Stick Snap

Stick Snap
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao.

Happy New Year!

I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce you to my new Blog site. It’s not really meant to be a chatty place. Rather, it’s meant to be an online gallery where I can share my paintings and images. I call it Silence: A Gallery.

The name is meant to emphasize that what I am attempting in my art is to awaken the experience of Silence in others. Silence is the form in which I most readily experience the Absolute. Some have called it Zen mind. I’m not sure the words or exact term matters. What matters is the experience.

But, by way of commentary, I do offer these words by Edward Readicker Henderson which I have excerpted from his article, “The Sounds of Silence,” that appears in the Jan/Feb 2007 issue of Spirituality and Health.

Holding very still, I listen, hard.
Some people say they have heard the northern lights, a crackling like sheets from the dryer and full of static.
I don’t hear anything.
And that makes me wonder: what else am I not hearing? …

Sounds arise, fall away, as transient as the breath itself. From where I sit, writing on my back porch, I hear the scratch of my pen on the paper, the neighbor’s radio, the creak of my oak chair when I lean back. The jet buzz of a rufus hummingbird punctuating the chirp of at least three other kinds of birds I can’t name.

I feel stupid for having no words to describe their sounds, no language that can even meet theirs with understanding…

I hear buses rumble by past a block away.
I cannot hear the slightest trace of the butterfly that flits its pale wings over the vast expanse of my unmowed lawn. Not the slightest trace.

What else am I missing?…

If I sit hear long enough, will I hear a sound that suddenly makes it all make sense, the tracer bullet of enlightenment hitting me right in the third eye?

Or will I simply hear butterfly winds?

Zen master Dongshen wrote, “How extraordinary! How extraordinary! The insentient express the Way! How mysterious! If you listen with your ears, it is incomprehensible. If you hear sounds with the eyes, it is truly knowable.”

So I invite you to visit Silence: a Gallery. (I've added a link to the links list.) Perhaps you will experience some hint of what awaits discovery when "you hear sounds with the eyes."

Namaste and Happy New Year.