A sculptor friend of mine who has been following my progress, posted this question to me when she saw the above image: “What is going through your mind as you render yourself invisible?”
Truth be told, in the moment of working, little is going through my mind. Which to me is evidence of a true meditative state. The time that we are living in is filled with so much stimulus agitating the mind that we rarely achieve “no mind”. Since arriving in Star, North Carolina, a little over a month ago I have changed my daily routine. I no longer immediately plug into a news feed in the morning and instead sit down to read, journaling the thoughts that bubble up in response. I’ve swapped streaming programming at the end of my day for a good old fashioned puzzle. I have no idea what’s going on out there. While I’m becoming invisible within the form that I am creating, the world is becoming invisible to me. And I like it. I like it very much.
I have a little less than a month left as I finish up my residency at STARworks. Born Again is on schedule and will be finished before I start to pack up my things. After this I jump in my car and head for Pecatonica, Illinois, before returning back home to Chicago. What’s in Pecatonica? Silence. Total and complete silence. I will be attending a ten day silent meditation retreat. No devices. No books. No journals. I will be in the company of strangers with whom I will not speak.
It feels as though the work I have been doing during this residency has been preparing me for an experience that most of us would find intolerable. And maybe prior to making myself invisible with 6,000 + pounds of clay I would have.