Waiting for Light

It’s been a year since I’ve written anything here. I won’t bore you by trying to explain what happened. Let’s just say it’s been like that old C & W tune, “Dropkick me Jesus through the Goalposts of Life*” and that since February I’ve just been trying to regain my strength, get back to my place in line, and find a way back home. Making art is such a deeply personal internal practice, there are so many psychological layers, experiences, and adjustments involved in the actions of doing art, and the whole process becomes an unconscious flow of meaning and action, one thing leading to another. Within that process the separate world of one’s personal art, symbology, and mythology expands, morphs, is enriched and nourished, moves and matures. When I’m estranged from that world for any length of time, whether by choice or by accident, it’s extremely disorienting. It’s like waking up on a strange beach without a clue about what to do next, where I was sailing toward, or what I was thinking before finding myself marooned. In the face of so much  confusion and exhaustion, I tried to stick to the simple and necessary this year and wait for the fog to lift.

Sumi-E ink painting by Rita J. McNamara

Every autumn the earth pulls a leafy blanket over herself, we harvest the garden, cut, split, and stack the firewood, and hang up all the tools in the shed. It’s time to conserve, take stock, pull together the lessons of the year, wait for the darkest night, wait for the light. The equinox is a fulcrum, a stillpoint, the moment when earth tips from darkness into light and the days begin to grow. It’s dreaming time. What a paradox that the longest darkest night hatches dreams of light, coming days, future hopes. Most of the traditional agricultural calendars begin with spring but for me the year starts when light begins to grow, the moment following the winter solstice.

Sumi-E ink painting by Rita J. McNamara

This year I want to pay more attention to the ordinary days of my life. I always say that and then every autumn I realize again how much time has slipped away, how many days were swallowed up in frantic jobs, circling worries, anxiety, sadness, scary scenarios. There’s plenty to worry about, we all know that. But somehow I stubbornly believe it’s still possible to rest in more of the moments of my life and less in the fear. How to pay attention. That’s the question. How to not get “tossed away,” as Katagiri Roshi* used to say, by every little headline, crisis, upset, argument or accident. The Japanese adopted the Chinese calendar of 24 seasons sometime in the 6th Century  and divided it even further into 72 micro- seasons. Four main seasons timed by the sun, by the solstices and equinoxes, just like ours. Each season is divided into six “small seasons,” named for weather or planting features such as “Time of Big Heat” or “Time of Greater Snow.”  Each “small season” is divided again into three 5-day groups, also usually tagged with weather, plant or animal observations such as ”frogs begin to sing,” “ice thickens on the lake,” “cherry blossoms fall.” This traditional almanac was used until 1873 when Japan modernized and adopted the Gregorian calendar. The old calendar is still popular, though, especially with farmers, fishermen, artists and poets.

Sumi-E ink painting by Rita J. McNamara

My experiment this year, beginning with the winter solstice, is to create my own personalized 72 season almanac, step by step. I’m calling this first small season “Waiting for Light,” and hope to include notes, maybe small sketches, photos, collages, or ephemera. I’m calling the 72 micro seasons “tinctures,” meaning something that colors or tints, infuses or imbues a substance (in this case, time) and I expect my tincture almanac will include thoughts and observations in addition to weather and planting lore. It’s an experiment  in art, observation and attention and I expect it to develop as I go along.

*Notes:

1. “Dropkick me Jesus” recorded in 1976 by Bobby Bare and written by Paul Charles Craft.
2. Katagiri Roshi was the director and teacher at the Minneapolis Zen Center during the 70’s and 80’s.