Studying visual art as an undergraduate, I found myself really wanting to be proficient at drawing and having no talent for it. Yes, of course you can learn to draw after hours of sitting in front of still-life arrangements configured of things like bicycle wheels, wigs and faded plastic fruit. And the challenge was not to look at the wig and transcribe what you think a wig is but to stay focused on shapes, textures and contrasts. The process taught me a lot about letting go of what I thought a shoe or my hand was, and begin to look closely by noticing the relationships of shapes, colors and contrasts.
One of the drawing techniques that I have been pondering lately is blurring your vision so things translate visually as blocks of shapes and contrast. It is relatively easy, squinting your eyes until what you are looking at becomes grainy. The technique helps me to look at a tree and let go of how I normally process a tree. Mostly, it came up as language: the tree is a pine tree, twenty-feet high, thick with pinecones, and it’s a ponderosa pine. Blurring my eyes allowed me to translate what I saw into fundamentals – blocks of shapes and contrasts.
Lately I have been questioning how to soften my gaze when approaching challenges or areas of my life that feel stuck. I recognize how frequently we want absolutes in living and fall into a tendency to insisting things be a certain way. We may be working toward manifesting committed partnership and be projecting what we want upon our current mate. And we spend our time infuriated that our partner is planning to spend two years in South America right about the time (in our time-line) when we are ready to start a family or move to the East Coast to advance our current career. How do we approach this with a soft gaze?
It feels like allowing particulars to become blurry and look at the shapes of things, it can help us be less attached to all of our knowing. So our partner is striving for humanitarian efforts in the world and continues to light up when describing the work to a friend. We might notice our own response includes tightening in the belly and uncomfortable nods and smiles but later we find ourselves distant and in an argument. Most likely the thing that shows up is that our partner’s desires are not aligned to ours. How can we soften our gaze here? Are we upset at the thought of living without our partner or does it instigate an old familiar feeling of abandonment? Are we committed to this person and willing to look at places of compromise or are we afraid without them our desire for life-long commitment might slip us by? And softening even more, what is this about, why in the world are we here in this experience, dealing with this conflict?
To soften even further, what happens if we release the need to cling to our perceptions and just notice the things in a less focused way? Okay here is this experience; it is butted up against my partners experience and there is some tension. I will just notice it. And when we start to loosen our perceptions, sometimes in the space of quiet our inner self, our intuitive side has a chance to come up and show us something. We begin to notice our motivation is like a freight train expecting everything else to stop when we are passing. Or there is this little voice that really wants to go to South America but is afraid. Or maybe the universe starts presenting things that lead us to a new arena of our career that we did not think was possible. And finally, the softening of the gaze feels like a way to relax into life rather than push up against it.