A question of balance

After many months of not making art, I am once again working on a painting. This is a work in progress, which illustrates my current search for balance.

The sustainability of the earth is an issue of balance. When our own lives get unbalanced, our bodies become unbalanced; when many bodies get unbalanced, the parts contribute to an unbalanced whole. Al Gore's first book on environmental issues, which he wrote in 1992, was titled Earth in the Balance, and the title itself has become a popular metaphor for a world that seems to be tilting in a profoundly unbalanced manner, due to our human actions.

My recent meditation on the issue of balance was inspired by a memoir by Jungian analyst Robert Johnson, entitled Balancing Heaven and Earth. The book describes Johnson's attempts to create balance in his own life, between being and doing, between his desire for community and his need for solitude, between his feeling orientation and the necessity of living in a world that values thinking and sensation. I felt profoundly connected to Johnson's sensibilities: in Myers-Briggs terminology, we are both INFP's, a shorthand that describes us as intuitive introverts with a feeling orientation. Certain personality types predominate in different countries, as Johnson learned in the course of many visits to India.

"America is," Johnson said, "collectively speaking, an extroverted culture that prizes rational thought above all else and values people accordingly. We also place a high value on material things and how much money one can collect, and in that way we are a sensate culture. Our thinking and sensation functions have brought the scientific, technological, and mechanical aspects of existence to an apex in the West, of which we are justly proud. But we have done this at the expense of our feeling. Practically everyone in the West becomes lonely, discontented, and uneasy because our capacity for feeling is in a terrible state of disrepair..."

I have recently become aware that my introverted feeling function was feeling desperate and deprived. I have been wandering in extroverted thinking realms for the last 6 months, blogging, starting community projects, speaking before the City Council, and doing volunteer work. At the end of the day, I became aware that I craved silence, that human speech itself felt painful to me. To arrive at some balance, I restarted my morning meditation practice, and set aside some of my continuous striving for community improvement in favor of painting. It's unsurprising that the subject of my current work is a mandala. Mandalas are visual manifestations of our need and capacity for for wholeness, centeredness and balance.

Several people expressed dismay over the past few months that I had stopped painting. Two of them were artists. This isn't because of a thirst to see my work; rather it reflects an anxiety that access to the creative flow that feeds us all can be interrupted. This is why we need art on some visceral level. It is not so much that we need the material manifestations of art in our life, but we need the lubrication that artists provide for the human spirit. If we truly are interconnected with one another, cessation of the creative flow in one person affects others. This extroverted sensate world may not fully appreciate the creative liquid of the arts, but it nonetheless craves the oxygen that creative expression provides to a world out of balance.