Beauty is Nourishment
Artist's Statement on the Mandalas created at Natural Mystery School
Art changes the quality of attention. Earth art trains us to look for patterns and textures and colors everywhere. The eye is drawn out of devices and into the landscape. The motivational field shifts. Once it begins, you can’t turn it off. The mind rewires itself to the patterns of nature, resulting in shifts in perception and consciousness.
The goal is not to fetishize nature or romanticize the images we create, but to engage in the living world as a collaborative practice. Appreciate the qualities of nature for themselves, not just as a passive backdrop or a collection of random objects, but as artistic expressions of the living planet.
RECOVERING FROM THE MIRAGE of MODERN CULTURE
It's easy to get lost in mental abstractions unless we start with what’s real. Focus first and foremost on what's right in front of us. Not on meaningless entertainment. Not on sensational news items. Not on propaganda or consumer advertisements. Not on the intrusive imagery of modern life that is quietly stealing our attention.
Start by engaging with the actual beings around us. The real teachers are relational and most of them are not human. Earth art is good medicine for the modern bodypsyche. It is a respite from the illusions and introjects we are inundated by every day.
Beauty is nourishment. Engaging with the raw materials of nature shifts the way we engage with time and attention and consciousness. Earth art is medicine for the modern psyche. We can return the mind to its natural context which is the living planet.
People only pay attention to what we have been trained to notice, what we believe is necessary in the unconscious where attention and motivation begin. To shift our attention back into the living landscape is an ongoing practice, not an idea or an identity. It takes hands-on engagement, not casual interest. It takes timeless amounts of time and not tiny increments. It takes actual relationships, not abstract observations. Ultimately, it shifts our sense of meaning and identity. It facilitates a shift in the instrument of seeing.
CONCENTRATING THE MEDICINE
DIGITAL MIRROR
Image making is a sacred technology. The human ability to create new images, new stories, new ways of seeing is metamorphic.
It is good to be thoughtful about the images that we live by. Otherwise, our lives will be filled with banalities and images that mesmerize but are not life-affirming. We may be drawn into addiction patterns, such as consumerism or endless scrolling. The images we are surrounded by change the underlying foundations of our thoughts and instincts. The images we focus on determine who we are becoming.
Some of the images I create are earth art itself - very lightly edited for contrast. But for others, I add a digital kaleidoscopic filter. The kaleidoscopic images are more symmetrical and more coherent. I see this process as concentrating a medicine to be more effective, like the alchemical practice of making spagyrics. Extracting the active principles of the image, refining them and rejoining them in a more coherent whole. The more symmetry the images have, the more congruent they are with timeless cymatic and geomantic patterns. This increases the effect on deeper levels of consciousness. It makes them more effective, for example, at inducing trance or enhancing meditation.
I make an effort to stay close to the original referent so that the kaleidoscopic images don’t become a hyperreal photo fantasy. I let the plants stay recognizable. I let the forms speak for themselves, but I add the exact same effect you would see through a handheld kaleidoscope. The enhancement of symmetry helps to remove visual distractions and invites a deeper state of attention. You can gaze at these images in meditation to experience the contemplative power they hold. See for yourself where your attention goes.
Images express the unique presence of the beings that are within them. Even peering through a digital lens, we can still feel the felt sense of living mysteries. Most of the mysteries in our lives we miss because we don’t slow down enough to engage directly with them. Living mysteries are everywhere, all the time, but it takes a particular eye to see them. Every image is both a thing of beauty and also an invitation.
SYMBOLIC RESONANCE
The highest value of any artistic gesture is not that it looks attractive but that it carries medicine. Art can shift our perceptions and our manner of engagement.
Patterns are not just flat images. They are portals. They are gateways to peer into other worlds. While the practice of pattern gazing may carry us far into an esoteric journey, it may also bring us more fully into the present moment. We can experience the same beautiful world we already live in, from a different referent.
Like many kinds of traditional art and practice, mandalas are a psychoactive catalyst. They support meditation and trance states and mystical experiences. In these states, our conventional ways of meaning making are thoroughly dismantled. Let the mind rest for a while in non-conceptual participation. Let the concepts emerge after the fact as supportive evidence of the wider intelligence that is already inherent in the participative moment.
In my experiments, I have found that the practice of mandala making must be engaged from a softer state of mind, without concept. If I work too much with concepts, then the image flattens. Instead, I start with images and let the concepts rise up naturally through them. When the concept is what drives the process, the result is lifeless. But when the process is purely intuitive, the image is alive, unexpectedly relevant, and filled with unspoken presence.
Let concept follow form, not the other way around. Don’t create a human construct and then build upon it. Let the forms speak for themselves and attend to them. Let the artistic impulse begin as a living image, a sensuous, wild and fertile terrain where teachings continuously blossom.
This is natural mysticism in action. It is done without concept, and with no intention other than present moment, embodied attention. After the fact, I explore the symbollic resonance of the image by meditating upon it and by research and contemplation. Then, I name the mandalas to help distill the medicine. The names express principles which preexist in the moment of intuitive practice.
Contemplating the images is its own disipline. After contemplation, what is hidden becomes more obvious. The hidden intelligence in a creative gesture is often startling in retrospect.
The whole practice brings together ecological literacy, world’s wisdom and the beauty of nature. These three areas of perpetual study catalyze a creative cycle which is self-propelled, endless and ongoing.
Wisdom awakens through contemplation. In the beginning, it is helpful to separate theory from praxis. But in the end, creative force and concept are recombined into one coherent medicine. Through the process, we rewild the mind and rediscover the animistic principles of the human instrument. The intelligence of nature permeates and supersedes human intellect. There is no step of this process which occurs without it. The intelligence of nature and the human psyche is synergistically awakened. The living world and the wisdom of the ages come together in seamless collaboration. The living world is illuminated to us through our participation.
Engaging with wild beauty and myth making is a part of fulfilling our role in the greater conversation and it is essential for awakening the many gifts of being human.
MICRO SEASONALITY
Participating in the landscape invites intimacy with the seasons. Seeing exactly when the shifts happen in the micro seasons that change between one day and another. Tiny changes in the landscape are easy to dismiss unless you are interacting with them intimately in embodied ways on a daily basis.
The seemingly ordinary landscape is kaleidoscopic. With each turn of the wheel, new patterns and colors are revealed. This does not happen just four times a year, it happens every day, every hour, in the progression of shadows through the day, in the changing colors of the landscape from one day to the next where ten thousand things are emerging and blossoming and dying all at once in syncopated rhythms. The turn of the seasons is continuous through every dusk and dawn and even in the subtle shifts that happen from one moment to the next.
Recognizing where we are exactly in the turning seasons is a way to participate in rhythmic time. What is happening precisely at this moment is not just trivia. It is an opportunity to take part in a seasonal liturgy, to engage with the active principles of life as it is lived.
We can shape our attention to the present moment and shift the patterns of our thoughts and behavior according to what is happening in the living world. This is a practice of attunement, a participatory gesture, not a conceptual idea.
Each season holds particular kinships, a new set of allies, a different relational network, a different set of teachers and teachings. Every season invites us to engage in different rhythms and different kinds of aliveness.
Every moment is an arrival and a departure. Every day is a revolving door of beings coming and going. With our modern preoccupations, we are missing most of them. But the seasonal progression of tiny changes is where beauty lives. There is power in precise and timely attentiveness. Beauty emerges from the cracks in our simplistic ideas of what a season is.
Through participation, we experience subtle differences. Instead of just “summer”, we see the season of the wood thrush, the season of the wisteria, the season of the daylily, the season of the magnolia, the season of the rose of sharon, the season of the honeysuckle, the season of the maturing grass seeds, the season of the cicada song and the nuances and interweavings between them. There are endless seasons, endless kaleidoscopic turns. In perceiving subtle differences, we open ourselves to deeper relationships. Nature is a continuous exchange of participative experiences.
CO-CREATIVE PRACTICE
I work with the artistic forms of nature as a kind of medicine. I have actively partnered with medicinal plants and poisonous plants, crystals and insects and granite. This work is catalyzed by dirt from the graveyard and sand from the ocean, animal bones, songbird feathers and wasp nests, sunbeams, and reflections of clouds in water. Everyday is something different. I have made mandalas in mountains and beaches, in my neighborhood and all across the states I have been in recently. Soon I will be traveling more often and doing this around the world.
With the support of the landscape, I create spontaneous, participatory, and unique contexts for healing. This is both an ephemeral art form and an office. Mandalas provide a supportive context for my work as a professional mentor and psychotherapist.
The elements of nature are active participants in a collaborative process. Every day, in a very literal way, the landscape is an ally, a healing presence and a creative partner.
From a mechanistic point of view, making ephemeral earth art may seem absurd, arbitrary and senseless. Just a human being manipulating an inert world of objects. Just someone making meaningless patterns out of ordinary things. But from an animistic point of view, every gesture happens in a wider context. We live in a participatory world. Meaning transcends boundaries of self and other, space and time and species.
Everything shifts depending upon how you choose to see what is happening. But if you choose to see art as a devotional practice, then it becomes its own reward and it is far more engaging than simply moving objects or making meaningless patterns. This choice is a shift in perception, but it changes everything. It shifts the internal and external effects of every action.
RELATIONAL INTELLIGENCE
The inhabitants of the living landscapes are not things, they are beings, they are guides, they are possible friends, they are continuous processes. Engaging with them does not require words or ideas. The only requirement is that we slow down enough to engage with other-than-human kin.
The story of separation, the binary that separates humans from nature is an illusion. The story of pristine nature that we should not touch is appropriate in some sensitive locations but it is isolating and problematic if we hold it as a continuous ideal that we should never touch the world we live within. We are physically and biologically entangled with every place we have ever been. There is no entrance without influence. There is no place from which to view the world without participating in it. As Rilke says: "There is no place that does not see you.”
The key to ecological knowledge is not to avoid participation. It is not to sterilize and fetishize nature and further separate ourselves from it. But to cultivate an ethos of ecological sensibility through the interactive experience.
When we don’t harvest personally, we are in danger of thinking that there is no death on our hands, that the food we eat is somehow not dead, that everything we consume is not at the expense of other beings. This creates an abstract relationship with everything we consume which magnifies the story of separateness.
By harvesting, engaging, touching and being touched by the living elements of the landscape, we develop a more coherent relationship with it. We become attuned to the particular qualities of the life world we live within.
RITUAL GESTURES
Earth art is a gesture of participation with life. It can be a devotional offering if it's done with reverence. As we participate in local ecological communities, we rewire neurological patterns and retrain our attention into something more meaningful than most modern life experiences.
Participating with nature actualizes its teachings like an illuminated manuscript. Life shines through all of its emissaries. They are simultaneously the message and its illustration.
The more we participate in the landscape, the more it speaks to us. It is speaking all the time, not just when we are engaged in the wild places, but also in our internal reveries and trance states and meditations and dreams. Life speaks to us and through us. Living patterns reawaken in the silent world that opens when we close our eyes. This is the restoration of our birthright, a portal into the wild mind.
Earth art is an intuitive, ritualistic co-creation across species. It has practical value for restoring our attention and shifting patterns of consciousness. It supports ecological literacy and immerses us into a living world. In return for our participation in the landscape, we receive essential nourishment, the continual revelation of beauty through thought and action.
Image Title: Beauty is Nourishment
Made From: Hopi Blue Corn (Zea mays var. indurata), Anasazi beans (Phaseolus vulgaris), Kabocha Squash (Cucurbita maxima), White Sagebrush (Artemisia ludoviciana), Common Sunflower (Helianthus annuus), Signet Marigold (Tagetes tenuifolia), New England Aster (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae), dappled sunlight on the forest floor, kaleidoscopic effect.
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