The Stillness of Artist's Block
how to listen during the dry times
It is rare for me to not have an idea knocking at the door from the inside-some image that asks to be fleshed out, or a feeling that longs to be put into word, but it does happen. It is happening now, and has been my state for several days. This morning, with the time to post my newsletter approaching, I turn toward this quiet to listen.
What is the shape that my lack of ideas seems to take? Why this quiet? I sense a subtle revulsion, a desire to avoid. I want to stay home, in my “compound”-a place made lovely by my garden and even, seemingly, more private by the moisture that has condensed on my windows from the night’s rain. The world has been too loud lately, perhaps even all my life, with sounds from humans and creatures that rip into my unconscious mind asking for a voice. I want no voice, no sound.
It is as if I am craving silence. Inner and outer silence that can make room for some new birth, but not too soon, because, like a frail nestling I need to strengthen my wings. What if there is no more strength? In fact I am sure, there is no more, no more in me. If I am to find strength now it will be from emptying out what remains-
This month I turn 65. I am pleased in some odd way, that I have reached this number and that the bulk of my life is behind me. It is not behind me in a nostalgic way; it is behind me like a huge sack of jewels that I can mine and review and discover again under previously unknown layers that I peel back to reveal, in the end, just light. What an amazing thing it is to be a human being! How sad and poignant, how rich and ebullient. Thinking back now it has been like riding the ocean waves; a sea of experience, of depth sounding, of longing and landing again and again.
The funny thing about time is that it really isn’t linear at all. If you are true to your experience, like any five year old you know that some hours are much longer than others. More than that, the moment of the present is a strange constant; an ever changing constant with the narrative voice of awareness seeming to guide even as the waters under your feet shift the surface upon which you stand. Or at least that is how it has been for me.
Perhaps rather than say that the voice of awareness guides, it is better to say it shines light. Noticing, the hallmark of the mendicant’s journey, is the constant. The light shines, never offering an opinion on the good or bad of what it illuminates. It simply, dispassionately brings into view the psychic and physical surroundings of the soul. Detachment is a mistake. Non attachment is the birth of the seeing eye; it emerges simultaneously with deepening perception. This doesn’t mean you no longer love. On the contrary, your love is released from all boundaries and spreads its spaciousness across the vast plains of being in wonderment and awe.
Perhaps these musings are only clear to me, or perhaps they trigger in you some thread you would like to follow in your own reflections. The stillness I feel now seems to ask me to wait. Waiting is not passive, it is deeply attentive. I don’t allow peripheral concerns to dilute my waiting. Instead I try to further the clearing so that I can let what comes arrive. If nothing comes, I will still be at peace because spaciousness itself is full.
Now the rain begins again and sounds loudly on my roof. There is no separation from sound; it penetrates the mind like air. I am often amazed by the musician’s art; an art form that invites time and silence to dance with sound and emotion. The music I like best eschews word, and communicates directly. In its dance with time the mind holds the relation between the notes in the same way that the eye completes a circle only partly drawn. Of all the art forms music comes closest to illustrating nonlinear time. The mind perceives the theme and carries it through the transitions of the music, blending now and movement.
Watching a stream can do the same thing. Unless you have one of those cameras that can slow to catch the blur of motion, a picture of a stream is still. But the stream is always moving. You can stand back and see the stillness of the movement. With time, when you peer carefully enough, you can see the essence in the actual; the beginner in the master, the oak tree in the acorn, the man in the child. As the years have gone on for me, this form of time; the essence, has become more and more prominent. Youth and age are simultaneous; change and stillness the same. It is hard to communicate this truth, and yet this is the truth I perceive as I wait for the muse to visit me again. I wait for myself to show me myself again.
