Tag: overwhelm

SWARM: “Fly on… right through” … or, “Differentiation + Linkage = Integration”

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Music9 Comments

lukas_felzmann_swarm_3

To write beautiful.

I knew where I was, momentarily.

The paradox: making awareness an habit.

By definition a habit, meditative or otherwise, becomes somewhat “automatic” and therefore something other than “awareness” or novel or differentiated… and yet…

Taking in the good… being lived…

“Implicitly, and more fundamentally, this practice means a relaxed opening into the love – in a very very broad sense – that is the actual nature of everything. Moment by moment, the world and the mind reliably carry you along. This isn’t airy-fairy, it’s real. Our physical selves are woven in the tapestry of materiality, whose particles and energies never fail. The supplies – the light and air, the furniture and flowers – that are present this instant are here, available, whatever the future may hold. So too is the caring and goodwill that others have for you, and the momentum of your own accomplishments, and the healthy workings of your body. Meanwhile, your mind goes on being, while dependably weaving this thought, this sound, this moment of consciousness.

It’s hard to sustain a felt knowing of this nature of everything. The brain evolved to keep our ancestors afraid to keep them alive. But if you look, and look again, you can see directly that right now, and in every now you’re alive, you’re cradled by the world and the mind like a child carried to bed by her mother. This cradling is a kind of love, and when you trust it enough to soften and fall back into it, there’s an untangling of the knots of fear and separation. Then comes both an undoing of the craving that drives suffering and harm, and a freeing and fueling love living through you and as you out into the world.

Imagine a single day in which you were often – not continuously, not perfectly – lived by love. When I try this myself, the events of the day don’t change much -but my experience of them, and their effects, improve dramatically. Consider this as a practice for a day, a week – or the year altogether.

More widely, imagine a world in which many people, enough people – known and unknown, the low and the mighty – were lived by love. As our world teeters on the edge of a sword – and could tip either into realistic prosperity, justice, and peace, or into growing resource wars, despotism, or fundamentalism – it seems to me that it’s not just possible for a critical mass of human hearts to be lived by love. It’s necessary.

How?

The essence of this practice is a yielding into all that lives you. This is a paradigm shift from the typical top-down, subtly contracted, moving-out-from-a-unified-center-of-view-and-action way of operating . . . to a relaxed receptive abiding, feeling supported by the ocean of causes creating each momentary wave of awareness. Then on this basis, there is an encouraging of love in all its forms to flow through you. The suggestions that follow are different ways to do this, and you can also find your own.

Soften and open in the heart. Notice that you are alright right now: listen to your body telling your brain that you are basically OK. Feel the fullness that is already here, all the perceptions and thoughts and feelings pop-pop-popping in this moment of consciousness. Feel the buoying currents of nature and life, waves of gifts from over 3 billion years of evolution on our blue and green pebble. Look around and see objects, including your own hands and body, and consider the unfailing generosity of the material realm, blossoming for over 12 billion years from a seed of light.

Be aware of the warmth and good will from others toward you. Sense your connecting to others, how you are supported by a net of relationships. They don’t have to be perfect. Some people do care about you. You are almost certainly loved.

Feel carried by consciousness, the effortless knowing of perception and thought. When stress, worry, pressure, or pain appear in the mind, see that the fabric of this suffering – the underlying operating of the mind – is itself fine, is always already fine.

Again and again making this little but profound shift, this giving over to the carrying cradling of mind and matter, you can afford to let your own love flow freely. Bring this down to earth: if you lived from love in your first encounter with another person today, how would you be, what would you do, how would you speak? What would a week, a year, be like in which you lived by love? How about trying this? Who knows, if enough people share in this practice, the world could become a much better place.”

– Rick Hanson, Just One Thing-

swarm_188-189_low - Felzmann

Differentiation

Linkage

Integration

Difference

Similarities

Meaning

Perception

Mayhem.  Chaos.  Disregulation.  Con-fusion.

Brokenness.  Openness.  Wounds.  Seeping.

Connecting.  Contaminating.  Communicating.  Constructing.

600x401xswarm02-31922478.jpeg.pagespeed.ic.hzJZzREh9d

In other words:  fly on… ride through.   Take note, make it a habit to take note.  Attend, automatically attend.  Love, freely, openly, love.

PARTICIPATE.

There is so very much good happening.  Arriving, passing through, departing… HAPPENING.

Don’t forget.  Don’t ignore.

Beauty.  Hands.  Hair.  Voices.  Language.  Gestures.  Meanings.

the PROCESS.

ENJOY.   DELIGHT.  LAUGH.  NOTICE.

Fly on.

Ride through.

Notice (differentiate, conceive, perceive, attend)

Link (conjoin, participate, connect, find similarity, solidarity)

Integrate (make meaning, story, intention, purpose, gratitude)

Novelty                                       Similacrum                                  Meaning

I have felt overwhelmed by meanings.  Flooded with good.  Surprised by kindness.  Taken off guard (guards unnecessary) by humans.  How much good there is — children discovering, struggling; coyotes chasing cars; peacocks squawking; handshakes and smiles; innovations and ideas; hopes and dreams; sounds and shapes; disappointments and losses; grief and gratitude; desire and refusal; romance and death…

BEING LIVED

a body materially exchanging, interacting, interoperating with all the materials that surround it

a consciousness, awareness alert to emotion, interpretation, possibilities and limitations

a being responsive to other being

LIVING

Felzmann - Swarmin the midst of

and with

alongside

and because of

interacting

exploring

interpreting

engaging

SWARMING

existence

BEING LIVED

-all images – Lukas Felzmann, Swarm; music – Coldplay, Ghost Stories

We Make Art

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Journallings9 Comments

We Make Art: A Query toward Perceptive Extension

paper snowflakes by Holly & children
paper snowflakes by Holly & children

Waking reminded –

I’ve been working over things in my sleep.  Parenting issues, marriage.  Vocation deadlines, assignments.  Logistics and payments and scheduling.  Improbable care of the self.

– that overwhelm is inevitable, inherent.

Everything we know (or surmise) about anything indicates vast beyonds unknown and ignored.  In order to see, to breathe, to speak, to hear, to feel, to think, to live.  We filter and avoid.  Press the vast majority of the world’s availability into a void.  So of course we can’t manage our world, or comprehend, even minimally control.  We can barely deal with even a relatively microscopic set of variables, and those only enough to survive.

Reminded, awake then, that overwhelm is constant and inevitable.  Inherent to the systems of which we are and are a part.  Living is processing vastness.  Essentially unscalable.  And we thought bacteria were small!

            So it comes as no surprise that at times we feel oppressed, drowned, immersed – helpless, confused and at loss.  Pretend for a moment that we have to-dos that seem important + unforeseen and substantial grief + illness + snow days (which = a house full of ecstatic children, active and noisy and eager to be entertained) + inclement weather shuffling schedules and doctors, activities and possibilities around + limitations of time, energy and internal resources + anxiety or mood ‘disorders’ + love and high hopes + responsibilities and intentions + fears and deep hurts + a body (bodies) mind (minds) to feed and nourish +…

Too Much Information, a saturated context for the human organism.  The black box crashes.  The connections run slow.  The screen jerky and fuzzy.  Head aches, breath thickens or shallows, noise is incommensurate – the signals scramble…

At first breach, first sign of imperturb…we check in, acknowledge – perhaps argue or fight or make love (i.e. signify our overwhelm and our intensity), sit still, register what we can…

and wake up, reminded:

WE MAKE ART.

            Once ground is touched, we go in (or out) – “seventh direction perception” – we begin to consciously process/perceive.

 

 

The query that sprouted is as follows: might the activity of art-a creative dialogic relation of index-sign-symbol, signifier-signifiant-and interpreter, i.e. “becoming-forth” – expand our perceptive capacities/processing?

In other words, in enacting the relationship of making, creatively, holistically, might we draw on more of the world’s availability – perceived and “dismissed” – a fuller context of experience less limited by intentional activities of categorical aims and constraints, thereby opening more of us to more of it in an open reciprocal dynamic interrelation, thereby sort of processing in “lump sums” – a gulping digestion of overwhelm?

We set aside prescribed roles, beliefs and opinions and work out, work into, an arbitrary generalized conventional (safe) medium…we fog our normalized paradigms and strictures of interpretive alertness – mores, values, expectations and censorship – we reach out gathering in.  Interact.  It seems something larger is carried, is moved – more than the medium, more than ourselves, more of a context, a world.

Does art extend our perceptive capacities?  Our scope of perception – to process, to be?  A kind of open-boundaried passage of experiencing between organism and world?

works in progress by Holly Suzanne
works in progress by Holly Suzanne

Putting Together

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings5 Comments
here it comes

So I’ve struggled a bit the past week or so with a plethora of projects: personal, family, parenting, school, commission work… mostly good things, deep rewarding things, and yet leaving me with a feeling that I have had very little time to simply create.  My wife challenges me often with the categories I concoct for myself between art and life, relation and solace, pleasure and responsibility, and by and large I agree that an artist’s life, a creative life, is a creative life, not a creative this-or-that, segregated activity.  And yet, nothing quite compares to a blank page not full of pre-existing questions or directions; an impulse externally unnecessary; a mark or word uncalled for.  It sometimes helps to think of things as stages, the “for now” syndrome that hope parasites.  But ultimately, I don’t quite feel “okay,” or balanced, somehow settled in my world, until time is available to sit at my desk, in my chosen or gathered surroundings, undirected but by what might rise from within.  Today I have plugged away seven hours or more at schoolwork, and granted myself an hour swept clear of such things.  The piece below is the result (click title or picture for text)

Putting Together

SLIM-pickings

On By NW FilbertIn Journallings1 Comment
A Supreme-Librarian in Meta-Space

Apparently I am soon to be one of these.

But just now, I’m

one of these…

and it’s the first official day of classes!

It reminds me of playing the saxophone.  Throughout high school, academics, vocal/piano and saxophone, tennis, religion and friends all vied for the top spots on my list of passions/interests/priorities and concerns…and all got ample time and attention.  Upon entering the load of college and the requirements of degrees in theology, music performance (piano & voice) and composition, saxophone-playing and tennis became those delights one participates in for fun and relief, the “free associations” as it were.

It is not my intention, but I can tell by these first few days of hours spent trying to navigate Blackboard, discussion threads, wikis and tikis and tavs, assignment links and syllabi texts, lists and conduits and course reserves, moduled lectures and more…that manoftheword is going to be leaking into to sheer babel and blather by the time he/I opens this page and clicks “new post.”

Case in point.

I’m hoping you’ll stick with me as my energies transfer and translate.  I’m expecting a rough patch of blurted postings until some new rhythm evolves and I’m able somehow to manage my time and brain between “free associations” and “required readings and writings / uploading assignments and creating virtual connections with teams.”  (Not that I don’t “require” a fair amount of the “free” to remain a person, it’s just…)

my time for tripping over a knot in the language ropes, plopping down and unraveling/tangling loose ends is getting gravely delimited.

I’ll figure it out

surely I’m OCD or enough anxiety-prone to devise

necessary borders and boundaries, divisions of timespace to synergize the tasks.

just giving you fair warning…there may be a lot of vomiting/swallowing circular writing here…and less obsessive drilling into pipes of terms and letterings…a little more of simply touching base or syncing up or finding bearings….