Trying to ... allow ...

"Trying to understand is
like straining through muddy water.
Be still and allow the mud to settle."
Lao Tzu

 

 

 

 

"Sea" shell ...?

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Ballpoint pen in 6x4" sketchbook. I don't remember if it came in a pack or I found it in the yard. Either way. I like how the back-lighting produced a glow you can see right through it, especially in the open end there. Wonder who made it home.

 

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"Once we start to draw, all of a sudden we begin to see again. Were we so blind? How could we have ignored the beauty, the intricacies of these 'simplest things' ... The moment the eye opens up, all becomes equally fascinating, equally inspiring, equally pregnant with meaning."
— Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing: Meditation in Action, Frederick Franck

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Made in the Shade: Main St.

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"The eye does not judge, moralize, criticize. It accepts ... the long bamboos being long, the goldenrod being yellow.”
― Frederick Franck, The Zen of Seeing

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Have you had mysterious experiences? Is this kundalini? | J. Krishnamurti

Wintoe

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"I don’t really know whether art can exist without a certain degree of tranquillity or spiritual poise; without a certain amount of quiet you can have neither philosophy nor religion nor painting nor poetry. And as one of the specialties of modern life is to abolish this quiet, we are in danger of losing our arts together with the quiet of the soul that art demands." - Saul Bellow

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Immerse...

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This drawing is pencil in an old 11x8.5" "Academie Sketch Diary"...

...of a creek that ran behind a rest stop south of Fayetteville, AR. I was camped out there for a while, in the late 70s, and often did my morning meditation sitting on a flat rock out in the creek. No, not the one you see in the drawing, as this spot was in full view of the whole rest stop. I'd go down the creek - away from the viewer in this picture - and around the bend, out of sight, where it was just me and the cows. They came from a field to the right, where you can see light through the trees there...

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HELLO...Hello...hello...

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Nothing personal...

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I had me a right ponder on the throne this morning. The value of conceptual knowledge. Would we sense what's good to eat and what would kill us without conceptual knowledge? Could pure senses tell the difference? Moot point since everything coming in through the senses is filtered and translated by already existing knowledge. That's what tells us there's a thing separate from us at all. Manifest reality - or nature, if you will - is not nice, or mean, or indifferent. It doesn't produce pscilocybin shrooms to thrill us, nor Deadly Nightshades to kill us. It doesn't extend one life a century and end another in minutes because of who they were. When I die, it won't be about me. It happens whether you're ready or not. If death is impersonal, doesn't it follow that life is?

 1/21/16

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necessary-not

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16x20" oil on canvas, 2013

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Small sketches...

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...from a recent outing. 3.5x5.0 sketchpad, ballpoint, all from the front seat of the van. One ok, one barely ok, and one unfinished. I had a rider during that last one, who finished her business inside before I did mine outside. My Mom. I didn't figure she wanted to sit there and wait while I doodled, and even if she did, she was blocking the view.

I prefer to go out sketching alone.
And without time constraints, if possible. That way you can lose yourself in it, really see what your looking at.
The first one was like that; nowhere to be and a fresh mocha in the cupholder. I lived a few minutes in that one.
Second one, the day was wearing on and I thought a little more about time. Just wanted to hurry and grab those clouds; didn't really sink in to it.
I guess I'm trying to find meditation in the act of sketching.

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