Tag Archives: brush art

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drawing the line

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I promised Carol at ZenDotStudio that I would draw lines this weekend.  So I did.

It was surprising how difficult drawing a line can be.  I mean, it’s not just about getting up the energy to do something that may have gone by the wayside over weeks or months or years.  It’s not just about facing the what if’s and the if only’s that tend to haunt things-let-go-for-long.  It’s not just about the anger, resentment, sadness, depletion, oh-I-should-have-done-this-sooner.  It’s not just about anything real except maybe that heart-pounding moment before the brush kisses the paper and the mind shuts off and the hand becomes an alien.

It’s just about drawing the line.

Drawing it as “Yes.”

Drawing it as “No.”

Drawing it as “Oh, how I want this to be different but it isn’t going to be.”

Drawing it as “I thought I knew how to do this but not any more so start again.”

Drawing and seeing I’m outside the lines.

Drawing and knowing I’m out of line, at the end of the line.

Drawing down the page, the moon.

Ink

as teacher, dharma, and old friend,

showing me how to let go.

A poem:

The End of the Line

Carefully try to remember what
it is that you are doing.  “How
do you do?  How do you like
what you do?”  are you going
to continue in the same wasteful
and thoughtless fashion?

Philip Whalen in What Book!?  Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop, edited by Gary Gach

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It has been a gruelling schedule over the last three days and I’ve discovered that I have yet to know how to be forgiving of myself when my limitations dictate the quality of my actions.  So when the gentleness of connections occurs, it heals the self-recrimination and soul-bludgeoning.

Monday evening, I had the privilege to re-connect with someone I admire deeply, whose courage and perseverance inspires me.  Once in a while, we connect with a soul so vast in its capacity to love and hold suffering that it is incomprehensible.  But there it was across the table from me and I was grateful.  We talked about reiki and various ways to connect with our suffering.   We touched on our fear that we feel so profoundly the need to be in service.  That night, I felt I had been purified to my core by this gift of bearing witness to my struggles.

Reading all your comments to the last post touched me.  There across from me on this screen are beings so capable of love and so willing to contain suffering just as it is, without drama or embellishment.  Just this moment, just this breath.  Thank you.  I am grateful that you are willing to enter this flame and connect with the work that transforms all of us.  Tonight, sitting in my favourite restaurant in this region, looking out over the shimmering bay as swans flew overhead, I wondered at the remarkable acts of chance that has brought us all together in this sangha.  We cannot do this work without each other because alone it is easy to fall into despair and a sense of futility when we see the vast regions that need to be cultivated.  What has been damaged, what has died, can seem to take up so much of the horizon and feed into so much distress.  But together, just bearing witness without desperate solutions, we can generate the strength to honor our pain for ourselves and our world.

You help me see with new eyes.  I am in awe of the vista you show me.  The colours and textures of how we grow into and past our pain are vibrant.  The illusion of separateness is revealed and the connections are clear even if tenuous.  It gives me the capacity to contain my failures and release my successes.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju