The encouragement of light

For some reason, this week I seem to be fixated on faces.

It began, I think, with a comment my daughter made on my blog around the time I discovered Anita Feng's raku buddhas: she suggested that perhaps I needed to make some buddhas of my own.

When in art class last week we learned a deliciously simple way to make prints from sheets of styrofoam, I realized I'd found a perfect vehicle for making buddha faces. So I began attempting to draw them -- they always seem so simple -- but they weren't quite coming out right, and I decided I might need to be more intentional about it, to draw while in a meditative state, drawing more out of my own understanding of what Buddha is rather than copying other people's renditions.

On my last morning in Portland I was awakened at 4 a.m., and for the next two hours, my dreams were haunted by Photoshop, of all things: I had an idea for playing with portraits that insisted on replaying itself over and over in my head. So when I got home I began working with this technique, trying to achieve the images that seemed so clear in my dreams.

And then yesterday, in my study group on Jesus, the Teacher Within, we were given this assignment: to take time to look in the mirror and gaze into our own eyes and ask – “Who am I?” “Who do I say I am?”

Looking obediently at my face in the mirror this morning, I realized, all of this activity is revolving around faces. And as a photographer, wouldn't it make more sense to use what I KNOW to create the face of Buddha, rather than to leap into another field where I have so little expertise? Perhaps I need to combine the desire to create Buddha faces with the Photoshop technique I dreamed up, and somehow know that I am coming to understand my own face and the face of Jesus in the process.

So before blogging I sat down at my computer, planning to try this new technique on a buddha face. But when I went to my file of statues to seek out a buddha face to work with, I realized I wasn't quite ready to tackle a buddha, and I chose instead to work with a statue I had photographed at my friend Carole's house up on Shaw Island. And this is the result.

I have not given up on the idea of making prints of Buddha faces: I think it's important to stretch myself, and any activity that involves drawing is a stretch for me! Plus I suspect that the act of concentrating on the face of Buddha is a valuable kind of active meditation.

But I also realize that in creating this particular image I am also answering -- for today, at least -- the question of who I am. I am reflective. I am woman. I am more comfortable with a camera than with a pen. And I am drawn to and bathed in light. Which brings me to the Hafiz poem with which we began our meditation session yesterday:

“How did the rose ever open its heart
and give to this world all of its beauty?
It felt the encouragement of light against its being:
Otherwise we all remain too frightened.”

It takes courage to look in the mirror and truly see our selves. And it takes courage to open to new ideas, to learn new skills, to see familiar objects in new ways. But I feel the encouragement of light, and will press on.