Lentangle II… I fell in love with art as a child and never
quite got over it. Drawing was my first love. If you needed a profile portrait
of a young woman with her hair up in a bun, I was the artist for you. Paper
dolls complete with wardrobes were a specialty also. In high school, Mr.
Goolsby broadened my experiences with art and I learned to love painting. An
elongated version of the Madonna rendered in yellows and browns with one red
bird perched on her hand still hangs in my studio. In my fifties, I went back to college to take
all those art classes I really wanted to take that were not a part of my degree
program. It was an intimidating and exhilarating ride.
Design One and Two, required before you could take any of
the fun classes, were black and white, pen and ink, black paint, no eraser can
help you art. Your finished product would be set up in front of the class
alongside everyone else’s creations for critique. Envy hissed in my ear when I
saw others work that seemed so graceful, effortless, just right. I’ve had a
love hate relationship with pen and ink since then.
Now I have a new love for pen and ink, Zentangle, a method
of meditative drawing that uses patterns to help organize and express your
inner self…superdoodling. You start with a three and one half inch square of
paper, quality paper, and a Sakura Pigma Micron pen. That’s it. Informed by a
book and a website (Zentangle.com), I practice for thirty minutes each day
producing one or two little squares. I am reading the story of Jesus’s journey
to Jerusalem before I begin drawing and will have a Zentangle for each reading.
A visual Lectio divina…
In Mark 10: 46-52, Jesus tells the story of Blind Bartimaeus,
the beggar who yelled at him asking for help. As I read and re-read this
passage, drawing a Zentangle after each reading, I became more and more
frustrated. They didn’t look or feel right. In the not quite sleep not yet
awake time, my answers came. Focused on the blindness and sight, eye shapes
filled my squares of paper, each of them filled with spring doodles reflecting
Bartimaeus’s springing up when Jesus called him Each of them were out of
balance, frenetic .
The shapes I was creating reflected what I thought I was
seeing when I read this story. The words were cluttering up my vision, floaters
in my soul’s eye. I believe anyone can be an artist. Mastery of the tools and
processes can be learned. The skill that defeats most of us is learning how to
see, really see what we are looking at.
Last night as I walked up from the stables, it was
beautifully dark with LED lights of other worlds glowing. When I see the vast
night sky ringed by the warm circle of mountains, I try to remember to take
time to really see what is there.
When I stand in stillness, see the night sky, its beauty and vast domain, the
reality of the Mystery takes my breath away. Who am I, a puny little piece of
this vastness, to call on God as if I could be heard? And now I see Bartimaeus
again…a blind beggar, covered up by the crowd, yelling into the darkness,
wanting to be heard, wanting to be helped… and I feel not so alone anymore.
Bartimaeus is my new guide for Lent. We are all blind but
some of us don’t know we cannot see. We move through our lives thinking we see
clearly, know what is required of us and produce accordingly, never really
seeing the darkness of the Mystery that surrounds us. Now maybe I can draw what
I feel, what I don’t know and can’t quite see, the reality of little lights in
the darkness with the soundtrack of my yelling at God. Are you listening, God?
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