The Revolutionary Act of "Doing Worthy"
Doesn’t everyone have a day when things fall apart? When it takes more effort than you think you have to put one foot in front of another? When even your technical devices seem to collude against you?
My reverie, pure joy, after my exhibit was done, ended abruptly with a letter from the IRS announcing they are coming to audit my business next week. On top of this, my intrepid father, at 96, fell for the first time and broke a bone.
So my retreat here at St Meinrad, scheduled so long ago, has been infiltrated with dread and piles of papers. The amount of sorting and retrieving of records is overwhelming, seven detailed pages of requests from the IRS … which calls to mind, once again, the old Greek story of Psyche. Her first impossible task was to sort seven different kinds of seeds, filling a gigantic room, floor to ceiling, before nightfall, before Aphrodite announces her time is up. I am thankful for these stories, and for the way a story puts the human dilemma in perspective. Just this morning, on my first day of this retreat, my son, who was born a muse, called. Ma, I had this dream. In a big room were all these small piles of seeds neatly sorted, and a spiral of seeds floating upward.
There are a few spaces in my classes at ABC 2020 in Alberta, Canada this summer:
Image Making: Then & Now | Exhibit Opens Nov 15: Laurie Doctor & Martin Erspamer, OSB
This week I have been reading Image Making in Arctic Art*, an article written in the 1960s about the the indigenous people living in the desolate Arctic tundra. It’s hard for most of us to imagine that in addition to no electricity, running water, heat, etc. …it is so cold that nothing grows. No trees in a flat landscape. They live in a white and gray shifting world of wind and ice. Life is uncomplicated by email, texts, phones, radio, TV, internet, cars, and airplanes. Their days are made of bare essentials — of finding food and oil for their lamps, to have enough light and warmth inside their ice igloos. In this bare existence, poetry and art are also part of survival. Poetry and art are food. There is no separation made between the need for the hunt and the need to create. Being makers is part of their sustenance. They make their own music, singing and humming as they work, reciting poetry, asking the unformed tusk: Who are you? Who hides there?
Edmund Carpenter* records a story from the 1700s of two Arctic hunters following a snowshoe print in the vast empty landscape; it leads to a young woman sitting alone in a hut. She has been there for seven months without seeing a single human. She tells of her whole family — her parents, her husband and her baby — being murdered by a hostile band. She alone survived. What struck these hunters most deeply was her dignity and composure. In spite of this unimaginable loss, and having to survive alone for months by snaring small game, she sat beautifully dressed, taking the time in her isolation and grief to decorate her dress with small found objects, placed in pleasing patterns.
Perhaps in the story of the young woman there is also the idea that you can open your imagination to finding what you need to be a maker, regardless of the circumstances you find yourself in.
Images from student work at Ghost Ranch
I am devoting this post to showing the work done by students in our recent class at Ghost Ranch. Please forgive this long absence — all my attention has been given to my class, and to finishing my paintings for my upcoming exhibit. Another post will be coming soon with some images from my show.
It is impossible, after a rich experience, to convey it all in words or images. This will give you a glimpse of the place, which has its own power and presence, and some of the work that was done.
It is not my job to praise or blame, only, in the end, to be envious of your work.
— William Stafford to his students
In the atmosphere of New Mexico high desert, we combined working with the Tarot cards (to strengthen intuition and inner imagery), with writing, painting and bookmaking…
Presence and Productivity
What I want to talk about today is how to find a balance between solitude and interaction, and how bringing presence to both cultivates productivity. Being a maker requires both solitude and interaction. Quality solitude awakens your inner life, your muse and your imagination. Meaningful interaction — a conversation with a fellow traveler — fuels creativity. Joseph Campbell said: “We may as well be with those who bring out the best in us.” How you spend your days, and who you spend them with, matters.
A full day of solitude is water for the thirsty maker…on these days, I often take a long time getting out of my pajamas. Breakfast is late too, but before noon. The length of time for dedicated solitude is less important than the quality of solitude. Quality is the renewal, the welcoming of a fresh horizon, that arises naturally from stillness. Yet stillness seems so distant to the restless mind. It’s as if everything is aligned in opposition to having an inner life. There is an aversion to boredom, a craving for stimulation, and a longing for the next shiny object. Let me give you an example:
There was a research study set up to examine our resistance to “doing nothing”. The participants were asked to sit alone in a room, without moving or having access to any devices, for 10 minutes. They were given the option to sit still, or to press a button that would give them an unpleasant electric shock. 25% of the women and 67% of the men chose to shock themselves rather than sit still.
It’s as if we don’t want to allow the presences tapping on our dark and luminous world of possibility, the images that are summoning us, to actually arrive and expand our being.
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…..
The Presence of a Tree
Twice a year I return to Taos, New Mexico to teach. Outside our lodge at the Mabel Dodge Luhan Retreat there is a magnificent old cottonwood tree. It is fed by water in the arroyo it rises above.
At our refuge in Taos, situated next to sacred Pueblo land, we feel the closeness of the landscape. It is high desert, and the presence of this tree is welcome shade and vertical majesty.
"Now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still." – Pablo Neruda
This week I went to my local bookstore, and asked the clerk: Why is it that if I buy a new notebook, I think I may write something worthwhile? Nonetheless, inspired by spring, I bought a new little notebook for my new lists, along with Austin Kleon’s Keep Going, which I have really enjoyed reading this week.
Newsletter: Laurie Doctor Upcoming Classes/ Registration open for 2020
Registrations are open for 2020, classes in Taos, Michigan, Kentucky, Indiana, Canada and Italy. I’d love to hear from you.
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