On Death and Yoga

( and love and life)

one of mine. 

         

Death.

A most certain future for me, and Susi, and Jim and everyone else, everything else. Death, the passing of the Summer, dead leaves on the ground. Bugs we squish under our feet without, a further thought. Stars exploding somewhere far away. Our Sun burning out. Our spouses passing on and leaving us heart broken. Brake ups. We can bring life forth and we can take it away. It is a dance we are a part of.

Death is inseparable from life. Something ends, another something begins. 

I painted her while to help me deal with my grief.
She was the best
company. (I never finished the painting)

                                              

When I was little, I thought about death all the time. Through life circumstances, I learned to pacify myself with the certainty of it. I accepted that death would come, one way or another, and if my parents were to die, I would be ok. If I were to die I would be ok. Not by imagining I would be in heaven, or some other place. Just somewhere I belonged. I had an 'inner sense', that none of this 'theatre' mattered anyway, and I am a part of something bigger than my mind could grasp. I was around eight years old then, and this explanation brought me relief.

I have looked closer at a death in my self, while studying yoga, in my twenties. 

My yoga teacher Yogi Vishveketu, a founder of Akhanda Yoga, thought me the most important in the practice was observing my own breath. Through this, I became an observer of death in my own body. And thus, I began observing Life. How I lived, how I expressed my life. Most of the time my inhaling was gasping for air. Then I felt anxious to relax when I exhaled. I didn't know why I felt so many emotions only just by breathing. Sometimes I was angry, sometimes sad, fearful. But never at peace with the process. Always trying to control the breath. Control my life. I felt so very far away from that eight year old girl, who seamed so 'clued in' and together.

 From a great yoga teacher Iyengar, I learned, that every inhale is allowing life in, and every exhale is letting it go. The space in between is given to observe, absorb, to rest.  In his book "Light on life", he writes, that if we center our mind on the breath, we gain awareness. What is awareness? I believe awareness is light. Remember being scared of the dark as a child? It was not knowing what lurks in the darkness. In that, the mind created monsters, some of them could have been real, but how do we know, if they are there, if the light is turned off?  Did you ever turn on the light, and fall asleep peacefully?  ''Shine some light on the situation'', and you can face the monsters, because you can see them better. 

Till death do us apart...

Death is parting and goodbyes. It is transition into the unknown.

We feel, and it hurts, and it is excruciatingly beautiful. 

                  

A dead starling that flew into my studio and broke its neck flying into a closed window. I cried. I took photographs while I did. The bird remains beautiful.

A butterfly. Also dead

          

Death, being companion of our life, is a witness of our Love. It is the love, or absence of it, that carves itself in sculptures of our lives. 

Here are two beautiful poems by Pablo Neruda. Someone, somethig dies, and through a filter of the writers experience a poem is born. 

Enjoy.

A Dog Has Died 

Sam, my four legged friend, and me.

  

  By  Pablo Neruda

My dog has died.

I buried him in the garden

next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I'll join him right there,

but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,

his bad manners and his cold nose,

and I, the materialist, who never believed

in any promised heaven in the sky

for any human being,

I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.

Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom

where my dog waits for my arrival

waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,

of having lost a companion

who was never servile.

His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine

withholding its authority,

was the friendship of a star, aloof,

with no more intimacy than was called for,

with no exaggerations:

he never climbed all over my clothes

filling me full of his hair or his mange,

he never rubbed up against my knee

like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,

paying me the attention I need,

the attention required

to make a vain person like me understand

that, being a dog, he was wasting time,

but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,

he'd keep on gazing at me

with a look that reserved for me alone

all his sweet and shaggy life,

always near me, never troubling me,

and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tail

as we walked together on the shores of the sea

in the lonely winter of Isla Negra

where the wintering birds filled the sky

and my hairy dog was jumping about

full of the voltage of the sea's movement:

my wandering dog, sniffing away

with his golden tail held high,

face to face with the ocean's spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,

as only dogs know how to be happy

with only the autonomy

of their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,

and we don't now and never did lie to each other.

So now he's gone and I buried him,

and that's all there is to it.

When I die I want your hands on my eyes.

By Pablo Neruda

When I die, I want your hands on my eyes:
I want the light and the wheat of your beloved hands
to pass their freshness over me once more:
I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.

I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.
I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you
to sniff the sea's aroma that we loved together,
to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.

I want what I love to continue to live,
and you whom I love and sang above everything else
to continue to flourish, full-flowered:

so that you can reach everything my love directs you to,
so that my shadow can travel along in your hair,
so that everything can learn the reason for my song.

''to the pure all things are pure''
                                              Jeanette Winterson

'Masks'   acrylic, pastel on paper

I have recently gone through a faze of fascination with Jeanette Winterson's writing. I found many treasures in her books. The quote above comes from the novel ''Oranges are not the only fruit''. It describes, to me a childlike state of expansion, an awe. It made me think of all those times I chose heart over reason, a gut feeling and got myself into trouble. 'Trouble' is a relative term though. And so, my 'troubles' were a necessary intakes of air. Without them life would have been 'safely' stagnant. 

In innocence, you might poke a bug with a stick, climb a tree, put your finger in a fire, tell someone you love them... being alive feels good,  you are curious.

One of the definitions of innocence is: lack of experience with the world and with the bad things that happen in life; purity
Purity is never preconceived.  
We have an instinct to protect what is innocent. Of course, there are some that take advantage of innocence, mistaking it for weakness. While innocence is simple it makes one vulnerable. While cultivating creativity takes persistence and courage, creativity itself is an invitation to play. It is an exercise in reconnecting with what is pure inside you, with whatever have charmed your attention..  
How does that tie up with the pictures here? 
These paintings all came through without a thought. They were not planned, premeditated. I have no commentary, mostly, because it is too personal. I love them, they were an exercise in feeling.  Feeling is not all that rosy sometimes. As humans, we do all sorts of things to avoid feeling, even though our bodies are designed to do just that. Feeling can be spectrum of emotion, from excruciating sadness to ecstatic joy. 
Showing someone your painting is showing them a part of yourself.
Handle with care. 

''Psychedelic moth''   mixed media on paper

Creativity is a playground. A place of infinite secret gardens. How often do we forget to visit ours, or discover a new one?
The unfamiliar can be uncomfortable. But empowering. 
It means having a go at being honest, simple, trusting and seeing what form the life itself wants to take, through you.  

''Gold 'n blue''   mixed media on paper

50 shades of grey of Irish landscape

Irish weather.

 It is impossible to get away from the Irish weather. Though, these days, people do spend most rainy days inside. No need for them to forge or grow anything. No horse or a donkey to feed. You catch my drift. We live in a culture of technology, that 30 years ago was unimaginable. A person had no time, or need to imagine it. They were too busy planting their dinners for the winter. Remember the times of no mobile phones? I am 33 and I remember having no phone at all. Not even a land line. 20 years ago, the  place I work in, sold condoms from under the counter, because it was illegal to use them! How did I move on from the weather to condoms? My monologue rolled down the hill with a little push of the wind.
 The weather here is not dull.  And neither is the land it expresses itself upon. Together they hold focus, they change like woman's mood. You can go outside in a sunshine and come home soaking wet. I talk about the weather with most people I meet. I used to try to avoid it, but the conversation always found me anyway. ''Ah, it's a lovely day today, isn't it?'' Or ''horrible out there, ey?''  The weather can change here 5 times per day.  The chances are, the person you are talking to is as delighted, or fed up, as you. ''50 shades of grey'' would have been a perfect title to describe the Irish weather, but it has been taken. Grey is not a dull colour, we find out from the book. Neither are the shades of Irish landscape. When Sun illuminates this place, it is as if a vale is lifted from a young girls' face, revealing beauty rough and untamed. Beauty hard to miss and harder to describe. There is poetry and music in this landscape impossible to capture, but in song, a painting or a poem. And the same goes for the people here.

I am a Polish bird, and have lived in Ireland for 14 years now. It is enchanting and majestic and other big words that fill my head, but are too serious. I go around with a bit of paper and a brush, and the pictures here are some evidence of it. 

Be patient with me, because I would like to share a piece of literature with you that is compelling. It is written by James Stephens in 1914, or earlier perhaps, and it is called ''The Demi-Gods''. It is absolutely beautifully written. The guy had a great insight into human ways and a really wholesome way of bringing it forth. He speaks about life of a tinker and his daughter and their donkey, as they make their way around the country, in all sorts of weather ;-) . Every native should read this book. It is funny, wise, and makes me wish I was Irish and share in the richness of this country's heritage ...But, I am a 'blow in', and know very little of such things. Be the judge of it your-selves then.   

''He stood outside

of every social relation, and within an organised humanity he might almost have been reckoned as a different species. He was very mobile, but all his freedom lay in one direction, and outside of that pasturage he could never go. For the average man there are two dimensions of space wherein he moves with a certain limited freedom; it is for him a horizontal and a perpendicular world; he goes up the social scale and down it, and in both these atmospheres there is a level wherein he can exercise himself to and fro, his journeys being strictly limited by his business and his family.  Between the place where he works and the place where he lives lies all the freedom he can hope for; within that range he must seek such adventures as he craves, and the soul expansion to which he can attain is upwards towards another social life if he be ambitious, or downward to the underworlds if he is bored.

For Mac Cann there were no upward and no downward movements, he had plumbed to the very rocks of life, but his horizontal movements were bound only by the oceans around his country, and in this gigantic underworld he moved with almost absolute freedom, and a knowledge which might properly be termed scientific.''

''The Demi-Gods by James Stephens 

To wrap it up, some beautiful photos of people, who travelled the roads,  taken from a book by Alen Macweeney. Worth exploring. 

Memories in color

                                            

When I was 6, we moved into old traditional polish cottage. It must have been built around 1940 or 50. By traditional I mean one room plus kitchen, big timber log house with two tiny windows. Old tiled furnace in one corner of the room. There was a shed where the animals used to live, attached to the house. It became a storage space for 'everything else' and later became my dark room. No, it was not a place of dark magic. Just alchemy. The only place in the house I had some privacy, and also my photography studio. And by that I mean a bit of space amongst other clutter, a bit of a clear counter to put the trays on and a line to hang the photos from, to dry them. There was no heating there. I loved it. I loved that, somehow I made the best out of this crazy, hostile space. This is a good memory. I feel proud of good memories. Us, people, have this ability to survive unimaginable situations. And we can change the way we think about them. In time. 

No one lived in this house for who knows how long, before we moved in, and so, the post communistic fingers of modernisation did not touch it. While people around began enjoying comforts of bathrooms, we still had an outhouse. Piles of hay were waiting for many years in the attic for some cow to eat it, and is probably still sitting there for all I know.

Above is my depiction of our bathroom, when I was growing up and until I was 20 years old. It was a corner in a kitchen, with a bucket, chair, a basin. A rustic take on a concept of a wash room. Through coloured glass of memory, the child I was then, is seeing with a different eye. These were not ordinary objects, like no object is ordinary when it becomes a witness. If the stones could talk, we would hear their stories of footsteps, storms, wet bodies moulding to their shape. The history of the human kind and beyond, told in wind, sound of waves, blemishes burned into the surface, all recorded in a form of a stone.

These are my personal black boxes. The story they tell is neither romantic nor poetic. The only wind I can think of being 'recorded' in my black boxes is that of my father 'passing wind'. Excuse my crudeness. What would this bucket say? Would it tell stories of cold arses in the winter? Would it remind me of smelly contents of its life? Yes, it is what you think.. When you are little and it's -17C outside, in the middle of the night, the bucket comes in handy... 

The basin...It was brown enamel, my first boyfriend washed my hair in it, pouring water from a jug down my neck, head, and long hair. The sensual basin. The practical basin. Where I mastered the art of body washing economy. My first experience of Yoga was this basin, because I learned to fold myself in half, just to fit into it. The silent basin, that kept my parents' secrets.

Light was rare and timid on the wall behind the stand. I still remember the texture of the wall. Old wall, it seamed hundreds of years old to me then. In this small, kept together by intention only cottage, the feeling was of something crumbling away. 

 Nature of change is reliable. My thoughts, memories, emotions flow and alter with time. Amazing thing about paintings, you will never look at one with the same eyes. I gave you a glimpse of my story of these. You will have your own. It is a very nice thought.  

Enjoy your day:-)

   

It feels like I fell into a time warp over the last few months. Nature or the global changes in the weather, blessed Ireland with the warmest summer in many years. I stayed in West Cork, where I live, with its abundance in beauty and coast line of Mediterranean quality. When the weather is good, there is really no better place. Work didn't feel like work and with long, warm evenings beach was the place to be every day.

  Not much painting happened. 

  A lot of personal growth and changes. Now pulsating within to be put to form, though I don't know what form yet. The trees you see below were a faze I went through. The images were strong in my head. I didn't know how to execute them when I was getting started, but I allowed the inner image to guide my hand rather than let my head control it. Most of my paintings are an exercise in patience with myself, letting go of judgement about the outcome and letting go of control. That is probably why I come back to painting over again. It offers a reflection of the state I'm in. Not a pretty sight sometimes. But it also offers a chance to challenge my self limiting beliefs. I struggle with making time to do something that is ultimately doing me good. Like exercise I suppose. Saying that, I always feel great after, mentally mostly, if I haven't done it for a while. 

  Saying all that, when we make room for our creativity, in what ever form, it is usually fun. And fun and play is a vital part of our lives, though we forget about it sometimes. I do anyway. I hope you guys don't. 

  But this is my journey. 

  For now, I leave you with the end result of what I started in April. The photos of the progress are in the first post on this blog.

Please feel free to leave a note. I would love to hear about your creative process, if you feel like sharing it. 

It takes time

It takes around 21 days to establish new neural connections in the brain. Braking a habit, learning something new takes patience, before it becomes familiar. The first few weeks are the hardest ones. I'm reminding myself this, as I am sitting down to write these words.
Making room for creativity, or anything else that I want to invest my time in, takes encouragement and vigilance.  My mind always questions, I try to find excuses, there is hundred other things that need to be done before I sit myself down, to do the one thing that will be more beneficial to me right now, than washing those pile of dirty dishes...  They will still be there in an hour.
Painting is my form of nourishment. It takes a battle sometimes, to give myself what I need. Perhaps you can relate to that.
It is important to invest in passion, it feeds the vitality.

As I am patiently learning to share my progress with you , I am going to give you a glimpse of what I am working on now.
Previously I promised to give a photo account of the two paintings from the last post. I am sorry, I cannot find the photos. I do, however have these ones. The technique is the same. The work is in progress and I will keep you posted.
I hope you will enjoy it. If you have any questions about it, let me know and I will happily try to explain. :-)

It all started from a blob of ink and some salt. A lot of water and letting go of trying to control the outcome...

...then I stared for a while and began to see a landscape...

                                     

...and this is where I am with it today.

This is the twin brother... 

...and this happened all in one go. Plenty of water, ink and general unplanned messing.

Thank you for stopping by. Please feel free to comment and suggest. Perhaps it will be a beginning of your own adventure. :-)

one step forward

This is a new adventure for me.
 New adventures tend to arrive on the doorstep unexpectedly, asking if you want to come and join in. If you say yes, there is no way of telling where you will end up. There is excitement, a little fear perhaps and all sorts of other things that happen, when one steps outside the comfort zone.
So, I am not sure where this journey will lead. I know it is essentially about art, its place in my life, the way it enriches and speaks volumes when words fail. It is about the freedom of expression. Trying new things, learning new things...
There is an icon on the right side of my screen, saying '' Share''. And I suppose, that is what I am deciding to do - share something I do, that I know is good for me and I am passionate about it.
As time goes along, I know this ''sharing'' will take shape.



I am starting with my two, most recent paintings.
'Purple forest' is a place I used to go walking in. I used inks and liquid watercolor. 16 x 20 inches
It took around 10 hours to paint.
I have photos of the progress, if anyone is curious about the technique.

This one is called 'Blue forest' and it is the same technique as above. Also 16 x 20 inches

I invite you to share your ideas and comments. Perhaps something here will encourage or trigger your own, unique spark :-)