Trying to see the big picture

Last week I went to a session on scenario planning, sponsored by a University group that is interested in sustainability. We were asked to imagine what southeastern Minnesota would look like in 2050, across a range of areas: natural resources, social environment, politics, economics, culture and technology. I found that I enjoyed projecting my speculations out to the future, and equally appreciated hearing versions of the future from others with different perspectives.

Scenario planning seems to be something my brain is eager to do right now. Several years ago I became attracted to mind mapping; I think I've blogged on this topic before. This morning I sat down and started to think about what I might put on a current Martha map, based on what I see happening in my own life and in the world around me. The easy conclusions about personal priorities are those I arrived at some time ago: 1) do all I can to invest in a sustainable home landscape right now; and 2) work to create a supportive and resilient community and especially neighborhood around me.

Some of the actions that are unfolding from the first priority have included: planting asparagus, a cherry tree, an apple tree, rhubarb, and more plantings to come; and home improvements aimed at reducing the solar exposure of our house in the summer. This is because I believe that local permaculture (or permanent agriculture) will be increasingly important in the years ahead, and because I believe rising energy costs and average temperatures will make it expensive to cool our house. Currently, larger savings can be experienced in terms of reducing our carbon footprint through conservation measures. Technology may make solar and wind more affordable on a household basis in the future, but it is not practical now.

The actions unfolding from the second priority have included: being an active participant in a local sustainability group, and starting a sustainability effort in my local church. This is slow community building stuff but it has some long-term promise.

The more difficult questions that I keep coming back to are: how does art fit into this whole scheme? and: am I called to be a leader in any different or new ways? Perhaps the questions are unanswerable and simply need to continue to be asked. My art is clearly a gift to myself and to certain others, but for a broad group it is simply irrelevant. This is not any self-criticism of its quality (although I do think higher quality work will demand attention in ways that average work does not), but rather an assessment of the quality of attention that people have available these days. If we think of attention itself--the ability to be present and take information in--as a finite resource and therefore an attribute of sustainability, I think we would have to conclude that most of us have our attention strained beyond sustainable levels. There's far more information and visual material available than we have the capacity to take in. If attention is an aspect of sustainability, most of us should be trying to gather back our attention from where it is scattered, often uselessly and even wastefully. Yet that is easier said than done, because one still has to make some decisions about where the attention will be focused.

Many people feel called to take up some form of art these days, whether it is visual art or music or writing. I think this is a good thing, because these art forms are a way of focusing our attention. Many others are being drawn to meditation, which I see as a form of clearing the slate of the mind so that we can think more clearly. I'm not a virtuoso meditator but have been trying to get some minutes in every day. The wisdom traditions assert that this is a good thing and I am taking it on some faith, because I find it difficult. I also have some faith that the continued attention I place on my art will help me in my ongoing efforts to try to see the big picture.

Art: product or gift?

I visited family over Easter, and while I was there, I went shopping, not because I needed anything, but I thought I would be interested in the novelty of stores that we don't have in our town.

I visited a major label store with employees who were gifted at chatting with customers. I rapidly discerned that I didn't need the green slacks that were on sale, so I sat in a chair to wait while my mother tried on hers. Stacked next to a display of marked down purses were 4 hand-painted canvases, all by an artist named Parker, featuring decorative floral patterns. Like the clothing in the back of the store, all four canvases were 70% Off The Original Price, once $142, now $42. What a bargain! I could hardly resist, but I did. Seeing these paintings gave me the clearest possible example of art as a product, something that has always been difficult for me.

Here's the dilemma of my creative process: my art-making skills are a gift. When I say that, I'm not claiming that I am a genius, but just that the process of making a painting is a gift to me, and the result is a gift for some people, but clearly not all. The problem is, I often feel uncomfortable about showing my work to others. I regard my work as a gift, but most viewers regard it as a product, and I can't stand having it assessed as a product. There is something about turning a painting into a commodity that feels horrible to me. And I felt a little horrible when I saw those canvases in the store, stacked neatly, marked down, firmly in the commodity category.

I wandered up to the store entry-way and a cheery employee asked me whether I had found anything. I confessed that I hadn't, but that my problem was, I didn't really need anything. She backed away with an awkward smile--the stores depend on people who keep shopping, whether they need anything or not.

As I watched the hordes of women bringing their purchases to the busy cash registers, I thought about all these people eager to give a gift to themselves--buying something, forking over their capital for a little emotional lift. But shopping is a dysfunctional form of gifting; its satisfactions are transitory and for the most part it tends to be wasteful and unnecessary. Jonathan Porritt, "environmental guru" and advisor to the U.K. government, says that our shopping is killing the planet, and we need to shop much less.

Perhaps what is needed is to start becoming aware of the function of the products that we buy: are they necessary commodities, like food or shelter, or are they gifts--an expression of gratitude? We are drowning in our piles of goods, transitory and shallow products that we don't need, that are no gift to ourselves and others. What is needed is a more imaginative way at looking at the gifts of our time and labor. I am re-reading a book that examines the role of creative works like art and poetry in a commodified society. It's called The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, by Lewis Hyde. Like the just-begun painting at the top of today's thoughts, this book is helping me begin to re-imagine my work and my life as a gift, an expression of beauty and gratitude that has the potential of contributing to sustainability.

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.

Initial thoughts about beauty

In conversations over the past few days, I noticed some statements people made about beauty.

• An interior designer said that beauty can improve the world.
• A teacher said that exposure to beauty could reliably do more good than acts of social action.
• A priest quoted Pope John Paul as saying: "It is...necessary to create lifestyles in which the quest for truth, beauty, goodness and communion with others for the sake of common growth are the factors which determine...choices..."

Digging a little into my remembered store of aphorisms from the sufi poet Rumi, I remember one in particular: "Let the beauty you love be what you do." It's a particularly apt aphorism for an artist, who is presumably charged with creating beauty. But I need more proofs.

I see nature as being able to create beauty that is so exquisite in its detail. The beautiful array of colors and variety of pattern on a beach far exceed what an artist could create. I look at what nature has created, and feel the inadequacy of what I can create with paint and brush.

Another problem is the tendency in our culture to turn beauty into a commodity. The artist may enjoy the creation of beauty as a process--but the commodification of that created thing is not lovely. A philanthropist in our town is spending millions of dollars buying art which is loaned out to a local museum. The paintings being purchased have an intrinsic value because of their beauty, and an extrinsic value as investments. I calculated that one of the paintings on recent exhibit, a Monet, was purchased for about $2 million. As I gazed at this painting, was I engaged in worship of beauty or wealth?

Beauty is a subjective thing. History and commerce elevate beautiful people, beautiful destinations, and beautiful art. But when the philosophers speak of pursuing truth, beauty and goodness, what they really must be referring to is the human capacity to appreciate beauty in many contexts. When we can see the beauty in the face of an elderly friend, in the pattern of worn paint on the side of a building, and in a teenager's quirky sense of humor, we feel love, interest and connection. When we make a choice to focus on ugliness: political corruption, pollution, people's shortcomings, we disempower our goodness. An aphorism that I know to be true from my work as an artist is: we are what we pay attention to. It must be that by paying attention to beauty we awaken love and connectedness to others.

This is the first time I have tried to understand why beauty must be important. I still remain unconvinced that the beauty I have the capacity to create can actually serve others.