Epilogue

I tried hard to finish this project before going on vacation, but here I am writing the final post back in Vermont, where I started this story two years ago. I'm sitting at the community table in Vergennes Laundry, the French bakery located in the former laundromat where we came whenever the washer broke or the pipes froze thirty years ago. As I type, surrounded by laptops, croissants, and caneles, ghosts wearing parkas struggle with laundry baskets over snow banks while angels with espresso dance overhead. To imagine is to move an image. My thirteen year old self who ached to run away from everything broken could never have known that right in this very place, Paris would come to me.

Full circle, back where I started. Not full circle exactly, but a spiraling upward, like a conch shell, the cochlea of the inner ear, or a maple creemee. The spiraling inward is also spiraling outward, the sacred is right there in the mundane, the far away is right in front of you.

My blog and I will be taking a summer break, and when we return I will be returning to drawing because, as Brenda Euland wrote, "If you skip for a day or two, it is hard to get started again. In a queer way you are afraid of it." I've become a little afraid of it and I want to move through that. Which leads me full circle to Ganesha, the Remover of Obstacles, the first drawing, the first post, when I started this blog for that very purpose four years ago.

I recently learned that Ganesha is also the God of Writers. He wrote the ancient Indian epic the Mahabarata, the most voluminous book the world has ever known. It contains the Bhagavad-Gita, the Song of God, the story of the spiritual practice of yoga. Dictated by the sage Vyasa, Ganesha made a promise to write the Mahabarata until it was done. When his pen broke, he broke off his own tusk and dipped it into ink in order to hold to his promise to keep writing. For that his broken tusk represents self-sacrifice. But it also represents openness, just as when a window breaks it becomes open to the whole world.

Arrival

When I arrived at my final destination in Los Angeles my cell phone died. The cord would no longer attach and after taking a few last battery breaths, she stopped accepting life. She had burned brightly, the Painter. She was better known for making calls and for taking calls, she had no name but her images remain. Forever, for everyone, from sea to shining sea...

The sun sets over palm trees and the Pacific in Long Beach, California after the first day of my internship and the last post of this story. When I was young and living in cold and snowy Vermont, it was hard for me to believe that the California beaches I saw on TV were real. I couldn't perceive it. But even though those beaches were beyond the boundaries of my experience, they had simply been there all along. For so long I thought imagination meant making up something that is not real. Through this road trip and this blog, I've discovered that imagination means tuning into something so it can become real. 

To imagine is to move an image.

The mind has no size or shape, just awareness. Enlightenment occurs when there are no longer any obstacles to our awareness or spiritual vision. Awareness does not penetrate or expand, it simply opens to what has always been present.   -His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama

Hero's Journey

Shelves filled with glass jars filled with pigments. A reflection of me reflects on her studio, a reflection of an overhead light reflects on her heart. Both Beatrice Wood and Robert Johnson lived in Ojai for a time and were students of Krishnamurti. I wonder if they knew each other? They both led long and amazing lives filled with curiosity, creativity, being broken and becoming whole, and following slender threads to a whole new way of understanding.

I am still in awe of how we grow psychologically. At first we admire a hero, never realizing that he or she only represents what needs to be realized in ourselves. Then, one or five years later, if we are reasonably intelligent about working with our projections, we wake up to find that we have become someone very much like that hero. We affix our own possibilities by projecting them onto someone else, and then we gradually assimilate them. A fourteen-year-old sees his future in a sixteen-year-old and in two years those admired qualities have been assimilated. A sixteen year old youth admires the qualities of a twenty-year old, and if things go well she incorporates those qualities into her own personality by the time she is twenty.


This process continues throughout our lives. Our projections of the hero onto others always represents where we are headed. The process generally slows down as we get older and our personality becomes a bit more formed, but the basic mechanism is always at work. Modern people, as I have said, can no longer house their souls in another person or thing; we must learn to house them ourselves and find the highest value within.


-Robert Johnson

Akhilanda

The Throne of Beato was created by a friend to celebrate Beatrice Wood's 102nd birthday. I spent a long time sitting on that throne, gazing at Ojai Mountain. Beatrice said she loved that mountain because it was the most stable thing in her life, it was there when she went to bed and still there when she woke up in the morning. The shimmering shards and fragments that make up the Throne of Beato bring to mind Akhilanda, the Hindu goddess of Never Not Broken. The following, from JC Peters article about Akhilanda, sums up the essence of The Always Broken Goddess.


Akhilanda derives her power from being broken: in flux, pulling herself apart, living in different, constant selves at the same time, from never becoming a whole that has limitations.


Akhilanda's lesson: even that new whole, that new colorful, amazing groove we create is an illusion. It means nothing unless we can keep on breaking apart and putting ourselves together again as many times as we need to. We are already "Never Not Broken." We were never a consistent limited whole. In our brokenness, we are unlimited. And that means we are amazing.


Thousands of shimmering shards, a hundred years, one mountain, and me.

Art Books

Beatrice Wood said that in her last years, in her 100's, sometimes she would get so tired she thought she would never get up again, she just couldn't get her bones to move. Then she would remember how she always meant to make that one figure in blue or that other one in red, and the ideas would pull her body up off the couch and back into the studio.  
  
"I have only one extravagance in my life. I wish it were a gigolo but it's not. It's art books."  -Beatrice Wood

Center for the Arts

Yesterday's post shows Beatrice Wood with Marcel DuChamp. They dated when they were young and remained life long friends. Young and struggling artists when they met, many years later she bought her house with the sale of one of his drawings. That house became her home and studio and is now the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts, a museum of her life and work. Her studio, seen here, was kept perfectly preserved. Beatrice said if there was one secret to her success as an artist, it's that she was well organized. 

It reminds me of how Gabrielle Roth says, "It takes discipline to be a free spirit." For the spirit to move freely you need to give it the structure, space, and attention to do so. In occupational therapy we say "Proximal stability leads to distal mobility." For the fingers to move freely the shoulder needs to be stable in its socket. Many paths leading to the same place.

Beatrice Wood

I don't know when I first heard about Beatrice Wood, but I remember that when I did hear of her I felt like I already knew her. We have similar last names, and my grandmother's name was Beatrice. I love her drawings and the ceramics she is famous for, but more than anything I love the way she lived her life. She lived to be 105 years old, and said her last 25 years were her most productive as an artist. She wrote this in the opening of her autobiography, titled "I Shock Myself."
 

For a long time I hesitated writing about my life. For the mind is tricky, colors with infinite subtlety the ramifications of any act. In the early part of my life, it is as if I made nothing but mistakes. I am convinced we would not be on this earth, if we did not make mistakes; only through them do we learn. But through the bad I was always battling for the light. "No" may be the most important word in the English language. Now, near the end of my days, it falls glibly from my tongue. Much protected in childhood, I wanted to know what the world was like, willing to pay any price to understand humanity. I paid the price.