Book of This Place: The Land, Art, and Spirituality

Book of This Place

the land, art & spirituality

deborah j. haynes

BOOK OF THIS PLACE

The Land, Art, and Spirituality

Copyright © 2009 Deborah J. Haynes. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Pickwick Publications

A Division of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

Chapters 6 and 15 are adapted from material that previously appeared in the author’s The Vocation of the Artist, © 1997 Cambridge University Press. Used by permission of the publisher.

isbn 13: 978-1-60608-703-9

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Haynes, Deborah J.

Book of this place : the land, art, and spirituality / Deborah J. Haynes.

Photographs by Valari Jack and Deborah J. Haynes.

xxviii +

184

p. ;

23

cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn

13

:

978

-

1

-

60608

-

703

-

9

1

. Landscape — Symbolic aspects.

2

. Metaphor — Religious aspects.

3

. Art and society.

4

. Art and religion.

5

. Creation (literary, artistic, etc.). I. Jack, Valari. II. Title.

n71 h34 2009

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

To David Thorndike

Table of Contents

Title Page

illustrations

preface

acknowledgments

prologue: path as metaphor

part one The Land

1 ivydell

2 temenos

3 water

4 the sisters and brothers

5 [this] place

part two Art

6 reclamation of the future

7 otium

8 altar

9 coffin

10 vocatio

part three Spirituality

11 practice chair

12 mindfulness of body

13 sit

14 lovingkindness

15 hope

Epilogue: The Beauty of the World

Appendix: A Resource Inventory

References and Suggested Reading

illustrations

Photographs by Valari Jack, unless otherwise noted.

Figure 1. Map of Ivydell, Deborah J. Haynes, 2009

Figure 2. Circumambulation path, 2002–04, Colorado red sandstone

Figure 3. Ivydell, 2000, Colorado yule marble

Figure 4. Temenos, 2000, Colorado yule marble, top photograph by Deborah J.

Haynes

Figure 5. Water, 2001, Colorado yule marble

Figure 6. The Sisters and Brothers, 2000–02, Colorado yule marble

Figure 7. [This] Place, 2003, Colorado yule marble

Figure 8. Reclamation of the Future, 2001, Colorado yule marble

Figure 9. Otium, 2003, Colorado yule marble

Figure 10. Altar, 2006–09, Colorado yule marble, photograph by Deborah J.

Haynes

Figure 11. Coffin, 2007, Carrara marble, lower photograph by Deborah J. Haynes

Figure 12. Vocatio, 2003, Colorado yule marble, photograph by Deborah J.

Haynes

Figure 13. Practice Chair, 2007, Colorado yule marble, two lower photographs by

Deborah J. Haynes

Figure 14. Mindfulness of Body, 2005, Tennessee black marble

Figure 15. Sit, 2005, Colorado yule marble

Figure 16. Lovingkindness, 2004–05, Colorado yule marble

Figure

17

. Hope,

2004

, Colorado yule marble

Figure

18

. Ivydell Hillside,

2008

Figure

19

. From top right: Ice on rock, fox, tree, cloud,

2006

–

08

, photographs of

ice, tree, and cloud by Deborah J. Haynes

Figure 1

preface

I have come home.

I have come home to inhabit the land.

I have come home to give form through art to what I see and know.

I have come home to deepen my spiritual life.

Book of This Place: The Land, Art, and Spirituality is the story of how I made this decision and of what has transpired. It all began with three intertwined events: a move to Ivydell in the foothills of the Colorado Rocky Mountains; a visit to a marble quarry; and encountering death, close up. The book is a map of sorts: it might be read as an historical atlas, as a visual narrative, or as an inner journey across the landscape of the spirit. Like a map, it shows where I am in time and space and why I am here.

Book of This Place is kin to a Buddhist sand mandala. In several religious traditions, the mandala is a map of the sacred cosmos, rich and complex. Buddhist mandalas are traditionally created by monks, who painstakingly place colored sand on a flat surface to form intricate symbolic patterns and designs. The resulting image is correctly understood as representing a three-dimensional structure in space. With its three discrete sections—the land, art, and spirituality—this book shares that quality of hidden dimensionality. Then, following ritual practices that include meditation and visualization, a Tibetan Buddhist sand mandala is dismantled and the sand is disposed of in a special site. This practice highlights the fact that everything is impermanent. Analogously, in these pages I describe the matrix of impermanence that characterizes all things. I seek to demonstrate the interrelationship of values such as creativity, lovingkindness, and community, and to chart the life of a particular site.

***

At its foundation, the book explores the vagaries of living at a particular time and place, cultivating both my powers of perception and engaging the land, its history, and its present state. This place is simply where I live: a one-acre polygon that has been known as Ivydell for nearly 100 years.

The urge to understand the physical world was one of my earliest aspirations. I wrote my first small books at age eight on clouds and butterflies, two of the most ephemeral forms in nature. As a child, I wanted literally to read the world: to perceive the dynamic changes in trees, sky, and earth, to analyze and interpret what I saw, and ultimately to know and understand it. This book is the adult expression of that same longing.

Ivydell is located in the town of Jamestown in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies. I have come here to steward this land. I walk. I sit. I lie on a stone with my legs extended up the trunk of one of the willow trees. I observe ice on the stream, now melting because it has been so warm. I am finding out what grows and what will grow at 7000 feet. I tasted arugula, spinach, and kale this afternoon, small plants still alive and growing in the cold frames on this late fall day. Both my artistic and contemplative practices are grounded by such direct experiences on the land, from gardening to articulating a philosophy of place based on experience in the natural world.

From my first days at Ivydell I felt an intimation of other presences, of other sentient beings, of a unique and then unknown history. The Southern Arapahos spent summers in this canyon before the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864. Their history is a sad and all-too-familiar tale of deception, broken promises, and murder. Later in the nineteenth century, the town was a major center for mining gold, silver, and other metals such as fluorite. The current legacies of that activity include reclamation of wetlands and cleanup of toxic mines.

Visionary Wes Jackson, who founded the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, suggests that artists might become homecomers who should go someplace and dig in and begin the long search and experiment to become native. Given the fragmentation of our lives and our diminished connection to the physical world, such a choice can model what genuine reconnection might be. In my view, place is an ontological category. It helps us to define ourselves and our existence. Place tells us who and what we are in relation to where we are. For me, this is not only a philosophical point, but an artistic and religious insight as well.

* * *

A second level in the mandala of the book is my work with stone, especially yule marble from the central Colorado mountains. In the summer I work outside between the studio and the medicinal garden, in the stone yard, usually under a large umbrella to protect myself from sun and rain. During the long winter months, I move into a small indoor studio. Marble is a beautiful stone. In hardness, it is halfway between alabaster and granite. This means that marble may be carved by hand and that it yields easily to diamond blades on an electric grinder or to pneumatic chisels. I use all of these tools. Moving stone that weighs 200, 600, or 1600 pounds is a challenge. Without a forklift, backhoe, or Bobcat, I get help from neighbors, or use ancient techniques perfected by the Egyptians, rolling the stone on small metal cylinders, using logs and levers to raise and lower it.

I began to work on marble by carving Greek and Latin words on small wedges of stone: temenos, vocatio, amor fati. Sacred precinct, calling, love of fate. In historical locations from the Samothracian sanctuary to Sardis, stone inscriptions provide us with knowledge about the ancient past. Now I carve words on marble monoliths and place them around the site.

Part of my fascination with this activity is the way the process of carving words in stone clarifies and focuses the mind. It is a spiritual practice in its own right. As in prayer, meditation, and mindful sitting, concentration is cultivated. One-pointed attention, the opposite of continuously interrupted attention and multi-tasking, is absolutely essential. Quite literally, the mind must stay focused on the tip of the chisel. Steadiness of mind and hand and evenness of breath are necessary in order not to gouge or damage the stone. I do not mean to glorify or misrepresent this process, for carving marble is also full of other moments of frustration, adversity, and the boredom of repetition.

Nevertheless, carving an S is a dance of slow sensuous curves, as the chisel glides through stone and the body moves to accommodate the letter’s twists and turns. A B is half a dance or a set of intricate steps where right angles meet roundness. A T is a long straight meditation, its two lines creating a special crossing point. In plant geometry, the crossing point is that unique layer in a plant, sometimes only one-cell wide, where energy moves up toward the sun, then down into the earth, where the life force changes direction. It is a metaphor for the way inner self and outer reality connect and separate in turns.

***

At a third level, I set out to write a book about religious aspiration and spiritual life, especially about how to cultivate awareness and stillness. Book of This Place reflects my Buddhist worldview, and, from a more general perspective, pantheistic spirituality. Nature is alive and breathing: it is sacred. The divine is everywhere. In fact, the book may perhaps best be described as an account of my art as spiritual or contemplative practice on the land.

I was raised in a secular family, the result of Catholic and Protestant parents who did not know how to educate my three sisters and me in religious matters. My mother occasionally took us to Methodist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran churches during our childhood, but never to a Catholic mass. In my teen years, I discovered a Unitarian Universalist church, and I announced that the goal of my life was happiness. But how could I achieve that? I began to study world religions, and in my sophomore year of college I took a yoga class. I continued my study of yoga and other religious traditions in Europe, India, and across the United States for decades. After obtaining certification to teach yoga, I intermittently taught both public and private courses for seventeen years. Presently I maintain a daily practice.

At the Lindisfarne Association in New York in 1975 I was also introduced to Zen Buddhism. There I participated in my first weeklong sesshin. Following traditional form, we sat facing the wall, ate meals in silence in the zendo, and chanted the Heart Sūtra. I hardly understood what I was doing; but I knew then that I wanted to learn new ways of dealing with the tumultuous feelings that were my constant companions: deep melancholy and sorrow, coupled with anxiety about the future. By my mid-twenties, I had experienced enough gestalt and bioenergetic therapy to understand the roots of such feelings in the upheavals of my family life, including alcoholism, suicide, divorce, and debilitating illness. I do not mean to dwell on these formative experiences here, only to note that working directly with the body and mind seemed, even in my unknowing, a useful route to follow.

My religious education continued for decades, through graduate study of Christianity and Hinduism especially, and later, through reading books and attending programs with Buddhist teachers. But years of yoga and meditation practice have taught me that while reading is useful, direct engagement with a teacher is essential. In 2005 I became a formal student of a Tibetan Buddhist teacher and began sustained practice of meditation and retreat.

***

I have used the metaphor of a Buddhist sand mandala to emphasize that Book of This Place has many levels and addresses complex questions. How might art become an ecological and spiritual practice on the land? How does artistic practice become an expression of contemplative life? What does it mean to connect aesthetic and ethical values in creative studio practice? How might art become an integral part of daily life instead of a commodity for the luxury market? What role do place and the land play in this? Most generally, what is the topos or place of art in contemporary life? I believe that the place of art is in daily life and in the actual places we inhabit. We create ourselves as we create art; we nourish and renew ourselves as we affirm our particularity in a place. Such creation, renewal, and affirmation happen in and through the mundane details of everyday life.

The most important question is, how should one live? This question points to the values that guide our daily lives, which may range from cultivating mindfulness, kindness, and compassion toward others, to acquiring fame and wealth. In the end, I am drawn to historical and contemporary traditions of art-making that embody what artist Paul Klee called visualizing the invisible. How one conceives of this invisible is crucial, of course, for is it an entity or void, presence or absence, form or emptiness? I have decided to investigate life’s contingency and impermanence here—in this community, in this place. I believe that the global challenges of our present historical moment necessitate such a commitment.

acknowledgments

Book of This Place: The Land, Art, and Spirituality has had a long gestation. Consequently, many hands and voices have contributed to my creative and literary process.

I am grateful to the many friends who have helped to sustain my energy and commitment. To Margaret R. Miles, for ongoing encouragement about the life of the mind and body. To artist Val Fike in Jamestown, with whom I have worked over many years on a range of projects. To The Knitters—especially Birgitta Ingemanson, Patricia Watkinson, Bonnie Frederick, Kathleen Bodley, Alice Spitzer, Paula Elliot, Sonja Moseley, Marty Mullen, and Willemina Kardong—who continue to provide a model of support and friendship across time and space.

I have been blessed to be part of two groups of women who gathered to support dying friends. I am grateful to Audrey Berne, Martha Russo, Karen Jacobs, Jane Garrity, Jeanne Quinn, and Yumi Roth, whose compassion, deep kindness, and pragmatic skill in all things were deeply grounding during Antonette Rosato’s cancer treatment and subsequent work with her art and estate. To Helen Turner, Kathleen Lowe, Kara Baumgart, Nancy Edelstein, Rivvy Neshama, Helena Unger, Jeanne Visvader, and Carol Kelly, who showed me how to translate love into compassionate care during the last years of Sara Shuchter’s life. And for teaching me about diverse cultural views of death and about the possibilities of hospice work with the dying, I am grateful to Darci Meyer, Andrew Holocek, Jane Cohen, Lynette Fuller, and Sarah Varick.

I am grateful to artists Robert Spellman, Joan Anderson, and Cynthia Moku, who not only allowed me to be a student in their classes, but also showed me through their own work how to connect my studio and Buddhist practices. For their instruction at the Marble/marble summer institutes over nearly a decade, I am grateful to Madeline Wiener, Kathleen Caricof, Scott Owens, Joshua Wiener, Petro Hull, Brent Everett, and Roger Seal. In particular, Roger not only showed me several techniques for carving words in stone, but also told me shortly before he died that I should consider working in granite rather than marble. The idea of following his suggestion simultaneously daunts and thrills me.

For reading the manuscript at various stages of its development and offering timely feedback, I am grateful to Mark Amerika, Lisa Eringen, Margot Lovejoy, and Gayle Graham Yates. For dialogue during the process of writing and producing the book, I am grateful to Laura Tennen, whose perceptive skill as a developmental editor midway through the writing process helped me to give form to the present book. To MacDuff Stewart, who read chapters of the book over the course of a year and kept pushing me to make the narrative more personal. To Karen Auvinen, whose discerning sense of direction and detailed suggestions assisted me at a crucial point in the writing to find my own voice. To Rivvy Neshama, who read the book