Blind contour spirituality

Yesterday I learned about blind contour drawing from an art teacher friend. She asks students to draw with a continuous line and without looking at the page and finds the product is often the students' best work of the class. Blind contour drawing is used effectively in art therapy, as described in this find-of-the-day blog. It makes sense to me that it could help people such as myself with a tendency for over-thinking. It took till today, while describing this to another friend, for me to realize this is precisely what I'm trying to do with my spirituality too.

If you think about what you are drawing too much, you are likely to let your logical thinking brain tell you what it thinks the subject "should" look like. This is where a good deal of bad drawing comes from. When you draw a bad representation of something, it's because you are drawing what your logical brain "thinks" the subject looks like and not what is truly there...Blind contour drawing makes your logical brain shut up for a while. It can't try to step in and correct what it can't see and it can't see what your hand is drawing...The results of these drawings will be awful. Your lines will be all over the place. That's ok. 

When you break out of your logical thinking mode and just let your senses of seeing and touch take over, magical things begin to happen. 

That is the realm of imagination and dreams. 

That is where art lives.

Carol Rosinski

My lines are all over the place. And it's ok. It's ok because what is created is True in its imperfection - it's where Art lives. I sometimes try to do this with words, as a way of getting at the art inside me - I'll just write down whatever words or phrases come to mind. It's rather surreal, but I think for me it's a similar process.

I've been researching hell recently since being asked to contribute to a project (more on which later). It's proving very interesting indeed especially since I'm also, aptly, at the point in reading The Odyssey were Odysseus has just been to Hades and talked to dead people. I have asked around among my acquaintances to see what others think and one respondent replied that he doesn't like the concept, that it makes him cringe, but that Jesus warned of its reality and so he felt called to respond. Leaving aside the question of the interpretation of Jesus' words, I find it interesting how little importance this acquaintance places on his own gut reaction and how little value it has to him in comparison with where the lines are supposed to be. I understand that we can't always 'like' our faith any more than we can always 'like' life, but I hope I'm learning to hear the dissonance in a remark like his and take it as a lesson that I might also have times when I'm deaf to my own voice, blind to my own vision, focused on the lines that I didn't draw.

As the yoga dvd guy says, we have to look for the 'dead places' in ourselves, both in our bodies and in our souls - our blind spots - and, once we are aware of them, listen to them and try to energize them back to life, to be part of a bigger whole.

I know my innocence

and I know my unknowing

but for all my successes

I go through life

like a blind child

who cannot see,

arms outstretched

trying to put together 

a world.

And the world

works on my behalf

catching me in its arms

when I go too far.

David Whyte ~ 

extract from What I Must Tell Myself