Really captivating. So many familiar confrontations.. I’ve been the nurse explaining the fences. Words that die in my mouth.
Did I hear right, you said your mother found Buddhism- had she been raised in Christianity? I recall you explained the subtleties in translation of the two main Christian sects in a previous article.
Inheriting a system of cosmology is different to stooping down and deciding to enter from adulthood. It struck me that she has converted (herself) back to the Three Treasures, and I start to imagine and wonder what that was like, in her case. I feel also ‘converted’ though without any sense of inheritance to the systems I now honour.
About being too freed from suffering to write/make art, I think I relate to a particularly maternal sense of contentment, it does silence art sometimes. When you see your children do well and things are all ok around you it’s like a circle of heaven is around the mind at all times. It does make the pains and losses of others more caustic as it pierces more than just the awareness.
Thank you for sharing her words and unwrapping them so carefully.
My mother wasn't raised Christian. But colonial influences can be found as a contradiction in her life. She believed that she was European in a previous life. Her spirituality inhabits within her language.
Touching on contentment, is silence always peace? Or sometimes a form of repression?
The conversion without inheritance. That's poignant and familiar. Conversion does not require lineage. Where does the non-position situate itself?
Conversion does usually come without lineage, you’re right. But there is another manifestation of conversion which is common to my kind- appropriation- which is like conversion without humility, accountability, time. Without appropriate silence and twice without lineage.
Position - might be a critical distinction between conversion and appropriation, and I think it blurs and bounces.
In that way to start again with a new View, with all the over-excitement, confusion, hopium, is to constantly need to recheck position.
Sometimes art is silenced before it manifests because it ought not yet speak. Most of my previous art-making has been a cauldron trying to cook failure, alchemise it, and at other times just anaesthetise it.
Maybe the task picks up in other realms, like dream. Maybe it must ferment for some time in silence to be ready for true alchemy.
Sometimes you start but you just have to give up because it doesn’t feel anywhere near important enough.
Your mother’s concise verse puts too much blathering to shame 💛
I love this so much.
Really captivating. So many familiar confrontations.. I’ve been the nurse explaining the fences. Words that die in my mouth.
Did I hear right, you said your mother found Buddhism- had she been raised in Christianity? I recall you explained the subtleties in translation of the two main Christian sects in a previous article.
Inheriting a system of cosmology is different to stooping down and deciding to enter from adulthood. It struck me that she has converted (herself) back to the Three Treasures, and I start to imagine and wonder what that was like, in her case. I feel also ‘converted’ though without any sense of inheritance to the systems I now honour.
About being too freed from suffering to write/make art, I think I relate to a particularly maternal sense of contentment, it does silence art sometimes. When you see your children do well and things are all ok around you it’s like a circle of heaven is around the mind at all times. It does make the pains and losses of others more caustic as it pierces more than just the awareness.
Thank you for sharing her words and unwrapping them so carefully.
My mother wasn't raised Christian. But colonial influences can be found as a contradiction in her life. She believed that she was European in a previous life. Her spirituality inhabits within her language.
Touching on contentment, is silence always peace? Or sometimes a form of repression?
The conversion without inheritance. That's poignant and familiar. Conversion does not require lineage. Where does the non-position situate itself?
Conversion does usually come without lineage, you’re right. But there is another manifestation of conversion which is common to my kind- appropriation- which is like conversion without humility, accountability, time. Without appropriate silence and twice without lineage.
Position - might be a critical distinction between conversion and appropriation, and I think it blurs and bounces.
In that way to start again with a new View, with all the over-excitement, confusion, hopium, is to constantly need to recheck position.
Sometimes art is silenced before it manifests because it ought not yet speak. Most of my previous art-making has been a cauldron trying to cook failure, alchemise it, and at other times just anaesthetise it.
Maybe the task picks up in other realms, like dream. Maybe it must ferment for some time in silence to be ready for true alchemy.
Sometimes you start but you just have to give up because it doesn’t feel anywhere near important enough.
Your mother’s concise verse puts too much blathering to shame 💛