Saturday Sketchbooks: Meditation, Therapy, Breathing, Sketching

The new year started with Olive, Brittany, and me curled up in a tent in Bastrop State park. We didn’t really know if Olive would be able to stay through the night without barking, but we’ve been wanting to incorporate camping into our life and I’ve been taking to marking the passage of time with these long hikes in nature for some reason.

Birthdays, anniversaries, and now new years.

When I’m walking and at mile 3 or 4, I can feel the breath in my chest with the steady in and out rhythm, my mind is focused, I feel present.

Olive did great with us, she was happy to be walking, and at night she curled up next to us when it got too cold. She would bark and then settle down when we reminded her everything was ok. As she fell asleep we could hear her breathing in and out.

In meditation they teach you to focus on your breath and come back to it. As you settle into the space you find yourself focused on the rising and falling action of the breath. Sometimes you count the breaths, one with the in breath, two with the out breath, up until a count of 10. You pause. Then you repeat.

When I was younger and it would storm, or the tree would hit its branches against the window too hard, we would rush downstairs to sleep on the floor of my parents bedroom. There, when I was scared, and the thunder too loud, or the lightning too bright, I would find myself focused on the steady and repetitive breathing of my dad and mom. When I was a bit older, and angry, my grandmother would pull me aside and tell me to count to ten. She’d ask me to take deep breaths, and count slowly to ten. And I found myself, throughout my life, doing this.

When I was even older than that, and I found myself alone in my apartment for the first time, in a new city without many friends, and I struggled to fall asleep. I would lay in bed and focus on my breathing, I would count to myself the breaths coming in and out.

And so in this way, without really realizing it, I found myself practicing this behavior of being present with the body and breath throughout my life.

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My drawings for the beginning of this year have been focused on the thoughts that come to my mind. Observing them as they pass by. Sometimes I imagine an object and what it would say, sometimes I just use a speech bubble to label a bad drawing. Sometimes I use them as some sort of omnipresent narrator describing the world around me. But I’ve also just been getting back into the practice of building these odd spaces and compositions. Piecing together like and unlike objects until something forms. Some sort of organic structure and narrative on a single page.

Part of me thinks about these things, and sketches, as singular comic pages. I’ve come to realize lately that my thought processes don’t follow neatly the structures and boxes of traditional comic work. And I think about these pages as a reflection of how I build up a singular idea of something. Thoughts jump from one subject or conversation to another, building on each other, and finally forming a thought or semi coherent narrative at the end.

In meditation they teach you to observe your thoughts. To think of them sometimes as traffic in the street passing by. Simply observing as they pass, noting them, but not running out into traffic to try and stop it or move it or redirect it.

Sometimes in "Art" I find myself trying to redirect my thoughts, and opinions, and mark making, and impulses to something productive and meaningful. And the more I try to redirect them that way, the more I have become exhausted and tired of making and creating. But when I show up and just sit with the work, or sit with the practice, I find myself creating things and making things again. Creating interesting spaces, building up narratives, making work that seems visually interesting and fulfills me.

In my professional life there is a lot of structure, and order, and project management, and checking in, and proofs, and reviews, and critiques, and neatly held projects that have to fit together. The work is orderly, things exist on a grid structure, margins are approved across multiple assets. Text hierarchy and informational hierarchy is structured and debated and discussed and approved. And these processes and structures lead to better outcomes. They lead to finished projects, and reliable assets and structures and systems that talk to each other.

In meditation showing up for your practice every day is the most important thing. Consistency over perfection. Because the point of the exercise (if there is a point at all) is not to have some grand outcome or result, but rather to be here in the moment doing. And acquaintance (friend?) of mine online tells me that the most important aspect is just being consistent. And so the last couple of weeks I’ve been laying out my blanket and meditating every day. In the same way the last couple of weeks I have been sitting down to draw, even in the results of that drawing are just fine.

As I've been sitting down day after day to create work, and make things again, and write about making things. I find myself with a little more clarity every time, a little more space in creativity, a little bit more awareness of the the purpose and reasons that drew me to Art and creativity in the first place. In the same way as I have been sitting down day after day to meditate I find more clarity in my mind, or room in head for ideas and thoughts, more patience for dealing with the stresses and anxieties around me. In therapy we talk about how practicing the behaviors and being consistent with them leads to progress. How every time we pause and consider, and give space to a thought or a feeling, that it gets easier to do every successive time. For me I've been reflecting on how these practices are all related. Therapy, Meditation, and Art. How these work together for me to build a sort of clarity in the mind.