Genius
Everything is. There is a universe in the tiniest leaf, there is a whole of creation in me. I will see it, if I look.
I really enjoy my art class. The teacher begun her introduction, on the first day, by saying: drawing is not about putting shapes down on paper, it is not about what you can do with pencil and charcoal, it is not about technique and skill. Drawing is about looking. Everyone can draw, she said. If you can see it, you can draw it.
We had a homework exercise that made the point beautifully. The task was to draw a fruit or a vegetable, from memory. Then to take an actual fruit or vegetable and draw it again, this time from observation.
Drawing a pepper from memory took me about five minutes. It was a simple shape, elongated, grooved. It looked like a pepper, it was a pepper, everyone would recognize it as a pepper in an instant.
Then I took a pepper and placed it in front of me. Forty minutes later I was nowhere close to completing my drawing. There was so much detail, so many shadowy shapes, so many highlighted places. The longer I looked at the pepper the more details I noticed. Grooves, ridges, stumps, kinks, depressions, curves. They were endless. I could have drawn for hours, for days, for years, and never be “finished” with describing the pepper with my pencil. The pepper was endless, unlimited.
What a beautiful illustration of our relationship to reality that is, I thought as I drew. We see reality in symbols, simplifications, streamlined shapes. An elongated shape is a pepper, a round shape is an orange, a round shape with rays is a sun. Killing is bad, being nice is good, stealing is wrong, giving is right.
Our mind, being always on the defense, can not open to the wealth of shades, shapes, kinks, curves, stumps and depressions. The mind makes things simple so that we can “deal with them”, categorize them, judge them. So that we are safe, so that we understand, so that we are sure to be good, sure to “do the right thing”.
But what if we let go of mind? What if we look? Then we will see an entire universe in a small, red pepper. Then there will be an entire universe in a smallest leaf. If we ask a question and look, we will see an entire universe in ourselves.
Then every single pepper is perfectly complete and unique, no better or worse than other peppers, but perfect as itself. Then each one of us is complete and absolutely unique, perfect as who we are. Then everything is complete and absolutely unique, perfect as what it is.
Everything is the real question. Everything is the real answer. If we can see it.
It is not about making things happen. It is about being ready to allow things to happen.
This is a different way of being in a world, different from how mind operates. There is nothing to do. There is nowhere to go, there is nothing to achieve, there is nothing to change. But there is being, experiencing, expressing. Why? Why not? I am here. Why? … I am here.
“Who am I?” is much more fun question to ask than “Why am I?”
We, my husband and I, just moved to Santa Barbara from Ojai. We saw this house few weeks ago, it just wouldn’t work for us then. The house seemed great but we couldn’t see ourselves in it, couldn’t fit into it. Three weeks later, as we ate dinner in a restaurant in Santa Barbara, we realized that we are ready to move. Our Ojai adventure was completed, we were ready to go.
Two days later we saw the house we’ve seen few weeks previously, this time it was perfect, we moved in the following weekend. There was hardly anything for us to do. Granted, we worked for a day or two packing and unpacking, but that was it. The move happened so quickly, so easily, that I hardly noticed it.
We were ready and everything fell into place, we were ready, and everything happened. Easily, effortlessly, gently. We were ready, so there was nothing more to be done.
This doesn’t make any sense to the mind. Allowing things to organize, letting go of control, letting go of the need to know how, when, why, what for, doesn’t make sense to the mind. Mind needs to know, organize, understand, have a plan.
When I choose to open to who I am, who I really am, who I am as God, my mind needs to know what it means, needs to know why, what for, what will it do, how will I change. Will I really be God, or will I only imagine it? Will it be real?
But I don’t need to know that. I can just choose to open and allow it to happen.
Knowing how mind functions I can choose to let go of it. I may not know what it means “who I am as God”, but I know that mind needs to know, so I can let go of that need. I know that mind needs to control, so I can let go of that need. I know that mind needs to understand, so I can let go of that need.
My mind needs to make things happen, so I can let go of that need. Then the only thing that’s left will be … me.
I remember the first time Christopher visited me in Poland. It was shortly after we met, about eight years ago. I lived in Warsaw at that time. One day, in the evening, we went for a walk at the river’s bank. It was a summer day and there were tents with beer, french fries and grilled sausages stretching, one after another, along the promenade. Nearly each tent had a band or a singer, playing and singing old polish songs that every polish person knows.
We sat in one of the beer gardens, drinking and listening to the music. Suddenly, as the band begun a particularly lively song, people sitting around us jumped up from their sits, held hands, formed a large circle and begun to dance, right in a middle of the promenade. They were strangers, they did not know each other, nor did they need to. They knew the song, the song moved them, so they danced. I run to join them leaving Christopher, half shocked and half terrified, at our table.
I remembered this little adventure today as I watched “the Fiddler on the Roof”. There is a scene where men in a tavern celebrate an engagement. They are happy, excited, and they dance. They dance how they feel, they sing what’s in their heart. Not for show or entertainment, not to display skill, not to attract attention. They dance because they are moved to do it. They sing because singing expresses how they feel.
What do we lose, I wonder, what do we lose when we don’t sing our sorrow and our joy? What do we shut down and push away if we don’t dance because the music moves us, because the life moves us?
My teacher often makes us howl in class, or growl, or cry like birds do. It opens the body, opens the heart, helps to let go of mind. But it is a wolf’s way, a tiger’s way, a bird’s way. It’s their way of being who they are.
So what is the human way? Maybe it’s singing? Maybe it’s dancing?
Funny I should ask, since this very question was popping left and right all around me lately. It all begun with an email that was forwarded to me, an email that contained “Little gems from the Health Care Bill”. Those gems were all the parts of the bill that would allow government to force people to do things, dictate what things they can do and how, control their health, control their business and investments, control their marriage, control their life!
As I read the tension grew, with every sentence the fear was stronger. Fear of being manipulated, forced, restrained, trapped. As I continued reading the email I remembered a question that Brooks asks occasionally: “So whose body is it anyway? Whose responsibility is it?”
It occurred to me, as I considered the email and the place from which I felt it was written, that there is fear where there is no responsibility. There is fear where there is no independence. Because whose responsibility is it that I am healthy? That my body is open and balanced? And whose responsibility is it to bring it back into balance when it collapses and becomes ill?
If I make it the doctor’s responsibility, if I make it the pharmaceutic industry’s responsibility, then there is place for fear. If they are responsible for my health then my body is in their hands. If my body is in their hands then they can manipulate me, control me, restrain me, trap me.
But what if I don’t? What if I realize that it is my body, that it’s not a doctor’s job to heal me but mine, it is not medicine’s job to heal me, but mine. Because it is my body, my life. I get to say whether I am ill or not, healthy or not. Who else could possibly make that decision for me?
There is no fear here, there is no room for control or manipulation in this place, there is no possibility of control or manipulation because I am here and I am responsible. Because I am here and I am responsible I am free to be however I wish to be. There is nothing here that could stop me, because I am here.
So what is my responsibility? Everything. Because it is me, because it is my body, because it is my life. I am creating it, I am designing it. I am free to do that, absolutely free to grow and open, with no limitations, because I am responsible.
I am done with my life, I realized recently. It’s been coming on for quite some time, as a feeling, sensations I couldn’t see clearly. And there was trauma clouding and distorting.
But as the picture cleared, as my presence opened and the trauma left I realized that I am done with life. I am completed with life as it is usually understood and structured. I have a family, I have friends, I have a way of making money I enjoy and am good at, I live in a lovely place. Details of my life are organized as I want them to be. I realized that there is nothing more I need.
I could work more and make more money, or I could work doing something else, I could move to an even lovelier place, to a different place, to a bigger house or just a different house. I could get another car, I could rescue another dog … I could get much more but, in essence, it would be more of the same. I already have all I need.
Seen from mind’s point of view, seen from society’s perspective, my life is completed.
Seen from my own point of view my life is now beginning.
I am finished with organizing the outside according to the outside rules, I am completed with doing things to get other things. I am now free to be who I am.
I am completed with organizing things that are considered necessary and important. Now I am free to organize things that are an expression of who I am.
I am completed with existing inside of reality defined by others. Now I am free to create reality that makes sense to me only, because it is mine.
I am completed with being Pausha Foley, age 34, a wife, polish immigrant, graphic designer. Now I am free to be whomever I wish in the world, even if the world has no name for it yet.
I am completed with relating the way I was trained. Now I am free to relate the way I relate, even if my way of relating isn’t known in the world yet.
Now that I have done what was expected of me, now that I have completed all that a person “should do in life”, I am free to be. Boundlessly, limitlessly, uniquely myself.
