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Painting by Lynn Lobo
We have a beautiful offering coming from Australia this month to share with you all. Dear friend Cheyne Morris sent this artwork and reflection entitled On Silence created by local artist Lynn Lobo. An artist in her own right, Cheyne carries a sensitivity and experience of “falling silent” ~ abiding in the place of centre and listening quietly for the early whispers of a new creative inspiration. With much gratitude to both Cheyne and Lynn,
Peri and Barbara
Next week I head into an artist residency in Finland titled SILENCE. This residency is an opportunity for me to be mostly silent for 1 month in a forest, meditate and make paintings. It will be winter, cold and quiet. Coming from an Australian summer, I'm wondering what silence means to me as an artist, and as a human being while I prepare to travel to the other side of the planet.
I feel we can't know silence unless we are aware of the impact of distractions. When distracted, we are pulled in different directions and lose our centre. The ground beneath us feels unstable. Distraction is a spatial experience. I am distracted by something that is not me. I am not in this present moment. We compare ourselves to others and feel our inadequacies. We may have lists to achieve something and feel driven. We compete and strive. Competition and drive are not inherently bad. The difficulty is in losing our connection to the centre of our being. We can feel lost, and suffer. Suffering is hard. Who wants that?!
Sometimes we consume without thought in order to relieve our discomfort. We may even consciously do it. Endless consumption can become a habit as we wrestle with ourselves to avoid silence. Silence can be confronting.
Silence is as much an inner condition as it is an outer environment. We can feel grounded and silent in a noisy atmosphere, or feel distracted in an eerily quiet place. I recall the experience of sitting in a completely dark cave, without a sound. No forwards or backwards. Just the uneven ground beneath me. In that moment, I realized that silence has no limits. Perhaps that is why we say we 'fall silent'.
In that fall, our senses are alive. We sense into the vast field of being. Preconceptions, past and future drop away. Silence is not about sound. Rather, it’s an embodied experience. We become silent. We become this present moment. The boundary that separates inside from outside is lost. Excerpt from Lynn Lobo's blog