Foreground and Background

Last month, I had the luxury of spending three days walking on the beach on one of the Dutch North Sea islands: Texel. A Winter Walk to pause and be still. We listened to the sound of silence and resonated with each other’s stories. The metaphors, images, poetry, pictures and songs we shared at the very end with each other about what we experienced indicated that the depth of silence had a revealing aspect to it. We went inward to go forward differently - moved by creativity and curiosity, chaos, confusion and clarity, dreams and desires, insight and inspiration, pain and pleasure, consolation and connection.

For me the experience was a modified and somewhat upscale version of the Venice Beach desire I wrote about in my previous post. We listened to the sound of silence, to ourselves and each other accompanied by the interplay between earth, sea and sky. I pondered the life of a snowflake and the relationship between a drop of water and the sea. I was reminded that the Search is really the Journey, and was confronted with the depth of the desire for silence and solitude.

One insight was through an experience of painting. At home I have been working on a painting - the sketch above gives an impression of the actual painting - but the painting does not quite work. I kept working on the piece, quite a number of layers over previous layers, yet the painting does not emerge. It just does not let itself be painted. I did not understand why, but suddenly it became clear to me: I thought I was painting the painting, but I am actually only working on the background of the painting. It is a very powerful realization especially related to life.

At times our experience that seems so important in the moment is actually only the preparation of the next experience, background instead of foreground. Eventually all experiences fade into the background, except for a sliver here and there. Like in a painting, the background ‘colors’ the foreground or current experience – the one cannot exist without the other. During painting – and during life – it is not always so clear what is background and what is foreground, but it is helpful to question which is which.

The insight makes me think of capturing this in some art form. I would like to do a painting and keep working on that same painting for the rest of my life. It will change all the time. Once a month or so, I would take a picture and once a year exhibit the painting, the same – yet different – painting.

The moments that we don’t paint are possibly the reflective moments, the moment of the Winter Walk when we look at our lives and can make room for discovery and distinguish foreground and background.

To be continued…

Group Relations International organized this winter walk. This was the invitation…

Winter Walk



Pause and be still


with what was 


what will come



Give space

to a moment of reflection in our life



Be still



Meet the other and our self



While walking on the beach

with a small group of people 



Around the Winter solstice



When the days 


lengthen and
change

from shorter to longer

from dark to light



A moment of reflection on 


how we spend our days



A still journey

Will you join our walk

Painting

This is a detail of a painting I created a number of years ago. The process of painting is a wonderful illustration of one aspect of what I learned during my Search: to embrace the unknown.  When I started this painting I knew what was to appear on the canvas.  Although it was an abstract painting, it was thought out, planned in terms of color and composition and all in all quite well organized, in some ways I was about to realize what I had dreamed of for this painting.  The ideas were important to get me started.  

The finished product looks very different than what I had in mind and not only because of my limited painting ability. Something else took place as well. When I thought a painting was done, my teacher encouraged me to continue, to let the painting paint itself.  The result was often that I started with one idea and ended up with a different outcome altogether, often richer, quite beautiful, more meaningful and mysterious as if the road to getting to the result was contained in the result. 

The process was not easy.  Crossing the space from the known to the unknown, from what was to what could become is one of letting go, giving up and saying goodbye.  The next brush stroke is an act of destruction as well as creation.  There is this terrifying moment when the painting is already destroyed and not yet newly created, and it is not easy to put oneself voluntarily in this moment, it is easier to hold on to the known.  This process of creation and destruction and creation is happening all the time.  Perhaps it is just 'growing', or 'evolving' or 'searching'… What is particularly important to me is the intention of destructing in order to create, the choice of leaving behind in order to embrace and always with this terrifying moment - that sometimes last years - of not knowing. I have left organizations, family, friends and loved one’s, ideas, languages, work, religion, habits, parts of my ego, realities, ways of searching even... and embraced the unknown.  All of this as part of the search and often with results that I could not have dreamed.

Georgia – a precious person in my life from the group relations world – alerted me to this story once, which I see as another illustration of the same process.  It comes from the Dr. Seuss’ book On Beyond Zebra.  It is about a boy who challenged his playmates to stretch their imagination beyond the traditional 26 letters of the alphabet – from A (Ape) to Z (Zebra) to create an extended alphabet. 

In the places I go there are things  that I see

That I never could spell if I stopped with the Z 

I’m telling you this ‘cause you’re one of my friends 

My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends

 To be continued…