“You are in the right place.”
I have been in so many places the last six weeks, from the Alabama shore, to New Mexico, to Berlin, to Basel and a little village in France. My head is bursting with ideas. I won’t explain my dream (from the title) to you just now, but the woman who appeared in it assured me: you are in the right place. Wherever I am, when I remember this, along with bless everything that happens so more of the right thing will happen — the space opens and I have freedom of movement. Of course I only remember this when I have gotten stuck somewhere….
I want to show you work from a few of the students in Taos, New Mexico and at the Akademie der Kunst in Berlin:
“Let everything happen to you.” — Rilke
I am back from my month long European adventure. Thank you, and welcome, to all of you who signed up for A Silver Fraction while I was away.
In these weeks across the sea I fell into a wonder-filled world of time, history, collaboration and surprise. I am returning with a sense of renewal, and something more — a kind of recognition that can only happen when you become a stranger. Others see you as if you are new, and the world holds up a different mirror. The reflection I was offered was both familiar and strangely new. The remembrance comes with the blossoming of what has been lying in wait within. It occurs to me now as I write, that the feeling of belonging, this recognition, perhaps only comes after the willingness to be lost, not knowing who I am, being a receiver, a stranger.
I am bursting with creative ideas for the time to come. . .
To see more images click below:
Desert Stories
Our class at Ghost Ranch was inspired by the splendor of the land, and the sense of being away, away, away. The quiet of the desert and the expanse of the horizon in every direction, and the intuitive inner imagery stimulated by working with Barbara Griek, the Tarot, writing and painting. I fall short, every time, of conveying what the students bring…to each other and to me. I fall short of conveying the depth of experience felt in the classroom, and all that goes into the making of their journals.
In Taos, I had the privilege of teaching with Paul Maurer and Nancy Culmone…..
What gorgeous thing
I reached for the bacon and found a poem.
It’s Sunday morning; I am making our weekly brunch in the kitchen: southwestern grits with cheese and salsa. Yellow grits that need the final garnish. I open the freezer, and when I reach for the bacon out falls an envelope addressed to no one. Inside the envelope is a sheet of paper with a typewritten poem beginning I don’t know what gorgeous thing the bluebird keeps saying. The poem is accompanied by a tiny songbird feather, smaller than my little finger, that floats down to my feet. The delicate feather of a bluebird fallen from an unaddressed envelope with a poem found next to the frozen green beans.
Wherever the poem with its bluebird song, and a feather, wherever it came from (no one has yet confessed to putting it in the freezer), the day was permanently altered by mystery and gratitude. I consider it another blessing, regardless of how it came to be beneath the bacon. And why not? There is the continuing story of our bluebird house — it sits in full view of our kitchen, and I am thrilled each spring when the pair returns. But last spring the bluebirds were chased off by the house wrens. This was after they had laid four beautiful blue eggs. When the house wrens took over we grieved the bluebird eggs until the day we found a fledgling struggling alone on the ground. This baby bluebird, whose vanquished parents would not return, died in my son’s open palm. We buried his feathered body with its tiny feet, and its lovely beak that will never sing, with my father’s ashes. Three generations in love with winged things.
Repertoire With Invisibility
This quote comes to mind:
Every journey has secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware. — Martin Buber
I woke up this first morning at Ghost Ranch to the dream voice proclaiming: Take stock in invisibility. Take stock? One of the definitions of stock is repertoire. A repertoire with invisibility. I feel the power of darkness in the desert; there is nothing but starlight up here on the mesa. The imperative of trusting what I cannot see. Waiting for what wants to come. Taking stock in the unknown.
Here in New Mexico in the dark of the moon, the desert sky is dripping with stars. Just standing beneath such vastness brings back an immensity, a gap, a pause. A shooting star. A recognition of something you have always known.
"Tree, Stone, Eye" | Student Images from Taos
Before I left for Taos to teach the opening classes at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House, I was pushing against the inertia of our long, long sequester. I felt the uncertainty that had grown in many of us about going into the world. I felt the reluctance to move. The poem below made me smile:
My head was heavy, heavy;
so was the atmosphere.
I had to ask two times
before my hand would scratch my ear.
I thought I should be out
and doing! The grass, for one thing,
needed mowing.
— from “Inertia,” a poem by Jane Kenyon
Now I have returned from a few weeks in New Mexico, teaching the classes that had been postponed for almost two years. We were the only ones at the retreat, and the classes were small. The landscape was beautiful, christened with desert showers and new blooming flowers. Everyone had been through something significant in our long period of sequester. There was rejoicing — the fresh newness of being together in a room. This rejoicing was helped along by spectacular food, made by our chef, Sophia, and her team — and good wine.
I began, as always, with the conviction that each student who shows up has a particular gift, and is in class to enliven and strengthen that gift — the seed they were given at birth. Everyone is born with a gift. I believe, and am privileged to witness, that the making of art for its own sake will “bring into realization the self most centrally yours” (William Stafford).
Online Course: Images from "Speak to Me from Everywhere"
Someone said that to not hurry is rest. We all need, as Gottfried Pott said, time under protection of the muse. How do we do this remotely? The paradox for me is wanting to design a course through this screen that sets up a structure for you to work, for a while, without any screens, watches or interruptions. My feeling is that this is a deep need, and essential to creativity.
My first online class is complete, and made possible by all you adventurers out there who decided to jump into this experiment. I am deeply gratified by the sense of participation that was palpable throughout the week.
Each day we worked, through writing, with a different principle of landscape. I want to show you some work from students.
Uprooter of Great Trees
I want to tell you a story — a very old story — that I heard from Laurens van der Post.* It speaks to the necessity of embracing paradox, and off the suffering caused by dualistic thinking: when things are either this or that; when you are either going to succeed or fail; when anything or anyone is either good or bad; when something is either right or wrong. Dualistic thinking renders us unable to deal with the difficulties and paradoxes that life inevitably brings. Spending most of my daylight hours painting, I notice that I need to hold the paradox of having structure alongside the need to be self-forgetting — the fool who jumps in.
I shared this story in a recent class in New Mexico. One of the students arrived at the last minute because of a family emergency. For the entire week she chose to remain silent in her grief, only saying: I cannot speak about it. And so she worked, allowing her hands to give shape to her grief.
Once upon a time, in a faraway place…..
Workshops: Exploring line with ink, paint, thread, graphite and poetry
We began with the idea, expressed in many traditions, that we are each born with a seed, an acorn, a particular something that we have to offer back to this world that has been given to us. The clue to what this is, as Joseph Campbell has said, is this question: What did you do as a child that gave you a sense of timelessness? Even if this doesn’t directly answer what your “seed” is, it is the thread for you to follow. Here is the same idea posed by an Italian born, German priest, Romano Guardini, talking about his dream:
Last night, but probably it was the morning, when dreams come, one then came to me. What happened in it I no longer know, but something was said, either to me or by me, which also I no longer know.
So, it was said that when a man is born, a word is given with him, and it was important, what the meaning was: not just a predisposition, but a word. It is spoken unto him in his essence, and it is like the password of everything, what then will happen. It is at once the strength and the weakness. It is the commission and the promise. It is the guard and the dangers. Everything that will then happen through the course of the years is the effect of this word, it is the explanation and the fulfillment. And everything comes to pass for him to whom it was pronounced -- each man, to each to which one was spoken -- he understands it and it comes into agreement with him. –Romano Guardini