When Our Borders Surge Outwards to Everything

Back in 1966, when I was 18, I flew to Europe for almost four months of hitch-hiking the continent. I landed in London, circled up to Stockholm. Then flew to Rome, spent a month in Italy. Then to Nice, Barcelona, north to Berlin, and finally Paris, where I flew back to the U. S. I stayed in hostels, slept sometimes on a beach, once in a doorway, a few nights in a guest house owned by someone who gave me a ride.

 

But after the last three years of the pandemic, or six years of threats to our lives, rights, and humanity, such a trip seems like an impossibility, more like a dream or a yearning than an actual memory of a time in my life. How many of us today have the freedom or might risk such a trip? The actual journey changed my life in so many ways, big and small. It revealed depths of history and possibilities of life I hadn’t known, depths in myself, an ability to love, an audacity and courage I hadn’t known before.

 

In the Hague, a woman I had met invited me to see an art exhibit in a gallery where she worked. The paintings were tiny. I don’t remember the exact size but maybe an inch or two square, and of incredible precision and beauty. We needed a magnifying glass to study the depth of detail. I loved it. This was one result of the trip, a love of art. I had expected to be awed by the art of Florence, Rome, and Paris, and was certainly not disappointed in what I saw. But the Hague was an unexpected gift.

 

Ever since then, if I happened to hear about any exhibits like it, I rushed to see them. This led me to discover Japanese netsuke, the 1 – 2 inch carved toggles used to fasten a pocket container to the sash of a kimono. They were made mostly of wood, ivory, or bone. Such art showed how a thing used daily for mundane tasks can be crafted with care and beauty.

 

Many of the etchings of Japanese artists like Norikane Hiroto and Tanaka Ryohei are small, approximately 3 by 4 inches, although they also created larger works. Their art brings us to beautiful rural Japanese landscapes with human dwellings, but no humans. A deep quiet fills everything. Many pieces by both artists are in black and white, while others include color.

 

Norikane doesn’t try to copy nature but lets the power of a place speak. Often in his art, one element stands out over the rest. In one famous piece a snow-capped Mt. Fuji stands powerfully above a village, stream, and bridge.

 

Tanaka’s etchings are so precise and clear, that a sense of great harmony fills the scene. Each detail, each place, awakens us to see how all details and all places fit together. His art reminds me of the line by English poet William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand…”

 

We don’t always know how much attention to give to details. We can easily overdo it, get hooked by one detail and miss the whole ⎼ lose the forest in the individual trees, for example. Or we do the opposite, focus on generalities, and miss out on how each act, in each instance, the details are what pulls the whole together. How the way we choose what to wear in the morning, for example, or brush our teeth, salt, and pepper our food, or take a breath influences our day. We can get lost in what we expect, or think is true, and miss what is staring us in the face….

 

*To read the whole piece, please go to The Good Men Project.

Visual Art as the Entranceway to the Ancient Caves of Humanity: Alone, Yet in the Embrace of Everything

Since the pandemic began, I’ve had this impulse to look at, or hang on the walls of my home, new pieces of art. Sometimes, they’re pages from an old book or museum calendar or one I created myself; sometimes, a piece from a dealer or a work by someone I love. I take a walk every day, look at whatever seems beautiful, trees, roads, hills, brooks, buildings, animals, and people. And with art this sense of beauty can come inside with me.

 

And there’s something more. Something about aging, relationships, and life itself, or life in a time of great crisis, that eludes understanding yet is motivating this impulse.

 

I’ve written about art before. So have thousands of others. Art is one blessing we can all share. No matter how hard we look at, think, or feel about an artwork, it keeps on evoking something new⎼ or it can. One look, one realization sets the stage for the next.

 

There is an infinite depth to any perception, as any perception takes place in and is influenced by an infinite number of factors, or by the universe itself. It is this infinite depth that art can access. So the English poet William Blake, in his poem Auguries of Innocence, wrote the famous lines: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand. And a Heaven in a Wildflower.”

 

I look at this woodblock print by the Japanese artist Kawase Hasui which hangs on the wall of my bedroom. It is called The Inokashira Benten Shrine in Snow. I love this piece. It is so detailed. It depicts a snowstorm over an old Buddhist Shrine that sits next to a pond that over a hundred years ago stood at the head of the source of Edo’s (now Tokyo’s) drinking water. Each snowflake stands individually by itself, and then floats into the whole. I feel as if I could enter the scene, become another detail in it, or feel the artist as he painted it.

 

Maybe each artwork is a door to a hidden place in ourselves, or the universe, or the artist’s vision. Like C. S. Lewis’ wardrobe doorway to Narnia. Or a window; just like a painting might be framed, a window frames the world for us to view with care and attention. And I feel that if I can mount such windows and doors on my walls, I will never be lonely or bored. An adventure will always be available to me. One minute, the world might be tired or threatening. The next, it shines brightly.

 

Years ago, I bought a piece of Buddhist art, a slice of shale with a Buddha painted on it. It is a reproduction of a painting from a cave in Southeast Asia. When I slow down and let my eyes linger on it alone, focusing on the whole piece; then a detail; then back again, the scene expands, taking on dimensionality. I feel what I see. The Buddha stands there for a moment in 3-d.

 

Art was probably created just for this sort of purpose. When we let go of our focus on ourselves for a moment, our plans, concerns, and beliefs, art can help us see the world in more dimensions. That’s why, throughout the centuries, it was closely tied to religion and spirit. One of the greatest visual works of art ever was The Creation of Man (Human) painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, by Michelangelo….

 

*To read the whole post, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

 

**Photo is from the cave created by students in our school.

Speeding Up Life Shortens Your Meaningful Moments: Time and Addiction

We obviously live in a fast paced political-social world. It is easy for most of us to get caught up in thoughts about job or school, relationships, money, health, or the new political reality. Thoughts move at lightning speed. Communication in the brain moves through neurons or brain cells as an electrical current, so ideas can register in tiny fractions of a second. And for many of us, thoughts constantly arise in our mind, whether awake or asleep. Just think how fast a thought can arise in your mind and then disappear. Having thoughts is what a mind does.

 

Emotions usually take longer to get underway, but once started, last longer. Try to make yourself love something or get angry. You need to evoke thought, memory, or sensation first. And emotions don’t evaporate and disappear so easily. They can lie hidden and their very intensity can make them difficult to process.

 

In fact, since thoughts arise so quickly, they can easily be used to hide away feeling. And as the pace of society quickens, we more easily get lost in our mental world. We think “the mind gets things done; feelings or emotions get in the way.” The more we use thoughts to cover emotions and feelings, the more we dread and avoid feeling. We thus train ourselves to fear our own feelings, and to experience anxiety and other forms of discomfort whenever feelings appear. We might not even relax when on vacation because that would mean lowering our guard. How often do vacations cause more anxiety than normal day-to-day life?

 

And when feelings or emotions come up in our daily lives, we react doubly. We not only try to respond to whatever situation we are in; we react against the formerly buried content. Our perceptions and thinking can get confused and distorted.

 

The result, as discussed by Stephan Rechtschaffen in his book Time Shifting: Creating More Time to Enjoy Your Life, is that our ability to focus and experience a moment of life is shortened to the length of a thought. This book was published 20 years ago, but its central message is even more important now. When psychological reality moves too quickly, and the duration of a moment is too short, then life seems more superficial, and it is difficult to be intensely conscious and aware. We can’t process meaning well. In order for an experience to touch us at all, we need something very intense or dramatic.

 

The shorter the focal duration of a moment, the more groundless and isolated we feel. We cling more desperately to our thoughts and viewpoints, as if they were the only thing we could count on. We crave intense risk, stimulation or challenge to achieve any depth of experience.

 

As Rechtshaffen points out, this is also what happens with addictions.The rushing mind can be addictive. In an addiction, we turn to some substance like a drug, or to a media device, something external to ourselves, to get high or to distract ourselves, because our focus on the moment is too short to allow anything “mundane” to be exciting. The more we depend on externals, the more our length of focus decreases, and we need even more stimulation. We can be manipulated more easily because our connection and understanding of our own inner experience is diminished. We continuously focus in the wrong place and never satisfy our true yearning.

 

We humans desire peak experiences, highs, and pleasures. And the longer we allow the focal duration of a moment to be, or the longer we can maintain focus, the easier it is to think clearly and for any experience to feel real, important, touching. Thus, almost any experience can be meaningful, can be a high, whether it is taking a breath, cooking a meal, or kissing our lover.

 

I think the deepest yearning we all have is to feel loved⏤to feel loved not as a gift bestowed upon us by others, but as a mutual creation that arises when we love others, when our life has depth and meaning. And when we do that we are likely to live our moments fully. Only by improving our ability to focus and pay attention, to quiet the constant chatter, and trust our inherent abilities and feelings, can we do this. Mindfulness, taking time in nature, allowing ourselves to truly savor and care for each moment we live, is so important. When the mind quiets, we hear the world more clearly. To re-phrase the English poet, William Blake, we hear and feel eternity in a moment.

 

*Photo: Temple, Delphi, Greece.