Still Sundays
It’s Sunday morning and I am writing from a small village near the Sovinec Castle. Owl’s Nest. That’s what Sovinec means in Czech. Sovinec is near a city called Olomouc. Yesterday we first traveled two and a half hours southeast of Prague to Brno and then north to Olomouc. We are quite east of Prague now. Olomouc is made of agricultural landscape where the sky is a moody painter and the earth is a palette. Capture that, lens. Feeling is a lens.
Usually when I write on Sunday mornings I feel Stillness offers Christmas presents for unwrapping—let’s see what’s under that tree of thought that grew so tall in one week? Some Sunday mornings I indeed feel as if I am opening up bills: let’s see what I owe for ignoring this week: were you really on autopilot even if for a moment, self?
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It was a full day of explorations yesterday and last night I froze in some deep sleep. No dreams.
How will I get up rested and write and get ready in enough time? Maybe I shouldn’t even bother given I probably can’t upload what I write until I get back to Prague. I boiled a cup of excuses last night but was surprised to learn this morning that Stillness wanted to pour me a cup for a change! Charmed, I didn’t even have to get out of bed.
I am in a pensione nestled in a farm of Stillness and yet I have to put on my sneakers to run against time. I didn’t come on this weekend excursion alone. Charles University’s photography department offered an opportunity to explore some cities outside of Prague and to meet some very talented photographers. So I am with a small group of ten and time is watching. I am allergic to watches but I will drink fast even though I am a slow writer: I like holding words and turning them in my mind’s small hands. Words are a tick-tock tickle-me surprise.
Bringing myself to the mat of stillness is no different than bringing my body parts to the yoga mat. It matters not how much one walks, runs, lifts weights, or any other physical activity that burns calories, nothing integrates like yoga. And I don’t mean “yoga” as in “stretching” for an hour in the morning and then that very night having beers or wine to the point of intoxication. If you have a consistent authentic practice your body will not allow it. You are a slave to your mind and your body holds the key to freedom.
And just like the initial thoughts of superficial significance which surface during the first fifteen minutes of practice so it is in the beginning on Sunday mornings: will I ever find a lady in Prague to thread or wax my eyebrows or will I have to braid them eventually? But if I linger long enough I always end up with: anything is possible, allow yourself to be surprised.
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I am happy to report I found the cause of the disease known as clichés. It’s inside us! We are not born with this ailment but as we grow up small grains of how things should sound, look, and feel keep getting absorbed in our skin. We begin to write ‘poetry’ that says “His eyes were blue like the ocean” not realizing the ocean is never just blue. That’s on a smaller scale. Amplified it can sound like, I should marry…
The amount of deconstruction required to rub out how we have been told to view the world demands a consistent practice. No one can scrub the skin of conformity for us. You can only put the perfume of performance on for so long. Eventually the unauthentic odor will stink up the shared space.
And then there are those who wear the proud badges that say: Look here! I am above clichés when I write or paint or create! Just because you turn up the volume doesn’t mean the music is good. Relax. Sometimes a bruise really is “black and blue” and the pain felt or observed doesn’t allow for any better articulation. We are human after all, words can only take us so far.
One can’t try to be different. If we dare to go deep enough we learn all that is common after all and unique too.
I was born to a mother and father who have never been ashamed or afraid to walk out of any meeting, gathering, or situation that does not resonate with their values. I am most grateful to my parents for teaching us how to walk away once we have changed our minds about a person, an art form, an artist, a profession. That commitment need not mean betrayal to oneself.
After only one week in Prague I have changed my mind about some artists and authors and their work (online and offline). I make no apologies for what I once supported given what I knew then. I make no apologies for having outgrown much. I will not stunt my personal development due to any loyalties. Those who remain in my life do so because they have continued to grow too, creatively, professionally and personally.
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I had the honor of meeting Jindrich Streit and his wife at their house. He is the most distinguished Czech photographer whose work entails social documentary. We had Jan, a faculty member and a talented photographer himself from the photography department at the University as our guide and translator. I asked away….
Jindrich Streit is humble yet well aware of his talent and vision. He has published over 28 books of his work. He was the first one to begin documenting “village life”. He says what’s missing from artists now is a deep connecting with their content. It’s all for the effect. Spiritual can’t be for performance. Everyone is competing for louder and louder and when what you need is to go deeper and deeper. Everything is about performance and not the actual content. Because everything is art, it is each artist’s responsibility to decide what that means for him or her.
Jindrich says it is painful to have a vision but we always have a choice. There is always a choice in which direction goes your life and your creativity.
After this weekend I can confidently say, although all are creative—it is human nature to be creative—not all are artists. You don’t have to create in a specific medium to be an artist but you do have to live with a vision. Art is a constant defining and redefining of a vision. So is life.
He has been a photographer for over forty-four years. He felt what he had to show was important. And what he had to show was ordinary people.
If it wasn’t for him and his lovely wife offering up their beautiful home this morning (which is right next to the castle!), I would not be able to post this. I told him yes, what I had to write was important and it was also important for a few others. It’s a Sunday morning conversation that means something to a few of us. He said, “Then that is all that matters and it must be done: if it is important to you and a few people. That’s all art has ever been: something which was important to a few people.”
I offer gratitude for those who contain my words.
Walking with stilts made of stillness you get a different perspective of what’s on the ground. The sky is not that far, earth is the experience. We experience it best through relating that goes beyond what’s in it for me.
Stop pretending.
Now I must go enjoy lunch and an even more meaningful conversation, translated, with this wonderful artist and his beautiful wife, who is a music teacher. They both just told me with each passing year of their marriage—forty—they have only grown to respect one another even more and fall even deeper in love.
Who says love isn’t enough?
My parents were right: love is alchemy.
Dear Annie,
Needless to say I am absolutely jealous. I have never visited that part of our world and have always wanted to. Your still Sunday touched on many themes concurrent in my life and time, not the least of which is walking. Ever since re-reading Dostoevsky, I can no longer simply walk; I must stroll as a flâneur, certainly as a hopeless peripatetic!
Also as to your mention of the cliché, as well as aphorisms, idioms, and colloquial metaphors. These have been on my mind also these past days, how we use these phrases as a kind of shorthand (culturally dependent) to convey complex ideas simply and efficiently. But I began to think that most of our conversations are in fact laced with these code phrases and how we hardly ever break through their numbness to actually hear or begin to understand one another.
I admire your instance on journey and the grounding evident in your thoughts no matter where you seem to land.
Dear Peter,
I very much appreciate your thoughtful comment. It always means a lot coming from an artist such as yourself. I appreciate that you would candidly share that you have and are considering these thoughts too.
That being said, in your own work, I feel you rise above and beyond any cliche and colloquial metaphors. And if any are even remotely referenced, it is often beyond an intellectual understanding which then provides the viewer with a new meaning altogether.
And by the way, as folks around me here learned this weekend, I don’t just stroll as flaneur but must nap between the walks…. always on the lookout for a garden near by…. : )
I so very much appreciate you taking the time to walk by my neck of cyberwoods….
~a.
This is definitely one of your Still Sundays that I’ll have to read over and over again…let it roll around in my brain and stick in different areas.
Writing evolving…That’s what’s sticking right now. It’s sad, but you’re the only person I know right now who’s challenging me to think about this. I thank you for that…My brain thanks you too 🙂
Dear Annie
Your description of how writing Still Sundays is for you is so apt as a description of how I feel when I am reading them.
There is the wonderful anticipation and a little bit of dread. Pressies or bills?
Somtimes both.
There are some wonderful presents here and also some bills for me to deal with (maybe a lifetime’s worth!)
Thank you.
I’m so happy you managed to write this and also post it. Even if I only had the time to read it a week later… it offered so much of the stillness you found around you.
Art really is something which is important to a few people. Reading a book during a flight, walking through an art gallery in Sicily, visiting a city you’ve always dreamed of visiting and noticing all the architecture it has to offer as if it were an outdoor museum called Paris, or simply walking up the famous hill of the city you lived your whole life and taking photographs, contemplating, writing all your thoughts in a journal – it all revolves around art. And if it’s important to us, even if the words are more personal and some won’t understand what’s hidden behind them… it’s still art as long as there are a few people who like it and whose souls are touched.
So many thoughts here too that I very much agree with. What is the point of repeating cliches? Nothing new gets created that way. I notice that some people try to look for things that they recognize in my pictures, and that usually ticks me off quite a bit. I feel like saying: if you have seen a picture like that somewhere, why don’t you look at it again, what is the point of me trying to recreate it. When I read fiction that has lots of cliches, my brain gets turned off, my mind starts to wonder. That never happens when I read your posts Annie, thank you for that!