'Tis The Gift to be Simple

painting and the eternal forms

It was one of my favorite songs from childhood.

It was only later that I learned that it was a Shaker tune. The language and the cheery quiet of the song spoke of a place or way of being, humble and relaxed; a place where you belonged-not as center, but as a part, without diminishment.

Many years later, I had an experience that mirrored the suggestion of the song. I was at Logan’s pass, on the top of the continental divide in Glacier National Park. My friends and I were walking a long, narrow path on the side of the mountain, a mountain so high that it was unmarred by trees, leaving only the vastness of space all around us. I looked down, and saw my feet. Suddenly I was laughing-laughing at the smallness of my feet, but also at the pretense of being a human when the vastness around me was what I truly was. My laughter sailed out over the valley to the surprise of my friends. How could I explain to them the marvelous joke of it all? Here I was, with tiny feet playing at being a woman when in truth, I was a manifestation of the ineffable. It sounds quite grandiose, but the experience was really very gentle and humble. I was bowed by the awareness of the divine-the divine that we all are. The mystery, so big and beyond, exploded my tiny sense of self, and I vibrated with the cosmic humor of it all. What a great, great joke this is! Here we imagine that we are individual beings, trying to solve the seemingly huge and endless problems that make up our lives, when all along there is no problem! The joy that infused my being at that time has come and gone, but rests quietly at my core, untouched by the ups and downs of daily life.

What a funny dream we dream, and how silly to cling to it’s tininess.

There is something that I have noticed, over some several decades now. It’s that there are echos in my life that seem to have started in a small way, but as I go on in my journey, become louder and louder. It is the reverse of the echo one makes when one calls out into space; your voice bouncing against the cliffs around you, becoming fainter and fainter. Like the rings formed by a pebble in the water, echos gradually disperse, grow thin and impossibly wide until they vanish.

The echos that I am talking about are the opposite. They start with a tiny reverberation and grow until they are loud and persistent; undeniable truths anticipated or foreshadowed by moments that catch one’s attention. The song, ‘Tis the Gift to be Simple was one of these. The first soft sound is the song. The awareness the song seemed to hint at grew and swelled in my life until I had the moment on the mountainside.

Another of these echos was a childhood activity of mine. I used to spend a lot of time by a certain stream on my parents’ property in Vermont. I noticed that if I looked at the stream in one way, I could only see the bright, clear reflection of the sky. If I looked another way, I could see through the water to the fishes, rocks and the flickers darting water beetles. How can I see both at once? I wondered. Can I see both the sky reflected on the surface, and into the shallow depths of the stream simultaneously? I would try this way and that, squinting my eyes, seeing shadowy forms but trying to see both sky and water clearly.

It turns out that this exercise has actually been a lifelong passion. The loud form of this echo is the practice of seeing the divine in the individual, the eternal in the moment.

So I am brought to painting. On this flat, two dimensional surface, I want to see the eternal. In this tree, I want to see Tree, the archetype. With the distant view, I want to see spaciousness itself, not merely place, although it is only through place that space is made manifest. I stand, quivering before the tinted canvas wanting to make a mark that is beyond mark, the mark that embodies that which we truly are when we strip away the idiosyncratic.

While I cannot do it yet, and maybe I never will, there are many artists who have. When you think of a face by Rembrandt, does it not seem as if you are seeing the essence of human being? In the succession of Rembrandt’s self-portraits we see the slow evolution of a man; moving from thoughtful youth to deeply reflective senior-his life’s journey written on his face, peering at us from the ages, riddled with cares, and perhaps, some subtle astonishment.

There are many other artists, whose work I am sure you can bring to mind, who have painted essence, not moment, transcending space and time to depict stillness in the moving stream of life. What would it be to live the simultaneity of our moments with our truth?

Can you detect a quiet joy present behind all activities in your life? The joy behind the outrage and terror and wonder of life? I don’t always feel this joy, but when I do, I realize that it is constant and abiding. It’s me that’s not. It is as if you desire to go home; find home, and then discover that you have always been home. Like some spiritual Dorothy in a Wizard of Oz who learns she only needs to click her heels and she will find that she has never left home, after all.

Is our journey, then, a circle? Is it a circle wherein it seems we could take one step backwards and be there, at the source-and yet we have to go the whole loop and find ourselves back at the beginning?

Namaste,

Leslie