Nothing Is Holier than a Beautiful, Strong Tree

Tags

Hermann Hesse, holiness, life, Nature, Philosophy, quote, trees

 

Recently a woman sent me a message on Facebook, commenting on my cover photo of the “glorious” tree roots intricately woven around rocks. She wondered where I found the photo. I told her I came upon the tree when hiking along a river in the mountains above Big Sur. Something about the tree and its rootedness arrested me, and inspired me so much I use it on several of my online sites. It’s gratifying that others are inspired by it as I have been. But trees have been an inspiration for artists and philosophers throughout the ages.

Recently I came across this quote from Hermann Hesse, the author of Siddhartha, on Zen Flash.

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone.

They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche.

In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree…

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.”

~Hermann Hesse

The line I love most is how “they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves.” And that is “exemplary” as Hesse notes and denotes a kind of holiness, to  remind us all of the need to be true to ourselves, to find our singular purpose in being and struggle with all the force of our lives to fulfill it, regardless of whether anyone takes note of it or us at all.

That tree found growing along the bank of that creek may have gone unseen, unappreciated by human eyes, its entire lifespan, and yet it would have fulfilled its purpose nonetheless. That is its great strength, the thing that makes it exemplary, and holy. Simply being what one was meant to be suffices. Nothing else is needed.

Having said that, here’s a paradox: The tree cannot fulfill itself alone. It is dependent upon its entire environment to fulfill its purpose. Those stones that probably felt like such an obstacle when it was striving to grow from a sapling to a mighty oak is what helped shape it and distinguish it and perhaps even strengthen it. It is what drew me to the tree.

I found in it something almost indescribably beautiful and inspiring, how it used the very stones that blocked its roots to build a firm foundations, and how it in turn become the foundation of new growth, creating a home for the ivy and moss and lichens that grow upon it, giving shelter to the small animals and insects that burrow beneath. It exemplifies that interdependence by which we all live and shows how strength and vulnerability grow hand in hand to create beautiful lives. 

Here are a few more faces of this lovely tree.

Other posts on trees you might like:

Walking in a Green Wonderland

My Roman Oaks

Endless Emerging Forms — Fog, Mist, and Trees

Learning What’s Needed to Be Healed

Tags

healing, Learning, Obstacles, Parenting, Zen

 

I found this quotation at Zen Flash, and realized it’s just what I needed to hear.

Nothing ever really attacks us except our own confusion. Perhaps there is no solid obstacle except our own need to protect ourselves from being touched. Maybe the only enemy is that we don’t like the way reality is now, and therefore wish it would go away fast. But what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. If we run a hundred miles an hour to the other end of the continent in order to get away from the obstacle, we find the very same problem waiting for us when we arrive. It just keeps returning with new names, forms, manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us about where we are separating ourselves from reality, how we are pulling back instead of opening up, closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter, without hesitating or retreating into ourselves.

~ Pema Chodron ~

Maybe it’s what all of us need to hear when troubling things keep popping up over and over again in our lives. They come for a reason, because we have something yet to learn.

I wrote in my blog post about major life changes how I put writing on hold to raise my children without the frustration that comes with constant interruptions. It seemed like the wise and selfless thing to do at the time, to wait until they were grown to write. Now I wonder. Especially since confronted with the same dilemma so many years later as I help raise my granddaughter.

Maybe what I need to learn is not to be “selfless” in putting aside the writing, but to examine why I feel such frustration at being interrupted, or why I feel I need uninterrupted time to write, or why I am so easily distracted? Or, contrarywise, why I feel writing is so important–some “sacred” task I must nurture in peaceful silence?

I don’t know the answer yet–what I have still to learn from this experience. But I want to examine it more closely, as Chodron advises:

Where am I separating myself from reality?

How am I pulling back instead of opening up?

How am I closing down rather than allowing myself to experience fully what I am encountering, without hesitation or retreating into myself?

What’s more, I find myself revisiting my relationship with my own children when they were young as I wrote about in my last blog post, looking at it through this new lens of raising a grandchild, as if there is something that needs re-examining? What is it I need to learn and set right? Or learn and let go?

Just yesterday a new hurt arose that echoed an old one from a year ago. This time I recognized immediately how here again was something repeating itself and challenging me to ask what I need to learn. And so I did ask, and learn. And the hurt melted away.

Why do we allow ourselves to be blindsided by these troubling repetitions, to think, oh no, here it is again, and suffer needlessly? Instead of seeing how they come to help us learn what’s needed, and be healed.

Peace in the Midst of Chaos

Tags

chaos, inspiration, life, peace, Philosophy, poetry, spirituality, T'ao Chi'en, Taoism

Is it possible to find peace in the midst of chaos? An early Chinese poet asks and answers this question.

To build a house in the world of man

And not to hear the noise of horse and carriage,

How can this be done?

When the mind is detached, the place is quiet.

I gather chrysanthemums under the eastern hedgerow

And silently gaze at the southern mountains.

The mountain air is beautiful in the sunset,

And the birds flocking together return home.

In all these things there is a real meaning,

Yet when I want to express it, I become lost in no-words.

By T’ao Ch’ien from Creativity and Taoism: A Study of Chinese Philosophy, Art, and Poetry by Chang Chung-yuan

“When the mind is detached”–how do we do that? How can I let go of wanting things to be the way I want them, of striving to make things the way I feel they should be instead of the way they are? And let go of all the frustration and upset that accompanies that struggle?

Yet underneath all that turmoil, when I let go and become lost in the “no-words” of “what is”, I experience that peace.

A deep calm underlies the surface struggle.

Just reading this poem brings me a measure of relief and the assurance that I too can find peace in the midst of chaos.

Where else is it to be sought or found?

Into the Flow, Bringing the Mountain Top into Market Place

Tags

Flow, harmony, in the zone, peace, sailing, spirituality, Tahiti

Have you ever felt being in the flow of things? That optimum experience that many athletes and artists feel when time disappears and everything you are doing just seems to click effortlessly into place?

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who has written extensively on flow, calls it “an almost automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness” in which you “become, at least temporarily, part of a larger entity” or even “at one with the harmony of the cosmos.”

I’ve experienced this a few times for extended periods, but most often only for brief moments. The type of flow usually comes after long periods of meditation, usually when I’m outside, immersed in nature, when thoughts cease and sights and sounds flow through me. “Mountain-top” moments you might call them. But occasionally, more rarely, they happen in the “market place,” unexpectedly, in the middle of a busy day. I love it when that happens.

The first extended period of this came when we were sailing in the South Pacific. We were anchored in a cove off Tahiti and I went ashore to do some shopping.

I felt unusually light-headed, as if walking on air, or as if some filter called “me” had disappeared, and all that was left was this crystal clear awareness taking in everything and everyone I met—that “not-two” feeling I mentioned at the end of my last post on ‘Lightness of Being.” That sense stayed with me during the bus ride to Papeete and slowly dissipated as I went about my shopping.

I wrote a poem about the experience when I returned home, focusing on the bus ride. When sitting in the open-sided bus looking out at the passing landscape that sense of “flow” was especially intense.

On a Bus to Papeete

Wind through the window
Streaming through my hair

I in my stillness
Hurtling through the air

Trees and grasses and roads bending
Faces with flowers and houses blending

Objects like petals on a dark stream,
streaming through me, leave me

Clean and empty as a hollow reed, still
faintly tingling with the rhapsody of being.

It happened another time when we had returned home from our voyage and I was working as a manager of a small popular family restaurant. It was Sunday morning and we were slammed. Folks were lined up out the door waiting to be seated. The hostess was going crazy trying to keep up with the demand, scribbling down names and crossing them off, leading couples and families to tables, bringing out highchairs and crayons and coloring books, taking out trays of water.

The waitresses were buzzing around the room taking orders, pouring drinks, balancing up to six plates at a time in their arms. The poor busboys were clearing tables as fast as they could, wiping them down, hauling cartloads of dishes back to the kitchen. Things were at a fever high pitch of frantic in the back of the house too, as cooks called out orders, slapped slabs of bacon and sausage on the griddle, flipped pancakes, whisked eggs.

And I was everywhere at once, making the rounds, helping out as I moved along, taking around coffee, refilling cups, chatting up the guests, helping to clear tables and seat people, checking up on missing orders, lending a hand to the stack of avocados that needed peeling to make up a new batch of guacamole.

Everywhere at once, acutely attuned to what was needed in the moment and filling in the gap, just streaming along, light-headed, calm, exuberant, being all things at once and nothing at all, just letting the ebb and flow of activity move me along, marveling even while in the midst of it, at how natural, spontaneous, hyper-aware, hyper-alive I felt.

It lasted all morning and well into the early afternoon. Then as the stream of guests faded, and the restaurant began to empty, so did the “high,” that sense of flow, and I was gently landed back on the ground again, normal me, but not a bit tired and still very happy.

Now most of the time I feel I’m being carried along mid-stream, not “in the flow” at the center as I was then, but skirting it, somewhere between the flow and the swirling eddies at the edge of the stream. It’s a pleasant place to be, knowing the “flow” is right there beside me, ready to whisk me away again when I’m ready and things are just right.

But happy too that I’m avoiding for the most part those pesky eddies that try to pull me away into the shallows—-those petty, tiresome swirls, and fearful spins, and down-spouts of grief and anger that are always there, ready to pull me under and upside-down when they can. Usually I am able to scramble free easier than I have in the past, knowing that whatever trouble in the world they represent is more easily solved when I’m not tumbling around in the turmoil.

Mostly it’s a balancing act, trying to bring those mountaintop moments into the marketplace and finding myself somewhere in between. Not an unpleasant place to be.

[First posted this in May 2013 under a slightly different title. Things are rather chaotic in my life right now and I found this post a soothing reminder. Still seeking to bring those mountain-top experiences down into the market-place.]

Nature and Consciousness – Seeing Things as They Are

Tags

Consciousness, Metaphysics, Nature, Perception, Philosophy, reality, Science, spirituality

© Luc Viatour (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Every time I write about nature I get deep into human consciousness. You can’t really separate the two. There is no “nature” – no way to identify, quantify, categorize, articulate, or understand it—apart from human consciousness, from how we think and talk about it.

We can’t study or explore or write about nature as something separate from ourselves, our own senses and experiences, our own thinking, perceiving, observations, experimentation. In that sense, nature is subjective, no matter how hard we try to objectify it.

This is not new, of course. Better writers and thinkers, from different disciplines, have explored this in more depth and detail that I can here.

This grand book the universe . . . is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it: without these, one wanders around in a dark labyrinth.  —Galileo, Astronomer

All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view, or from the experience of the world . . . .  –Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenologist

We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. –Edward Sapir, Linguist

If the world exists and is not objectively solid and preexisting before I come on the scene, then what is it? The best answer seems to that the world is only a potential and not present without me or you to observe it. . . . All of the world’s many events are potentially present, able to be but not actually seen or felt until one of us sees or feels.  –Fred Allen Wolf, Physicist

Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner—what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.
-–Rainer Maria Rilke, Poet

The sun shines not on us, but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. –John Muir, Naturalist

At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the processions of the seasons. There is nothing . . . with which I am not linked.  –Carl Jung, Psychologist

See this rock over there? This rock’s me!  –Australian Aborigine

But in the ordinary play of our day, we forget this. We experience everything outside ourselves as “not me,” “alien,” “other.” Even our own bodies are commonly experienced as “not me.” We say “my stomach growled,” or “my foot fell asleep,” or “my sinuses are acting up,” because they seem to act involuntarily, with a mind of their own, without our conscious consent. As does nature, and other people, and the things we create—toasters and cars and computers.

Separating the whole of life and existence into parts is a useful way of talking and thinking about things.

But too often we fail to put everything back together and see how interdependent it all is, how embedded we are in the whole, and the whole in us. When we fail to do so we lose a vital understanding of ourselves and the universe, and we act in ways that may be harmful to the whole.

The see the ocean in a drop of water, to see ourselves in everyone we meet, is not, as some think, merely a poetic and rosy way of looking at the world. It’s to see things as they actually are.

Original posted 8-9-2012

To Mother the World

Tags

children, Family, Love, Mother, mothering, Mothers Day, spirituality, Tao, Tao Te Ching

The novel I am working on is about relationships between mothers and children and all the ways that is expressed, from the most fearful and destructive to the most trusting and freeing. So I’ve been thinking a lot on this topic lately.

A passage that had a huge influence on my understanding of what “mothering” is, or could be, is found in the Tao Te Ching (CHXXV):

There was something complete and nebulous

Which existed before the Heaven and Earth,

Silent, invisible

Unchanging, standing as One,

Unceasing, ever-revolving,

Able to be the Mother of the World.

This Mother of the World, of course, is Tao, the all-pervading, all embracing, unchanging, and unceasing. It’s the thing that evolves, supports, nurtures, protects, and provides space for its “children,” all individual being.

A tall order for a mere human.

Yet something about that passage spoke to me as a woman and mother. It drew within me the desire to embrace my children in that spirit. And I found the mothering of my own two children improved immensely when I was able to step back and project in some way this more expansive sense of mothering that allows them to feel loved and supported without all the worries and anxieties and criticism and fear that accompany a mere human sense of mothering.

This mothering is not as personal, intense, or myopic, as the latter. It doesn’t hover, it doesn’t obsess, it doesn’t fret. It frees them “to be,” and is based on an immense sense of trust—in myself, in them, and in the universe at large. In God, or Tao, or some divine presence or higher power that embraces all of us, and gives each of us the capacity to mother each other.

This is not to say that I often meet this ideal. Far from it.

But I know that I mother my own children best and make fewer mistakes when I’m able to embrace them in that larger, more expansive way. And it feels more natural, less constricted, to mother that way.

I find this kind of mothering works best when all-inclusive. When I embrace all around me with the same mothering spirit. Not just my children, but all children, all people, all things—my home, my community, my work—even the individual objects that fill the space around me and the space outside my window.  When I’m able to actually feel and identify with that potential, to “be” the “Mother of the World.”

Mothering, I learned, is a capacity that anyone can embrace: man, woman, child. You don’t have to be a mother, or have children of your own, to mother the world. When you adopt that stance, all things become your children to nurture, cherish, support, love—to help bring to their full potential.

Here’s wishing you all a lovely day of “mothering.”

Primary Wonder & A Bell Awakened – Two By Levertov

Tags

becoming awakened, Denise Levertov, life, mystery, poetry, wonder

The whole purpose of life, of this extraordinary experience in being, is to be awake to the wonder and mystery around us in all their myriad forms. These two poems speak eloquently to that need.

Primary Wonder

Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; cap and bells.

And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng’s clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.

Variation On A Theme By Rilke

A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me–a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day’s blow
rang out, metallic–or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.

Both by Denise Levertov

Speaking of Erotica . . .

Tags

books, Erotic Romance, Erotica, literature, Reading, Romance, Seeking the Beloved, sexual tension, Union with the Other

. . . have you read anything hot lately?

Perhaps it was the convergence of Valentine’s Day and the release of Fifty Shades of Gray (the movie), but I’ve been on the look-out for a really hot romance. Something literary. Not the so-called mommy-porn “Gray” aspires to. Nor the BDSM that seems so popular these days. But a straight, steamy love story that has depth and substance. I have yet to find what I’m seeking.

It hasn’t been from lack of trying though. I read “Gray” back when it first came out just to see what the hoopla was all about. But I couldn’t get past the first three chapters–the writing was so silly, the characters so unbelievable, and even the sexual tension between the two seemed tepid at best. Nothing to keep me turning pages.

Since then I’ve revisited some “steamy” romances I read in my youth, only to find them sadly lacking. I’ve surfed through pages of reviews of erotic romance and downloaded a few e-books onto my Kindle (thank God for Kindle—this is what it was created for!). While some were fun reads, and others hot enough to steam up my reading glasses, all left me feeling vaguely dissatisfied.

I am seeking something that stimulates and satisfies in a deeper way than what I’ve found so far. A story that explores, perhaps, at least to some degree, both the sensual and spiritual nature of desire, arousal, and consummation. After all, sexual and spiritual pleasure, power and transformation are parallel journeys on the road to fulfillment. Both are precipitated by strong human desires for union with the Other. Both, arguably, are what shape us as human beings.

Each journey involves deep longing for something beyond the individual self. Each requires trust and receptivity, surrender and self-sacrifice, tenderness and devotion. Each gives way to passion and delight, awe and wonder, ecstasy and bliss, love and transcendence.

Each seeks the Beloved.

I can’t help thinking that the first journey, that’s seeded in sexual desire for oneness, is what prepares us for the second, to step outside ourselves into something that subsumes us. And I can’t help believing that the two journeys can overlap or coincide. That the parallels between them have deep significance.

Maybe this kind of recognition is too much to ask for in an erotic romance. But I’m still looking.

How about you? Do you enjoy reading hot romances? Anything you’d recommend?

Downward into Darkness on Extended Wings

Tags

Deborah J. Brasket, downward into darkness, poem, poetry, Sunday Morning, Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens’ poem “Sunday Morning” ends with these lines:

We live in an old chaos of the sun,

Or old dependency of day and night,

Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,

Of that wide water, inescapable.

Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail

Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;

Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;

And, in the isolation of the sky,

At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make

Ambiguous undulations as they sink,

Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

I love the final image—that graceful downward swoop into darkness, held aloft by the lightness of wings fully extended. That final juxtaposition of dark and light, I find deeply moving.

Steven’s poetry has been a huge influence on me. I see traces of it everywhere in my writing.

The final lines of this poem introduce a short story I wrote, Tamara in Her Garden, where a woman who has been deeply traumatized by life finds healing in her garden–not just in the beauty she find there, but in the natural decay and death that comes with it. She tells us:

Sometimes when I kneel in the grass at the edge of my flowerbed, leaning out over the border of sweet alyssum that is heaped like snow, leaning so close that my face feathers the fragrant petals, and then breathe–breathe deeply, I sense that with each breath I am gathering up a huge lungful of myriad, microscopic creatures that course through my nose and mouth and throat in a rhythmic pattern of respiration perhaps eons longer than the life-spans of such tiny beings. And I feel lightheaded, what with the deep breathing, the heady fragrance, the thought that so much life and so much death passes with such pleasure through me. I sway when I rise. My bare knees and tops of feet bear a moist imprint–a fine cross-hatching of grasses.

While some think she’s hiding more than healing in her garden, she sees it differently—and here’s where Steven’s influence is clearly seen:

I see my garden as highly invigorating and precarious, teeming with raw necessity, a microcosm of all the life and beauty, decay and death, that ever was. Sometimes I stand in my round garden as if standing upon the edge of a precipice, poised for flight. Not to fly away as I once had supposed, but to delve ever more deeply.

That “delving ever more deeply” is what interests me, the fact that we have to explore the dark places in life in order to grow, for that’s the only way to bring in the light. We’re not sustained by beauty and lightness alone, but by seeing the beauty and lightness in the dark places, in the brokenness that lies all around us, seeing it in the very places where it doesn’t seem to exist. And seeing how the beauty and lightness is nurtured in the dark places of our own lives.

These are old ideas, of course–how the transience of beauty intensifies its pleasure. How the brighter the light, the deeper the shadows, how both together help us to see the object and its roundness more clearly. It’s a theme that is played over and over in poetry and literature and art. We never tire of it because it’s so rich in associations and, at the same time, still so veiled and mysterious. We sense the deepness there, some truth not fully plumbed. We walk around it and around it, but never fully grasp it. Perhaps that’s why we return to it so often in our art, not to touch it, but to be touched by it.

Sometimes that touch is healing, as in the garden I wrote about. Sometimes it is transforming. It tears us to pieces in order to create us anew.

I wrote about this in my poem “Walking Among Flowers.” Here’s an excerpt from a blog post that tells how this came about:

Walking through the village on Nuka Hiva down narrow, winding roads, past pastel-colored houses surrounded by gardens overflowing with flowers and dense tropical foliage, melting in the heat and humidity and the perfumed air . . . . . I felt physically and mentally assaulted, overcome by the intensity of the colors and the abundance of the beauty that surrounded me.

Colors exploding all around me, shattering the senses—sight, smell, and sound washing together. Undulating waves of color, wrapping around me, streaming through me, carrying me away.

Sometimes it was a soft, sensual immersion. Sometimes a harsh, brutal slaying. It knocked me off my feet and broke me open. I swallowed it whole.

In the poem I tried to capture how the brutal beauty of the experience tore me apart, leaving me bloody and trampled. Yet out of this seeming “death” rose something new, ethereal, like light, and powerful. Here’s where we see Steven’s influence, in the final downward swoop:

 I lay like a light on the garden wall

then swooping, swallow, flowers and all.

The same “beauty and brutality” that tore me apart, transforms me, and allows me to partake of its wholeness, to become one with the wholeness, and holiness, of life.

It’s odd though. I don’t think of the beauty and brutality in equal terms. In this life, as we normally experience it, the brutality, the darkness, is the shadow side of something that is “real” in a way that the shadow itself is not. We still experience it, it still gives depth to the wholeness of our experience. It still shapes us, even as it torments us or tears us apart. It’s very “real” in those harsh, experiential ways. It’s perhaps part of the birthing process, but it’s not the birth itself, or the thing we’re giving birth to.

But what it is, is not something we can easily put our finger on.  So we write poetry about it instead. And we feel it, as we too swoop “downward into darkness on extended wings.”

“I See You But Do You See Me?” – Artist Marc Clamage, Bearing Witness

Tags

art, bearing witness, beggers, Bernie Glassman, Blog, Homeless, I Paint What I See, living on the street, Marc Clamage, painting, panhandlers

“I see you but do you see me?” Maxine by Marc Clamage

Since my last post, I discovered another artist who refuses to turn away. He bears witness one face at a time by painting panhandlers he sees in Boston Harvard Square near his workplace.

“I used to hurry by them,” writes artist Marc Clamage, “but then I began to stop. Each face tells a story, I realized, and I would try to capture as many as I could through a series of oil paintings.”

Rosie and David with pet guinea pig, by Marc Clamage

He’d noticed there were more than usual that year, and that they seemed “younger, and more troubled.” Sometimes even whole families begging on the streets.

Many of the people he encountered were simply passing through, on their way to a new job or to visit family. Some panhandled to supplement a low-wage job, or help pay the rent.

Others were homeless. Panhandling was their only source of income. A few of these were mentally disturbed, or drug addicts. Some were sick and dying.

 Marc writes: “I do not ask the panhandlers to ‘pose’ for me, but to carry on with their business. I pay each person $10, though I wish I could afford more, because they earn that small fee in the hour or two it takes me to paint them.

“Newly Engaged, Need Motel to Celebrate” Justin and Lauren (The Lovebirds) by Marc Clamage

Over that time, we often get to talking, which has been a privilege and an education.

I’ve seen or heard many human dramas: the tragic love story of Gary and Whitney; squabbles over the best places to work; the mysterious figure everyone calls “The Rabbi,” stuffing $20 bills into cups and disappearing before anyone can see his face.

“I’ve witnessed a few instances of cruelty, but many more of thoughtfulness and generosity. And when I head home, I’m always struck by one thought: There but for the grace of God go the rest of us. Perhaps that’s why we find panhandlers so hard to look at.”

I was deeply touched by Marc’s paintings and by the stories of the people who posed for him. You can view more of his paintings and read the stories on his website “I Paint What I See“, or at his blog.

Gary, Desert Storm Vet, by Marc Clamage

I also like what he says about how he paints:

“I paint what I see, only what I see, only with it right in front of me, only while I’m looking right at it. I do not work from photographs, or imagination, or memory, or even from sketches. I paint exclusively from life. The essence of representation is that every choice, every brushstroke must be made in direct response to the experience of visual reality.”

To really “see” someone, the way an artist does, objectively, without judgement, and yet responding to what is seen, the pain, or loneliness, or confusion, or anger; to see and be seen like that, must be freeing, for both the painter, the one painted. And for the viewer as well.

To simply behold what we see–the good and bad and beautiful and ugly–without judgement, but with compassion and humility, is the essence of “bearing witness.” And it must have a healing effect.

Bernie Glassman in “Bearing Witness: A Zen Master’s Lessons in Making Peace” wrote:

“In my view, we can’t heal ourselves or other people unless we bear witness. In the Zen Peacemaker Order we stress bearing witness to the wholeness of life, to every aspect of the situation that arises. So bearing witness to someone’s kidnapping, assaulting, and killing a child means being every element of the situation: being the young girl, with her fear, terror, hunger, and pain; being the girl’s mother, with her endless nights of grief and guilt; being the mother of the man who killed, torn between love for her son and the horror of his actions; being the families of both the killed and the killer, each with its respective pain, rage, horror, and shame; being the dark, silent cell where the girl was imprisoned; being the police officers who finally, under enormous pressure, caught the man; and being the jail cell holding the convicted man. It means being each and every element of this situation.”

Whitney, cancer victim, by Marc Clamage

To bear witness in that way must be the hardest, the most healing, and the most humbling thing we could ever do. And the most needed.

Elsewhere, Glassman writes: “When we bear witness, when we become the situation — homelessness, poverty, illness, violence, death — the right action arises by itself. We don’t have to worry about what to do. We don’t have to figure out solutions ahead of time. . . . Once we listen with our entire body and mind, loving action arises.”

More of Marc’s paintings follow. See if you see what inspired him to paint these people. Sometimes we see something that cannot be “passed over” lightly, but must be “passed on” to others in whatever way we have of preserving them:  in paint or print, or images on a blog site. So I pass these on to you.

Colleen, by Marc Clamage. Died of exposure and a drug overdose.

Gideon, by Marc Clamage

“Too ugly to prostitute, too kind to pimp.” Anthony by Marc Clamage

Maria by Marc Clamage

Laurel by Marc Clamage. Her sign says she’s a mother of 4 and victim of domestic violence. On the flip side it says “I’m not a whore, asshole.”

Carrie by Marc Clamage. Now clean and sober and off the streets.

[This post originally appeared on another blog in a slightly different form]