Tag: Creativity Workshop

art, poetry, Uncategorized, writing

Practicing Presence

annacitrino
Croatian coast
Regents Park rose garden rose
Rock texture, Dalmatian coast, Croatia
Bird tracks, Oregon coast near Reedsport
Leaf texture, Lake District riverside, UK

“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”—Frederick Buechner 

In the work I did for three decades, I lived with strict schedules. Nearly every minute counted, and clear goals for each hour, even portions of the hour, seemed necessary. This year I’m choosing to live differently. Thoreau went to the woods to live simply and deliberately. I’m beginning a new life in California as of this summer, and in my experiment in living, I want to focus on living with presence. I have goals–to learn to draw, play the clarinet, learn Spanish, to write poetry, among other goals. More than achieving all my goals, though, I want to open to a place of being. I want to listen to the land I live on, inhabit it physically and mentally–to take in the subtle changes as the seasons shift–the light, the color, the sounds, nurturing the awareness of its presence. I want to every day consciously notice life for the miracle it is.

As I walk across the land where I live, I notice many things that need tending to–the poison oak that’s growing up on the path, the oak trees that need trimming, how last year’s rainstorms have washed away soil on the bank. After being gone for some time, as I have been, there are numerous things I need and want to do. Perhaps these things don’t matter much in the big picture of the universe. Keeping the poison oak at bay, for example, isn’t going to influence what happens in India, though it will make it easier for me to walk around. The bigger lesson in caring for the trees, pulling out weeds, watering, and the various other things people do to their living space when living in a rural area, is understanding how living on the land involves an interconnection and a relationship. As I give to the land and care for it, it cares for me. If I avoid behaviors that cause erosion, for example, it benefits me and benefits the earth I live on as well. Tree roots don’t get undermined causing the tree to fall over. I used to not want to cut the herbs growing in front of my house, better to let them continue on their natural life, I thought. Over time, though, I’ve learned, that most herbs actually like to be cut back. They grow better as a result. The plants have taught me things about themselves.

Learning what the land you live on wants, what it needs, and how to give it that care takes time. Currently, I’m reading about what grows best in specific areas, what gophers and deer don’t like to eat. I’m also learning by getting out and walking around each day to see how things are doing. Doing the walk is a kind of observation ritual so I can better understand the organic processes of the land and my life in connection to it. Though it may be someone’s job to care for the community’s garden or shared landscape, living in an urban landscape requires similar attention. As in human relationships, the land we live on and use needs us to understand the effect our behavior has on it, if we are to live in good relationship with it, if we want a meaningful relationship.

Soquel, California sunset sky
Reeds, Neary’s Lagoon, Santa Cruz, CA
Spider’s web, Neary’s Lagoon, Santa Cruz, CA

Similar to learning how to have a relationship with the land I live on, learning to draw or to write require an attending to an inner awareness of what is trying to come forth. When drawing, as well as when writing, you heighten your attention to details, as the details develop the picture of what you’re focusing on. They enable you to see more fully–not just the object, but its presence and the meaning of its presence. This requires time to not be measured in minutes or in reaching a predetermined goal. Instead, we allow ourselves depth. We explore our connection to time–allow ourselves to move without measurement. Instead of skimming across the surface, we fully inhabit our actions, our thinking, our being. The German poet, Rilke, wrote about the artist’s connection to the creative act in Letters to a Young Poet  “In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!” It takes time to know who you are as an artist. You have to listen to your life, to what it’s trying to tell you. The message is usually subtle and complex, and takes practice. You don’t have to be a visual artist or writer to be creative. Living is itself a creative act. We have visions of what we want to create in ourselves, and we can be patient with ourselves in the act of making our life something meaningful and with beautiful character.

Observing the world enhances our ability to listen to life and to experience it more fully. This past May, while hiking around in the UK’s Lake District, I looked up from the river’s edge where I was standing to see a leaf backlit by the sun. Its vibrant color and intricate texture stunned me. All the leaf’s veins stood out as if I was looking under a microscope. If color could shout, this leaf would certainly have been deafening. The more I keep my eyes open, the more I notice the infinite variety of colors, textures and shapes. The world comes alive, and I feel more alive as a result.

Leaf, Lake District, UK
River rock, Lake District, UK
Leaf at river’s edge, Lake District, UK
River in Lake District, UK
Lake District roadside moss, UK

Often, I photograph textural details in the world around me. I carry my camera and my journal with me most places. I never know what amazing thing I might see. Holding a camera or a pen are but ways of paying attention, of nurturing a relationship to yourself and to the world. I don’t know what the various images of texture I’m collecting will add up to, the thoughts that will surface as a result. They may be nothing significant in themselves. The photo itself is not the goal. They are but a way of seeing, a pathway. As Shelley Berc, co-director of the Creativity Workshop in her article “How Fear Chokes Creativity and What to Do About It” writes, “We find wonder and beauty, new ideas and images everywhere when we allow our senses to experience each moment fully. When we shut down our perceptiveness and our sensitivity and only look to the finish line, our creativity has no access to the very elements that make it enriching and deep.” When I open the door to my house in the evening to sit on the steps, crickets croon and wind rustles the trees. Leaves fall like rain. There is an energy astir. The earth is full of wonder and alive with a kind of music in the interplay of all that is. We are more than our occupations, lists of accomplishments and goals, more than the muscle and bone of our bodies. Taking the photos or writing in a journal are mainly ways to enter a door into another way of being–one that is more awake, aware.

In his Book of Hours, Love Poems to God, Rilke, writes, “If we surrendered/ to earth’s intelligence/ we could rise up rooted, like trees.” There is a wisdom in the earth that can only be understood as we allow ourselves to absorb its sounds, its rhythms and textures, colors, as we develop an intimacy with it, enter into companionship with it. Trees have roots but they also bend and move, provide a place for birds to roost, food, shade for other plants to grow and for humans to enjoy. They offer beauty. There is more to trees, and the natural world they are a part of than merely the things they provide, however. The earth isn’t just a backdrop to human existence. It is our foundation. Perhaps recording what I see is a way to develop a different kind intelligence–one of deeper roots to all that sustains not just myself, but all of us.

The wind has blown in gusts all day. The light is soft gold. When I stood beside the redwoods this afternoon, I heard them groan. Every world region has different textures that are its own. The natural world is alive with presence. Walking in a forest, desert, beach, grassland, mountain, city park, or simply looking up into the sky and noticing it, listening to it, and then drawing or writing, photographing, or simply talking about what you are aware of draws us into the mystery of existence. Certainly, that’s worth experiencing deeply.

Birch trees, UK
Stone wall, UK
Wysteria, UK
Leaf with rain, UK
Peacock feathers, Croatia
Cut log, Croatia
Madrone bark, Croatia
Water of Dalmatian Coast, Croatia
Palm tree bark, Croatia
Street in Trogir, Croatia
place

Love is a Place–How Place Shapes Us

annacitrino

Two weeks ago as I rode home from the airport, Delhi was enveloped in smoke, the city’s signature perfume. One evening later the skies were full of lightning with rain pouring down heavily. Since returning from a trip to the Czech Republic and Austria, I’ve been thinking about what it is that makes a place. Some time back, when I first moved overseas, my husband and I sat in our Izmir, Turkey apartment, explaining the culture to ourselves–as we understood it at the time–our first experience of living in a foreign country, through using the designs in a carpet on our floor. It was world full of life, energy, color and sound, but still contained and shaped by tradition’s forms. Turkey is still the favorite place I’ve lived outside of my own home, still holds wonder and happiness in my memory.

Years ago, I visited Spearfish, South Dakota a small town where my parents had lived for some time, and where I still have relatives. While exploring the downtown, I came across a book in the bookstore window titled Dakota, A Spiritual Geography.  At the time, I didn’t know the author, Kathleen Norris, but noticed that she was living in Lemmon, South Dakota in a home she had inherited from her grandmother. Lemmon was the same town my father was born in. I had come to South Dakota for the purpose of getting to know a bit more about my family’s background. I had grown up in California, far from relatives except for my father’s parents who lived at the time lived nearby in Lemon Grove, California. I knew little of my family history except through the descriptions of my parents. I was drawn to Norris’s book and its subtitle in particular, because for some time I’d held the belief that the geography we grow up with shapes us in mysterious ways we don’t quite understand–affecting the way we think, what we value–shaping our souls. A few days previous to discovering the book, I had gone with my Aunt to see where my grandmother’s family was buried. My Aunt’s friend was an oral historian whose family knew my great grandparents. She had shown me the graves of my great uncles, and before walking back to the car, I went to stand in the middle of a field nearby. There, I found myself surrounded by the green wheat, an ocean of grass, the sky above infinite and blue. No sound pierced the silence as the earth’s  scent earth and the weight of its quietness seeped into my feet. This was my parents’ homeland, a geography they knew and that shaped how they saw the world–its colors, sounds, rhythms. My body felt the quality of its presence, affirming my sense that the land speaks to us. Dana Gioia’s poem, “Palabras,” talks about this idea as well. “El mundo no necesita de palabras. Sabe expresarse/en luz solar, hojas y sombras,” Gioia writes, “The earth doesn’t need words. It knows how to express itself/ in the sun, the leaves and shadows,” and it’s true. There is a kind of voice inside of the material world that speaks without words–something akin to music, but more abstract. Though Nature speaks volumes to us in its vast library of sound and movement, one artist has tried to show this voice visibly in an interesting way, attaching pens to a willow tree’s branches, making visible the branch’s movement, a fascinating idea. Small scratchings embodying the language inside the leaves’ dance.

My belief in geography’s affect on humans was affirmed some time later when I came across an article in Discover Magazine “Are the Desert People Winning?”  by Stanford anthropologist Robert Saplosky, where Sapolsky explains how anthropologist Robert Textor in his 3,000 page book, A Cross-Cultural Summary, written in 1967, noted after examining 400 world cultures and classifying them into nearly 500 traits that a “striking proportion of rain forest dwellers are polytheistic, worshipping an array of spirits and gods.” This pattern, Textor points out, can be observed in places like the Amazons, and Borneo, whereas “desert dwellers—the bedouin of Arabia, the Berbers of the western Sahara, the Kung of the Kalahari Desert, the Nuer and Turkana of the Kenyan/Sudanese desert—are usually monotheistic.” Sapolsky goes on to point out how there is a kind of singularity to the landscape in desert locations, where the world is reduced to essentials. Rain forest people, on the other hand, live amidst an abundance of plants, herbs, and animals. “Letting a thousand deities bloom in this sort of setting must seem natural,” states Sapolsky. Every place and culture has its uniqueness, and each place touches our lives and shaping us. We live in a place, and we respond to it, interact with it.

As we travel from one place to another, we carry with us the other places we have been, and the memory of those places. I have often wondered if this is why I enjoy countries very different in landscape from those similar to where I grew up, but am emotionally drawn to countries like Greece, Spain, and Italy, or the state of New Mexico in the U.S., because they remind me of where I grew up in the dry southern California desert with rolling hills and yellow grass spotted with granite boulders and chaparral. Dana Gioia in his TED talk about place explains that “the world looks different depending on where you see it from and who you see it with. It sounds different. It looks different. It tastes different.” He goes on to describe how until recently, people had to pay attention to the local landscape to provide them with the means to live, and that people visit foreign cities today because they enjoy the diversity that local art, architecture, soil, produce, weather, presents in any particular place. Related to this idea, the biologist, E.O. Wilson has written about biophilia–how humans have a natural affinity for nature. It is our source of life. Today, however, we often don’t know the names of the trees outside their windows or the plants we live beside on a daily basis. Gioia asserts that the standardization of the world in its architecture and foods, clothing, and other numerous effects of globalization on cultures, while increasing affordability, creates a loss in diversity. This is a “huge impoverishment of human spirit”–a loss in connection to where we live, Gioia stresses.

We are always changing and so are places. When I first moved to Santa Cruz, California from San Diego County, I wore sweaters most the summer long until about noon each day. It was cold! The world looked different–there were so many trees, and the coastline was rocky, and it didn’t seem to matter how you casually you dressed. These were small things, but many small things put together create a sense of place. During the Creativity Workshop I recently attended in Prague, the workshop leaders asked us to sit in a cafe and draw the soul of a person–not the physical features, but the soul. That was challenging. I observed a mid-aged woman with blond hair and noticed how calm she was. Her voice was quiet, as were her manners. She was in no hurry to eat or to make her point with her partner. I envisioned her to be the shape of a cloud, all edges soft, content to wrap around objects without having to take control. She would glide from place to place without rushing. She contained no sharp edges. She could float above the world and see things clearly. It was interesting to think of visualizing a person’s spirit embodied in material qualities. When I came back to Delhi, though, noting the city’s distinctive differences from where I had just been, I wondered what a drawing of the soul of a place would like–specifically, what would a drawing of Delhi’s soul look like? I’m still pondering that question, but the art piece would need to be kinetic with glints of glass, a mosaic of colors swirling, moving, rising out of dark space then turning into smoke, the scent of smoke filling the room.

Leaving a place you have known and loved and lived always carries with it a grief. A place grows inside us, we have a relationship with it, and to let go of it is loss. We mourn. I remember my dad standing on the path outside my house when he came to visit me just before I moved overseas. “You’re never coming home again,” he said, crying. I had never seen him cry but once before. I was looking at the move as the adventure of my life. He was looking at it as loss. Even though I’ve been living and wandering abroad for years now, I still carry the longing for open space, wide and wild space–the kind of landscape the western part of the United States still holds. I’ve lived in mega cities for many years. I enjoy tidy gardens where they can be found.  They are wonderful to behold with their shaped and contained designs, especially when greenery is rare, but to feel truly alive, I need wild space. E.E. Cummings writes in his poem, “Love is a Place,”

Love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places

Not only is love a place, but I say place is also love. Through our connection to place our understanding of the world and of love begins. Last summer as I lay on the floor with the doors open so the sun and breeze could float in while I did my exercises, the sudden subtle perfume from the redwoods wafted in through the door and tears welled up in my eyes. The absolute perfection of that clean,  woodsy sweetness. There are more dramatic places in the world to live, I’m sure, and I recognize different people need different things. What is it about a place we call home that makes us want to go back to it? There are people, the familiar routines, the memory connect to place, but there is also something fundamental–the physicality of the place itself. You are in love with the land, you want to know it, care for it, understand it and its mystery. When you find the home of your heart, as I felt I had lying there on the floor inhaling the afternoon’s quiet and perfumed air in California’s Soquel Hills, you know it’s where you belong.

I look forward to the day when I can go home.