Part III Inuit Skeleton Woman Story as Metaphor for Creative Process:
Concentration
...untangling takes a heart willing to die. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
...untangling takes a heart willing to die. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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To untangle Skeleton Woman is path of soul and to soul; the strengthening and nurturing of heart. In terms of our metaphor, it is also to understand that art does not belong to the professional, nor is it an accumulation of techniques. It takes picking through the smelly tangles of ego gratification, the festering wounds of conditioning, and the illusions and forms of duality to discover the power of being. The untangling is the painting of the painting, the doing through being, with suspended motive and judgment. The Death figure looking over your shoulder in time transforms into personal coach making you accountable for your authenticity.
TRANSFORMATION PAINTING invites participants to become the fisherman by stepping past terror of identification and begin untangling the bones of Skeleton Woman. Being in a painting circle with this kind of spiritual-creative process supports success with a collective engagement, but it can also amplifies confusion and stuckness. The practice of continuing to painting into the same piece develops a conversation that extends to other aspects of life. Painters have shared a greater easy in holding their life in a larger context, knowing it is in constant process. Like the fisherman in the story it require a special kind of concentration suspending the observations of the small mind.
TRANSFORMATION PAINTING invites participants to become the fisherman by stepping past terror of identification and begin untangling the bones of Skeleton Woman. Being in a painting circle with this kind of spiritual-creative process supports success with a collective engagement, but it can also amplifies confusion and stuckness. The practice of continuing to painting into the same piece develops a conversation that extends to other aspects of life. Painters have shared a greater easy in holding their life in a larger context, knowing it is in constant process. Like the fisherman in the story it require a special kind of concentration suspending the observations of the small mind.
The poet Jane Hirshfield talks about concentration as a particular state of awareness: penetration, unified, and focused, yet also permeable and open. Her Buddhist background comes through when she says it not an act of will, but more a cultivated state. She mentions in Nine Gates, the different definitions of concentration which relate intimately to mythic alchemy of the Skeleton Women Story and to creative process. In the story it is the engagement of the fisherman to sort and organize her bones that initiates transformation. In TRANSFORMATION PAINTING it is applying the paint from a place of concentration which brings forth images and information beyond the personality.
"To concentrate" means come to a common center. There is a unity intimated, a drawing inward and toward coherence. In this kind of painting it is a trusting the unknown within as well as the unknowable. Another aspect of concentration is that it calls forth clarity, as well as a precise connection which in turn grounds. TRANSFORMATION PAINTING cultivates awareness, being presence to what is.
Concentration, comments Hirshfield, also implies strength or density, as in a salt solution. This meaning suggests a potency, like critical mass, which begins a new stage of the process. The last meaning of concentration is one used to translate dhyana, the Sanskrit term---source of the Chinese chan and Japanese zen---that describes the one-pointed mind of meditation. This is really the essence of the cultivation that this particular process is based on. In the story, the fisherman sings repeated sounds like a chant in order to concentrate his doing, to open to the organizing principle of the Greater Field of Life.
