pictures and musings about the watch here. But we’ll need a different ritual for setting aside time.

Simply taking off a watch is one way to have such a ritual. It’s a sign of inhabiting a different mental space, outside of ordinary time. Another way might be to turn off the phones that claim so much of our attention. They’re a door to a wonderful world, but left open all the time they invite too much interruption.

Entering a ritualized process is another possibility: making a cup of tea, digging in a garden, participating in worship, engaging the imagination. We benefit from anything we can do to set aside time in a way that allows us to live well—to enjoy a meal or a conversation, to take a walk, to lose ourselves in something we enjoy, to create something new.

What kind of ritual helps you to suspend time?

 

Seeing the Picture

I’m remembering a dear uncle this week. Tall, gentle, and soft-spoken, his careful tamping of tobacco and patient lighting of his pipe fascinated me at family gatherings when I was a girl. Back then he was the only adult I knew who painted pictures, and I was confused when he said he didn’t think of himself as an artist.

One of his paintings was of a tree, which I remember him saying was out back of some building, in the parking lot. That was even more bewildering. How could something as special as a painting be made of something that sounded so ordinary? I would have learned an important lesson much earlier if I had been able to articulate that question, but I was a child with a thousand things I didn’t understand and no way to determine which I needed most to learn about.

Fortunately, I was able to know him long past childhood. He gave up his pipe in later years, and eventually failing eyesight took painting from him as well. But his sensibilities remained, and he appreciated the goodness of life. To talk with him was to share in a beautiful perspective on the world.

I took a break in the middle of the morning yesterday, from both the household chores I was taking care of and the writing I’ve been obsessing about for the past few days. Weary of all of it, I decided to just have a cup of coffee. Not to read or write, not to think or analyze or plan, but just to sit and look out the window and drink my coffee.

It was a beautiful day. The bright snow on the ground, the white-trimmed branches against a bright blue sky—“pretty as a picture” was the phrase that came to mind. It’s an old-fashioned idiom from a time when pictures were rare, special in a way utterly foreign to our image-flooded culture. But the phrase still evokes that sense of attention and value that comes with placing a frame around a scene. Making a picture is a way of saying this is worth noticing.

That’s what an artist can do. It’s what my uncle did when he saw something beautiful in an ordinary scene. Appreciating beauty doesn’t require a literal frame, but it helps to have some kind of reminder to pay attention. The frame could be the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee. It could be a particular place to be at a regular time of day. It might take the form of a ritual, like lighting a pipe.

It might even be a conversation with someone who can help you pay attention. Talking with Uncle Guyles often helped to frame something worth noticing. I’ll miss him.

What helps you frame the things you want to notice?

The Restorative Power of Deep Attention

This week I watched “Rivers and Tides,” a wonderful film directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer, about the art of Andy Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy works outdoors, often in the Scottish countryside where he lives. He uses elements from the natural world—leaves, stones, moss, bracken, ice—in surprising ways to create beautiful and powerful forms.

Andy Goldsworthy's Rivers & Tides

Much of his work endures only for a few hours, or even minutes, undone by elements as natural as the materials he uses. He brings to his work the expectation that it will soon yield to water, heat, gravity, wind, growth, decay, and time, incorporating nature’s claim on his creations into the viewer’s experience of the art. His ephemeral art, made of elements yielded by that particular place, are offered back to the landscape. Nature reclaims the elements of his work and once again changes their form. He says of a serpentine line of ice, made from icicle fragments and glowing gold in the rising sun, “The very thing that brings the work to life is the thing that will cause its death,” as the sculpture begins to melt.

In one sequence (you can view a clip here) he uses bleached driftwood to build a beautiful, domed structure with a perfectly round hole in the top, like the oculus of the Pantheon in Rome. He constructs it at a place where river and sea meet, the lines of the rounded walls echoing the swirling motion of the water next to it. As the tide comes in, the water washes up around the dome and lifts a few of the logs at its base. They separate from the structure, encircling it and becoming part of the circular flow mirrored by the lines of the dome. As it yields to the water, the dome becomes an even clearer expression of the motion it is made to suggest.

As Goldsworthy says in the film, “It doesn’t feel at all like destruction.” Eventually it is carried away by that very motion and incorporated into a flow it could only emulate when it was intact. He could be speaking of this circular structure later in the film when he says of another piece, “The sea has taken the work and made more of it than I ever could have hoped.”

Watching this film, I could feel my heartbeat slow, my breathing deepen, my muscles relax. When it ended, I felt the kind of inner quiet and spaciousness that comes after prayer or meditation. A sense of reverence infuses the film. It evokes a sense of wonder and of awe.

Goldsworthy’s rooted presence in the natural world, and his ability to convey it through his work and his words, are a rare gift. He brings deep attention to growth and change in nature, to the details of creation. He knows the characteristics of rocks and leaves, the path of the river, the ebb and flow of the tide. He seems to be exploring how to live in relationship with the overwhelming power of the natural world, finding ways to meet it with his own power as an artist, and working to know the world around him and his place in it.

His work is a reminder that we are part of a miraculous creation, in its enormity and power as well as its specificity and detail. Living with the kind of attention he brings helps us to be present for moments of divine clarity, when life on this earth shimmers with the presence of a reality beyond the one we can know.

What helps foster a sense of reverence in your life?