Bowing to the Artist Within

I walk through all the thoughts of my shadow,

I walk through my shadow in search of a moment.

When I carve wood, I often experience the wood as a person who is speaking to me. I listen to it, in a kind of "I-Thou" relationship. As the philosopher Martin Buber explains, there is an intimacy between ourselves and the things around us; in my case, between me and the wood. Recently, I read that the world-renowned potter Margaret Tafoya, from Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico, talked to her clay, called it "Mother Clay," and prayed to it before she shaped it into pots. It was easy for me to understand because of the way I work with the wood. Tewa, the language of Santa Clara, uses the same word,

, to mean both

and

. As potters work the clay, the pot and the person are intimately connected. The shape that becomes the pot embodies the spirit of both.

My friend, artist Lenore Tawney, was born in 1907. She is known for her collages and her weaving. Lenore is so youthful that I frequently forget her age, and we often chat as old friends about things of interest to us as contemporaries. I went to visit her recently and asked her about her spiritual connection to art. As I walk into her loft, which is both her studio and home, she tells me that a visitor recently told her that walking into her space is like walking into a prayer. The same visitor asked her if she strove for beauty in her work. "No," she said. "I strive for truth. It's all in my heart and my artmaking process. The artwork comes out like a great river." She chants mantras (prayers) all the time, all devoted to the Great Mother. One mantra is

, "I am that, that is God." Another, her favorite, is

, which she translates as "I bow to the god within me."

Swami Chidvilsananda, the Siddha Yoga master, instructs us to honor ourselves with the same mantra. She translates

a little differently, as "I honor the great primordial self within myself, awakening the conscious self to the vast eternal inner self." There is an interesting parallel here to talking to "Mother Clay."

Lenore was interested in the spiritual for as long as she can remember. She loved to go to vespers with her mother when she was little. Her first weaving was called "St. Francis and the Bird" and was dedicated to her father. She says that it was the beginning of her spiritual journey with art, her pilgrimage with it. It is as a pilgrim that Lenore sees herself on her journey in pursuit of truth. She recites the mantras on the route to find her artwork that "comes out like a great river."

The route in a pilgrimage is often rocky with many closed doors along the way. In my pilgrimage toward understanding, I grapple with one closed door after another. But even when I finally unlock these doors, I often do not find much there immediately. Marcel Proust referred to memory as coming "like a rope let down from heaven." Memory and experience exist like ghost following you silently around without visible history. Reflecting on this, I began to ask myself, How could we in a workshop setting, or alone in our studios, go deeper in our exploration? How could we work more closely with the raw subject of ourselves? How could we find that primitive material buried there, our own internal rivers, that can help us change ourselves and our artwork?

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