The Nuanced Language of Image

This time last year I was engaged in a project I called the Pomegranate Exercise. I had begun finding hollowed out pomegranates on my walks in Ojai and the image of the empty fruit spoke to my imagination. I was (and am) working on a novel about an underground group of older women. The pomegranate, its lush innards gone, skin dried dark and leathery put me in mind of the Crone. After meditating on the fruits and on all the friends who were in various sorts of life transitions, I invited women I know to engage in a meditation on the topic of age, creativity, the pomegranate itself, whatever came up. I mailed the pomegranate shells to about twenty women friends and friends of friends who responded and asked them to create art about or with fruit. The resulting art and witness writing can be viewed on my website (click on collaborative projects).
Last year the pomegranate shells were few and far between, the scarcity contributed to my sense of their preciousness. My own intention was to feel less isolated as I engaged in my fiction writing as my primary form of expression during the winter months. I also sought to experiment with collaboration, a skill I would like to learn more about. Sallie Wolf, one of the artists, agreed to host a show of the actual objects in her studio and I committed to create an exhibit on my website. All of this transpired and was very fulfilling.

This season, the pomegranates appear very differently, many remain on the trees, eaten, but not as thoroughly eviscerated as last year. I suspect weather conditions made the fruit more abundant so the birds and animals didn’t have to do such a thorough job of cleaning them out. My association this year is that the fruits look like exploded grenades. (In Hebrew, the word ‘rimon’ is both pomegranate and grenade). I am offered an opportunity to consider that destruction is aspect of creation. Death, endings, finishing something -- all these are necessary for anything new to manifest. I have some resistance to this. There is some grief scratching at my door, just outside of my consciousness and I have been staying a little too busy to answer the door. Until I greet that guest I know that something else that is waiting cannot arrive. What’s keeping me? Do I need a suicide bomber to enter my space? What would such a being look like? The storms of the winter attempt to instruct me, tear off the roof, flood the living room, burn down the storage shed. But do I?
It is something to do with just being, not doing, withstanding the winds of chaos, the explosions of things breaking down, with my eyes wide open and my heart wide open and my feet planted firmly on the earth. And this, strangely, feels like death.

All the Rules are Changing

Last year I discovered this wounded soldier in myself. I was surprised to meet him because I was writing about how the term ‘spiritual warrior’ was incorrect. I never expected to see a soldier of any kind show up in my own work. Yet there he was. My intention was to understand what is happening in the world and what is the right response, the right attitude, the right action? Are we on a sinking ship? Is it hopeless? I had just returned from a leadership training with the Network of Spiritual Progressives. I created this piece in the class I teach on the Creative Process at the School of the Art Institute.
I wrote in my witness: “The lone individual defending himself yet scarily, tentatively extending his heart out into the world? The black sequined and netted material felt to me like the Shadow, dark, mysterious with beauty encoded in the sequins but it also needed red because pain and passion are so tangled up in the Shadow and our Shadow flows out into the world and affects how we are in the world. But the beautiful dark rose also flows from the Shadow stream within us.

I revisited the image this week, a year later. Everything calls me to pay attention to light yet these dark images come up. I try a method that Galit, one of my students is using. She is taking words and giving them definitions based on her felt sense, her intuition. I write, “discover”- reaching into the dark with faith. Then “teaching”- collapsing my telescope and seeing what others have in their hands. I feel like an anthropologist of wound technology. I can tell with my eyes closed how the wound occurred and if I can conjure light I can heal it. Are we supposed to be wandering like this? Is this the work?

I added the mask and ‘red badge of courage’ to the soldier piece. All of it feels old and incorrect, not what’s called for. I wrote in my witness: “My shadow is the heroic guy against the world, even as I have taught others to follow their pleasure through the creative process and trust where they are led…why is this wounded place of red and black asserting itself so strongly? I’ve done the dark; I’m done with the dark. I know it’s time for light, to follow bliss. The piece answers me: “Don’t pretend you are ready.” But I am, I protest. “No, you still prize your dark credentials, you all do who earned them. It’s hard to give them up. The world no longer needs your dark roses, it needs light and you resist that and it is mostly unconscious be cause you say YES, but your body knows you lie.” So I say, “I make a new intention: I see the light, I be the light, I am the light, I love the light.” The piece says: “Let those who have genuine darkness that hasn’t reached its expiration date come to you and give them light. Your darkness is over; funny thing to mourn, but its so.” What does it mean to mourn the dark? I don’t exactly know yet but it has something to do with giving up all the well-earned credentials and meeting the world with an empty bowl. More on that later.

The Fool

So I haven't been doing very well with blogging every week, so here I go again, trying. I'm getting ready to leave Ojai and return to Oak Park after a time where I have done very little besides write and work on a little film called The Fool.
The film is a collaboration with John (my husband) and working together has been an enlightening challenge. Without him I am sure the film would not have gotten finished. As in any involved project there is always something that could be improved or changed. Since this particular project is appallingly self involved there have been endless things to get hooked on as being awful or not good enough. The premise of The Fool is that I am seeking to understand what it means to be an artist and through dreams become one of the images that I have painted. Self indulgent, you say? No kidding! Film seems a more indulgent medium for self-portraiture (even a surreal self portrait) since my actual self is on the screen. Still, it was fun to do and at least I'm getting practice with the software!
The film will be shown at the Second Annual Oak Park Film Festival to be held September 22 & 23 at the Oak Park Public Library. At least I hope it will once Stan West takes a look at it! For more info on the festival, contact Stan West at stanwest1@msn.com for more information. At some point a version will be available on my website maybe? We'll see what the response is first!

The Pomegranate Exercise

So back in December I began a project that has just been completed. I found pomegranates on the ground here in Ojai that had been eaten out by birds and animals that looked just so beautiful to me that I began to collect them. Pomegranates, one of my favorite fruits, symbolize the womb and also the fruit of the tree of life. Since I am writing a novel about older women, Crones, saving the world through their creative endeavors, well one thing led to another and I decided to see if any of my friends would be inspired to meditate on a symbol of an empty womb. Twenty three women responded and each one transformed a pomegranate into an amazing work of art. You can see the results on my website patballen.com
(Once on the website, click on 'collaborative projects')
Sallie Wolf hosted a show of the work at her place, Calypso Moon, in Oak Park for a month and then using all the photos, writings and documentation, Hannah Jennings put the show up on my website.

My major creative work right now is writing, an every day endeavor that sometimes make me very lonely for the camaraderie of the studio and the touch of materials, so the Pomegranate Exercise served to connect me to other artists and friends (and friends of friends, since many women invited others). I loved all the organizational details, mailing out the poms, receiving them back transformed, and reading the wise words and reflections of other creative crones or, in some cases, crones-to-be. This project feels like a great experiment in 'virtual community' which I have been working towards since I closed Studio Pardes.

I hope you'll go and visit the exercise and let me know what you think. My deepest thanks to all the artists and to Hannah Jennings of HJ Designs who put the pages up and made them beautiful and easy to navigate. Anyone with ideas for more collaborative projects is invited to get in touch, many of the Pomegranate artists are interested in participating in more such efforts.

Homage to my Mom

Forty years ago today my mom died. I created a little altar space this morning with food, flowers and a yarzheit candle and an image of her from a piece of art I made.
Even though I have been working on the art piece, and planning the commemoration, when I awoke this morning I forgot. I just felt this sense of frenzy, like I had to 'get to work' right away! I sat down and journaled and I remembered. Forty years is a long time, much longer than the amount of time 'my mother' existed in my life. Yet for those forty years the relationship has continued to unfold through images. These images do not erase grief, sometimes they magnify it, but they hold a reality that has no other place in a culture of work and future oriented progress. The images let me participate in the incomprehensible mystery of life. Throughout the day I ate some of the beautiful tangerine and drank some of the sherry wine from the offering. The tangerine was a gift from my friend Aviva who came to paint yesterday. This little ritual is in my diningroom, not in a church or synagogue. I pass the altar as I go to put in the laundry, get up from my writing to pee, make lunch, and write a check for the guy who fixed my irrigation to water my new trees.
Above the sideboard that holds the altar is a painting called the Sabbath Bride.
It is a huge story painting about the return of the Shekinah, the feminine aspect of God. I believe these acts of making space in my everyday life for grief and honoring, for love and ritual create the path She needs to return. I think She is calling us to undo the separation of sacred and profane and weave them back together, to weave ourselves back together, mystery with the rational, self with other, with nature. I am deeply grateful to my own mother for teaching me how to intertwine the body with the spirit by honoring the soul, the simple, the true, the everyday mystery.