Meditation 05.18
I met a man who painted classical mythologies and set them free. I studied his method, the way he began by capturing the scene on canvas, painstakingly copied from a celebrated master. With a sweep of the paint brush he both destroyed that likeness and created a blank canvas for his re-imagination. The new image looser in color and line, made only faint references to the original as though born from what lay beneath but reduced to an essence.
I recognized it as a metaphor for then return to self, which is to say, the removal of narratives that no longer serve, or perhaps never did
in a practice that finds beauty from a simple shift of perspective.
So with eyes looking inward I began to move my body in release
even as I searched for the familiar,
for a memory outside of time and place
not yet clouded by doubt or fear or regret
where I found the essence of me.
When the movement stopped I sensed a renewed clarity that made me at once stronger and softer. Even so, I understood that my arrival here was itself a point of departure and that tomorrow I would begin the dance all over again.
Painting Credit: Fodor, Lawrence. Hercules and Antanaeus II. 2015-17
Daydream 11.17
When you enter the storyteller’s mind you find an abundance of curiosity fed by the desire to replace what is with what is possible.
Empathy, says writer Rebecca Solnit, is “then a way of traveling from here to there.” “What is it like,” she asks by way of demonstration, “to be the old man silenced by a stroke, the young man facing the executioner, the woman walking across the border, the child on the roller coaster, the person you have only read about, or the one next to you?
What is it like, I continued on, to be the woman in the painting whose draped body hints at seduction
but whose half averted and blank face suggests she has gone someplace else
a place I can only imagine, a memory or a daydream, where she leaves behind, if only for a few moments, the weight of the day to day?
Wanting to know, I went to meet her there.
Mirror Mirror 10.17
I wonder whether you, too, have a mother who is a gardener.
And whether you, the daughter of a gardener, desired to be like but also different from your mother, so that after dabbling in the garden for years with thumbs less green than hers you moved on to pursue other interests, such as photography.
I wonder whether your interest in photography grew into a passion, one that is as strong as your mother’s love for gardening but that is different, that is your own.
I wonder whether one day you began to photograph flowers instead of grow them, and whether you believed at the time that your choice of subject matter was inspired merely by a wish to capture beauty.
I wonder whether, after some time, you started to notice that your photographs of flowers brought you closer to your mother as you began to perceive just a little bit of her in each one.
I wonder whether, after recognizing your mother in your photographs of flowers, you began to understand them as perfect tokens of your long-felt desire to be both alike and different, the two of you, she the gardener and you the photographer, connected by a passion and a love of flowers, hers fleeting through the changing seasons and yours, in their photographic captures more permanent representations of the same.