Creative Window

I started this collage about a month ago, and finished it before my “window sitting” practice began in early August. Interestingly it reveals another window of seeing, expressing what matters to me most – the whispers of the Heart that call to me - and that evidently wanted to be expressed creatively – in this case through art collage.

After setting the initial pieces of the collage out on plain poster board paper, I decided to dig out a piece of my “Fun Qi Art”™ that I did ages ago with Cray-Pas oil sticks and use that as background. I collected pieces of quotes and pictures from my “collage files” that spoke to me. Particularly there were 3 quotes that resonated. The first one, in the center with ripples around it, is an Emerson quote that became the central theme. It says:

“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.”

The second quote, in the right upper figure of a meditator, is from Franz Kafka and says:

“Just become quiet, still, and solitary, and the world will offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

And the third – the little blurb under the little oval picture of sail boats on the ocean at the bottom - is from someone named Andre Gide that says:

“One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”

In the finished collage there are themes of imagination, wonder, opening to life, movement, opening and listening to the Heart (and the stars :). There is a strong theme of deepening, and sitting in inner Stillness where Mukti – Freedom – lives – where the “truth” reveals itself – the “truth” about mySelf, the world, and Existence… There is a stargazer, a meditator, and maybe even an adventurer, although I don’t see myself that way. I have a hard time letting go of the shore :) Yet, there it is, the invitation to let go of the shore and discover new lands, new ways of being and seeing… There’s a big ocean curl wave with the words “primordial experience” in the center – symbolizing the pull of the Primordial Womb of Life – the deep Stillness of the inner Heart of Being.

There’s a woman sitting at the edge of the ocean, as viewed through a window (!), with the words: “Days that pass simply and quietly…” Ah yes… another whisper of my Heart – to let go of the complexity that I also create and come, sit and be joyfully still - just BE. And then there’s little picture of a small cabin in the woods, surrounded by water, pines and mountains with a fluid aurora borealis overhead. It found its way into the piece as another whisper calling to me – a call to living simply in Nature.

Underneath all of that are the squiggles of color that in some places appear entangled. At first they spoke to me of chaos, maybe an inner chaos, or a level of chaos underneath that keeps me entangled – as well as the emergence of creativity through chaos, and the presence of Stillness in chaos. Sometimes I also see these colorful, unending, interconnected lines underneath it all representing the thread of Beginnings and Endings that run through life, as well as the unbroken thread of the fluid Rhythm of Beingness that is the ground of all existence.

There are so many ways to look – to see through this creative window that offers a glimpse of what calls to my heart every night through “window sitting”: Imagine, Listen, Deepen, Let Go, Open, Stillness…. Freedom…

~*~