Isn't she something?
I was searching for tree references this morning and found "The Spirit of the Komachi Cherry Tree" by Yoshitoshi, a 19th-century Japanese woodcutter. If you'd like to see more of this man's work (and quite a lot more besides), here's the link to a very nice Canadian site that was kind enough to let me use the image: The Art of the Print.
The spirit of a cherry tree. It absolutely entrances me.
I was searching for tree references this morning because my dedication of yesterday started bearing fruit today. I'd found a passage in a small book by Paramahansa Yogananda a couple of days ago:
"...Concentrate your efforts on successfully maturing the spiritual tree, that you may someday gather the ripe fruit of self-realization."
The passing image of a spiritual tree touched me, and this morning I started nosing around...trees, fruit, abundance, the Divine Mother...ripe for exploring in color and words...The elusive goal in the mist...
Then something else funny happened. My journals are square black books with white pages, filled with fine black ink and colored pictures, where I've recorded thoughts and goings-on for almost 20 years. I have a mile-high pile of them. In the beginning, they were full of my newness in Europe, and later of my art. These days, they're full of meditation. They are the tracks of where I put my feet.
So, because it's always what I do first, I sat with my journal to begin this process of trees and fruit and the Divine Mother, and suddenly I knew that, for the first time, my art needs to be elsewhere, in another book, another place...or rather, meditation needs to stay alone. Odd, I thought...I'd always treated them as two parts of one whole, but I see now that things have changed and they no longer are. This feels momentous, strange, nothing I can explain, and yet impossible to do any other way.
What this means, of course, is that I need more notebooks, so I've already placed the order. I like to use the Square and Chunky Sketchbooks from Seawhite of Brighton. Lots of space on those white pages, and there's something so perfectly irking about a square format.
Time to go sit under the cherry tree.
Comments