How many times have we changed our viewpoint or come to like what before we disliked? We all have done this, but for many of us, it’s not easy. A feeling of like or dislike can seem so set and permanent. More part of a thing perceived and not an artifact of our own mind.
Yesterday, my wife and I needed to put the news aside and decided to look at woodblock prints by a contemporary Japanese artist named Shufu Miyamoto. We both found many of his prints distinctly beautiful, but one stood out in a peculiar way. It was called A Spring Dance. I noticed it before she did and liked it⎼ then I didn’t. Something seemed off to me.
It depicted a field being planted, with yellow flowers both in the foreground and towards the back, with a forested mountain behind the field and a pink-orange sky. And in the very middle, a magnificent tree, maybe a cherry tree, covered in white blossoms, with many of the blossoms blown about in an invisible wind. These features were what attracted me to the artwork.
But the field under the tree was plowed into rows only faintly outlined, in a dull brown or grey, and the farmer or gardener planting the field was so indistinct as to barely make his, her, or their presence known. They almost faded into the field. I thought it a mistake by the artist.
Then my wife joined me and immediately said she loved the piece. Loved not only the tree, which stood out for her, but the contrast between the bright flowers and the soil. And she admired the way the gardener faded into the field.
So, I looked again. I realized I generally like the quality of openness in a work of art. I like being taken inside the scene. With this work, the haziness of the field, the indistinctness, mystery, or moodiness at first made it hard to grasp what I was seeing. Or it asked something of me that I wasn’t yet ready to give.
What is indistinguishable can gnaw at us. Like a question. Questions can be hypnotic. Some questions can be so big we wrap our lives around them. “What drives my life? How can I feel the depths and joys of life more consistently? How can I stay informed yet clear-headed and sane? Can we create a less violent and more caring, just society? How do we face death?”
I remember taking a course in Ericksonian hypnosis and the teacher asked a question, then let us sit there and realize how captivated we were by what he had said. When I was teaching, I suggested to students that if they started an essay or a story with a good question, the reader would be hooked and continue reading until an answer was uncovered. Or if I started a class session with an engaging and open-ended question, the session itself would become an adventure, a communal treasure hunt for an answer.
When I meditate, I often bring to attention each stage of the breathing process. The beginning, middle, and end of the inhale. A pause. Then the stages of the exhalation.
I notice I sometimes miss things. As I try to “catch” the beginning, I lose it. I can’t pin it down. By trying to catch “it,” the natural breath is turned into an abstraction instead of a feeling and a process. It can be so difficult to simply look without interfering or be aware without stimulating a desire to hold on to or push away what we perceive. It can be so difficult to let our bodily-being simply live its own rhythm.
But then this interference itself is noticed, maybe labeled, and let go. The point of focus shifts to the speeding up or slowing down of the breath, or shoulders rising and then dropping, relaxing. Simply noticing becomes effortlessly calming.
The interference can be so subtle. We put our idea of who we are or who is looking in place of fully seeing what’s there. Why? Perceptions are so fleeting, while ideas can persist and be constantly renewed. Maybe we create a seer out of a moment of seeing to make it last longer, or make us seem to live longer?
Or maybe it’s just a habit we’ve learned. We, of course, need a strong self of self. We can’t even take a step without knowing where or how big “we” are. As children, we need to figure out what being a body means. Where do we begin or end? Or do we begin and end? We seek definitions. When babies bite their toes maybe they’re trying to determine if they’re attached to their feet.
But then we make a mistake. We think our toes are “ours,” whomever that owner, that “our” is. We think “our” skin marks the boundary of whomever our toes belong to. We don’t see that this skin not only contains us but expands us. It is one way we touch the ground, the earth, and everything and everyone on it. We also have 5 other ways of making contact: smell, taste, sight, hearing, and emotionally and intellectually feeling, thinking about and contacting it all.
Sometimes, that last “way,” mind, imagines a disconnection, a wall between us and everything when there is none. Sometimes, it asks a question that focuses our attention so deeply or broadly it breaks all walls.
So, this artwork⎼ I began to see it in a new way. The darkness, haziness, was not a fault. Not a mistake. But a door, a point of contact, a question meant to gnaw at us. It did not set us at a distance but brought us right to the earth we stood on. What was off was my limited interpretation of what was being seen and what was seeing.
As the gardener faded into the soil, “my” self faded into a perception of the painting; faded into each breath taken, so what was “me” became simply an act of conscious perception with nothing extra added on. The haziness became a gift that brought me, with the gardener, to the soil. Suddenly, A Spring Dance was beautiful.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Shutterstock