Energy Balls – what are they?
To start with, I was simply searching for a logo for my Dynamic Emergence site. I instinctively started painting swirls over and over. I was looking for something – I thought I knew what. After a while, I began to realize that I was in something, in a process that had somehow gotten my attention, my involvement, without me grasping what I had said yes to – but so grateful I had. It was through my thought-need of finding a logo, a practical need that I sought to resolve, that I re-entered this teleology of creating.
Once I realized that I was in something other than what I had thought, I started to pay attention in a different way, I started really paying attention. I began asking the process, and myself, ‘what am I doing? why am I doing this? what am I looking for?’… ‘what are we doing?’ I got my responses in more insistent urges to go deeper, to keep going, to get more focused, less ‘practical’, more sensitive to – aching for – each arriving impulse.
Urgency and energy began to take over. I chose to surrender to it. It was like improvising on the piano or with my voice or any kind of performance where I am collaborating with something unexpected, large, clever in its own way; leading me, enjoying leading me. I knew there was a raft taking me across a deep water cavern to somewhere fully alive. The journey was itself the aliveness and so was the promise of where it would take me. The process was the raft.
At times my breathing changed – got deeper, more pronounced, more erratic… my feet danced from left to right and my hand danced above the surface of the paper before I let it touch down – holding my breath momentarily to see if I had ‘ruined’ it or ‘captured it’ accurately. My breath let me know either way. It was an emotional roller coaster – triumphs and disappointed stress and anxiety. I knew when I was ‘on it’ and I knew when I had just missed it. More paper, more paint, more sweeping strokes, more breathing, more trying, more flowing, more dancing, more passionate inquiry.
I began to know I was onto something – a friend came over to look at what had been happening. We talked of Bohm and the implicate/explicate order, we talked of Buddhism and the middle way, we talked of risk-taking and discovery, we talked of the numinous; pre-form becoming form, the nebulousness, the sensitivity and power of that which seeks to emerge. We talked about Dynamic Emergence; the collaboration between the not-yet-formed and that which seeks to become through the process of interaction, and aliveness, stirring, and rising.
Becoming is an art. Life becomes; it emerges – a visible, audible, felt appreciation of co-touching, co-seeing, cooperating, communicating… one becoming one.
I love improvising on – and with – anything because, let’s face it, jazz is life and life is musical. It has temperature, tempo, playfulness, pathos, secrecy, subtlety, implicate and explicate, magic and ritual, challenging cadences, and inspiring invitations. It is constantly moving and the negative space, just like in a painting or a photograph, has equal value to the positive. The silence and the music, the paint, and the clear page yin and yang their way into dialogic emerging conclusions that vary from witness to witness.
There is nothing ordinary about life nor its mouthpiece; art. Art, like Nature, will take any form or medium it can to imagine itself into being.
When we dance within our interplay we become at one with the expression, a celebration of something true, majestic, and humbled… everything and nothing… used up for a moment and apparently non-usable… surrendered and yet totally touched by the connection, the brief dalliance that each process brings us into.
I cherish feeling such things. It takes a certain kind of ‘salt’ to try and the reward is absolutely non-predictable and that, all on its own, is its own kind of magic.
Leave a Reply