January 26, 2016 – Awareness and attention are EVERYTHING!

A small painting I started so I could attend to my painting commitment while I traveled. This is the result of four painting sessions – two of them in airports!

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Somewhere along the way – a really, really long time ago – an idea got ahold of me that the most important thing, what makes us us, is what we pay attention to and how we pay attention. I have no idea how this idea came to me – maybe it was a spontaneous insight that was bestowed upon me, like passing Go and collecting $200 on my way around the board. But it’s stuck with me. And lately it’s really alive in me. I’m hearing from others and trying it on, and am seeing that it’s so true! I know a woman Nancy, who pays attention to birds. She sees them wherever she goes, she learns about them, so she has enormous knowledge about them – she knows about their migrations and habitats. And it is through her, that I’ve been converted so that I only buy recycled paper products, in order to help save the virgin Boreal forests in Canada, that are lumbered for fluffy toilet paper. Her attention to birds has changed me.

I’m continuing to read through parts of “The Master and His Emissary” – the book by Iain McGilchrist, that I shared with you last week. In describing what he’s discovered about the left and right brain, he talks a lot about attention. He says: “The kind of attention we pay actually alters the world: we are, literally, partners in creation. This means we have a grave responsibility, a word that captures the reciprocal nature of the dialogue we have with whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves.” So, based on this, how we pay attention – how we attend to everything apart from us, creates our relationships with all of it, which then creates our reality. He uses the example of a mountain: to a navigator it’s a landmark, a source of wealth to a prospector, a many-textured form to a painter, a dwelling place of the gods for another. He says there is no way to distinguish from these points of view, what the “real” mountain is. I find this fascinating but also really key, if we want to be intentional about not only our own lives – but the future of life on earth.

I just spent the weekend – along with 195 others – with Alison Armstrong – one of my teachers. We explored the questions that we consciously – and more often unconsciously – “live in” and the impact they have on us. In looking at it, I see the questions we live in determine the quality of our lives, because they govern our attention. If – as I realized I do sometimes – I am living through the filter the question of: “what if I don’t know enough, have enough experience, have what it takes?”, then I pay attention to all the things, for example, how many more years other art teachers have been teaching – I compare myself to them and I don’t measure up. This can stop me from moving forward on my ideas and inspirations. But I also realized that I don’t just live in that question – I also have come to live in the same question shifted: “what if risking not knowing enough, is exactly what is required and what will give me the knowledge and experience I fear I don’t have?”

Alison had a guest, Bill Harris, an author and teacher on the brain, who talked with us about the role awareness plays in our lives. Without it, we have no choice in how we feel, think or act. We operate on autopilot. Awareness is the observer that pays attention to us as we do what we do. If there is something that isn’t producing our desired results, with awareness, we can choose to do things differently in the future. Without awareness, we have no such choice. We are stuck.

And of course awareness and attention are critical in our painting lives. Maria a new retiree, who has just taken up painting and is really throwing herself at it, came in one day to report that she’s seeing differently. She is noticing things she hasn’t before – like, while crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, the interesting view of the far tower through one of the openings in the tower close to her. I hear others report similarly – in the middle of their days – wondering how to paint clouds or trees, or whatever is in front of them. I find myself noticing light and how it casts itself on things in the world – all the time. We start painting and our attention shifts to the ways our visual world is calling out for us to paint it.

I realize that mostly what people want, when they are drawn to paint in one of my groups, are painting skills. They want to know how to paint – a water drop, a fuzzy background. I’m really happy to share all I know about painting watercolor, in order to help free the art that is within whoever is in front of me. And what I’m really, more deeply, called to do is to help grow your awareness – your capacity to see. I want for you to be able to discern – color, shape, shade in your subjects – the what you are painting, as well as to pay attention to what happens with a certain amount of water, paint, size of brush – the how you are painting.

What I was reminded of this weekend, is that the more we focus our attention on things, become aware of things and practice things, we actually change the physical structure of our brains. We grow our capacities. And by becoming more aware of our surroundings, by paying closer attention, we shift our experience of the world. When our experience shifts, everything changes.

I’m often amazed by the incredible specialization that people have in our world. The internet has revealed this – and even fostered it. You can find out about anything on Wikipedia – all because there are people who pay attention to these things – giving the rest of us the gift to grow our awareness of them. I’m so glad that all these bases are covered, so that I can do my part – attending to the transformation that we undergo, as we bring forth the art that is in us. We make our art and this changes us, and it changes the world.

With my love,

Cara