awareness – Page 2 – the awakened eye

the zen of camerawork

Posted on January 9, 2016 by miriam louisa simons

Gratitude to Roy Money for his thoughtful offer to share his article Minor White and the Quest for Spirit here, knowing it would be of great interest to readers of this site, and also to Christine Cote, editor and publisher of Still Point Arts Quarterly where the article first appeared. This post is a teaser – you’ll have to click through to the page to read the whole article and view more of White’s photographs. You will not be disappointed!

Minor White - Empty Head, 1962

Minor White was one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century and he generated considerable controversy in his last years for the promotion of spirituality. I met him early in my introduction to photography and admired his work. I recently renewed my interest in him because of a developing involvement in Zen practice and efforts to explore spirituality in relation to my own photographs.

Minor was not only an important artist but also a teacher, editor and curator, and his language of spirit and spirituality came at a time when it had declining credibility in the art world. Though this language had a certain resonance within the wider cultural scene of the sixties it was an early and continuing theme for White that was no doubt stimulated by the challenge of living as a homosexual in an era before gay rights. Spirituality has long been associated with finding relief from the misfortunes and injustices of the social world, as well as finding purpose in the midst of uncertainty and doubt. Of course spirituality has also been an ageless source of inspiration for artists exploring the uncharted domains of human awareness and creativity.

Many people are unaware of the importance of spiritual and metaphysical issues in the development of modernist art. Indeed there was a reluctance of many artists to talk about this, for fear it would be misunderstood. Picasso is credited with saying “Something sacred, that’s it… We can’t say that… people would put a wrong interpretation on it. And yet it’s the nearest we can get to the truth.” (Lipsey) In that sense Minor White’s concern with spirituality was mostly notable because of ways he made an issue of it. […]

– Roy Money, Minor White and the Quest for Spirit

Image: Photograph by Minor White, Empty Head, 1962
Sourced from the public domain.

Hokusai says

Posted on November 11, 2015 by miriam louisa simons

Hokusai: Hawk on a Ceremonial Stand

Hokusai says Look carefully.
He says pay attention, notice.
He says keep looking, stay curious.
He says there is no end to seeing.

He says Look Forward to getting old.
He says keep changing,
you just get more who you really are.
He says get stuck, accept it, repeat yourself
as long as it’s interesting.

He says keep doing what you love.
He says keep praying.
He says every one of us is a child,

every one of us is ancient,
every one of us has a body.
He says every one of us is frightened.
He says every one of us has to find a way to live with fear.

He says everything is alive—
shells, buildings, people, fish, mountains, trees.
Wood is alive.
Water is alive.
Everything has its own life.
Everything lives inside us.
He says live with the world inside you.

He says it doesn’t matter if you draw, or write books.
It doesn’t matter if you saw wood, or catch fish.
It doesn’t matter if you sit at home
and stare at the ants on your verandah or the shadows of the trees
and grasses in your garden.

It matters that you care.
It matters that you feel.
It matters that you notice.
It matters that life lives through you.

Contentment is life living through you.
Joy is life living through you.
Satisfaction and strength
are life living through you.
Peace is life living through you.

He says don’t be afraid.
Don’t be afraid.
Look, feel, let life take you by the hand.
Let life live through you.

– Roger Keyes

The poet Roger Keyes is an American professor of East Asian studies. This poem is apparently his cross-media translation of the art of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) into poetry.

Sourced from a year of being here – daily mindfulness poetry by wordsmiths of the here & now.

Gratitude!

Image: Katsushika Hokusai, Hawk on a Ceremonial Stand, Ukiyo-e

Source: wikiart

From the bookshelf: Hokusai, by Gian Carlo Calza

the measure of a moment

Posted on September 26, 2014May 22, 2015 by miriam louisa simons

Artisans and artists whose work is an attempt to express the inexpressible will often speak about their practice as a settling into the moment, a relaxing in the now, or even as a dissolving into wild unknowingness – and creating from that far side. Years ago I came upon a way to explore the intimate and fleeting moment; I began painting the exhalation of my breath. I reckoned that the length of one exhalation – as laid down in one simple brushstroke – was a pretty good portrait of a moment in my life, and a measure of my essential ‘beingness’.

Miriam Louisa Simons - Breathscribe Series - Desert Breath

But when I read Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being, I had to rethink my moments. Turns out that in the Zen view of time one exhalation of my breath would amount to not one, but hundreds of moments. In a revealing note at the end of the book (Appendix A: Zen Moments) Ozeki fleshes out the Zen view of time. It’s mind-scrambling, like most things Zen:

The Zen nun Jiko Yasutani once told me in a dream that you can’t understand what it means to be alive on this earth until you understand the time being, and in order to understand the time being, she said, you have to understand what a moment is.

In my dream I asked her, What on earth is a moment?

A moment is a very small particle of time. It is so small that one day is made of 6,400,099,980 moments.

When I looked it up afterward, I discovered that this was the exact number cited by Zen Master Dōgen in his masterwork, the Shōbōgenzō (The treasury of the True Dharma Eye).

Numerals resist the eye, so let me spell it out in words: six billion, four hundred million, ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and eighty. That’s how many moments Zen Master Dōgen posited are in one day, and after she rattled off the number, old Jiko snapped her fingers. Her fingers were crazily bent and twisted with arthritis, so she wasn’t very good at snapping, but somehow she got her point across.

Please try it, she said. Did you snap? Because if you did, that snap equals sixty-five moments.

The granularity of the Zen view of time becomes clear if you do the math*, or you can just take Jiko’s word for it. She leaned forward, adjusting her black-framed glasses on her nose and peering through the thick murky lenses, and then she spoke once more.

If you start snapping your fingers now and continue snapping 98,463,077 times without stopping, the sun will rise and the sun will set, and the sky will grow dark and the night will deepen, and everyone will sleep while you are still snapping, until finally, sometime after daybreak, when you finish up your 98,463,077th snap, you will experience the truly intimate awareness of knowing exactly how you spent every single moment of a single day of your life.

She sat back on her heels and nodded. The thought experiment she proposed was certainly odd, but her point was simple. Everything in the universe is constantly changing, and nothing stays the same, and we must understand how quickly time flows by if we are to wake up and truly live our lives.

That’s what it means to be a time being, old Jiko told me, and then she snapped her crooked fingers again.

And just like that, you die.

Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

The Awakened Eye - Willy Tjungarrayi

Will I ever be able to look at the paintings of the Western Desert artists the same way again? If one fingersnap equals sixty-five moments, surely one dot would amount to something similar. So, how many moments are portrayed in a work like this one above, by Willy Tjungurrayi? Or the one below, by Lily Kelly Napangardi?

The Awakened Eye - Lily Kelly Napangardi

I know this much – one of my exhaled breathstrokes is equal to around seven fingersnaps. That means each complete painting portrays many days’ worth of moments. Was I present at every miracle moment? I doubt it.

But something in me suspects that those Aboriginal artists were, and are, and that they would agree 100% with old Jiko, and Zen Master Dōgen.

Today

I
do not
want to step so quickly
over a beautiful line on God’s palm
as I move through the earth’s
marketplace
today.

I do not want to touch any object in this world
without my eyes testifying to the truth
that everything is
my Beloved.

Something has happened
to my understanding of existence
that now makes my heart always full of wonder
and kindness.

I do not
want to step so quickly
over this sacred place on God’s body
that is right beneath your
own foot

as I
dance with
precious life
today.

– Hafiz

Translation by Daniel Ladinsky

See more at Poetry Chaikhana

* 1 fingersnap = 65 moments and 6,400,099,980 moments = one day, so 6,400,099,980 divided by 65 = 98,463,077 fingersnaps per day.

Zen Master Dōgen

the way of nen

I’ve lost track of which is which

Posted on December 26, 2013May 21, 2015 by miriam louisa simons

Nina Papiorek: Namibia Zebras iii

Zebras: July 22

When I look at this photograph of zebras, when I feel love for them, I become them: I enter their stripes, feel their taut flesh, their muscled bodies, the flanks, the legs, the soft nostrils.

I cannot hold myself apart from them long enough to experience it as love of other. When I love one of these zebras, I am reveling in my own delineated skin, my four points of contact with the earth, the tail of long hair soft at the backs of my behind legs.

Who made this animal? And why? Why on earth – why in a whole universe – such whimsy? What got into somebody’s head, to mark me thus?

When one zebra looks at another, it is not amazed at what it sees. Probably the looker little supposes that it looks much the stripy same as the other fellow. But even if it knew about its own appearance, this knowledge would not impress the zebra.

I can feel the other zebra’s head resting in the middle of my back, where its undermouth sinks into the curve of my spine. Its weight is deeply satisfying. And I can feel the weight of my own chin sunk heavily into the other zebra’s welcoming back, and holding the weight of my striped head (though I do not know that it is striped). I can smell the other, and the other can smell me. I’ve lost track of which is which.

Don’t try to figure it out. It isn’t important. Nor is it worth any effort at all to tell where zebra stops and human starts.

– Jan Frazier
When Fear Falls Away: The Story of a Sudden Awakening

[I have no way of knowing what picture Jan was looking at when she wrote this piece; the image here is by photographer Nina Papiorek]

as if it was a lover…

Posted on August 14, 2013May 21, 2015 by miriam louisa simons

Amanda Robins: Dyad 2

Amanda Robins: Dyad 2, 2009
pencil on Arches watercolor paper, 115 x 95 cm

I examine the object as if it was a lover, a book, a document. It is willing to offer everything to me, passively. I am moving closer to the object, as close as I can, and it covers me benignly. Warming me to the world of things.

I layer the pencil marks over one another in light strokes, building up the tones carefully. Light glints softly off the graphite surface. The paper colours and imprints like asphalt, a well-worn pavement with pockmarks and incisions. The paper stump forces the graphite into the craters and valleys of the paper – sliding over the surface – burnishing, embossing. I am entranced by this silvery surface – the powder creates a film, grey and silver clouds forming, the lines of pencil changing and perfecting them. Away from the amorphous, I push the image into my favoured safety net … [t]his is the boundary, the structure which allows me to feel held and absorbed, contained and subsumed.

– Amanda Robins

SECOND/SKINS Exhibition Catalogue
www.amandarobins.com.au

Amanda Robins at the artisans’ gallery

meditative process made visible

slow art