VisualMeditations

Lisa Rawlinson

Visual Meditations

Visual Meditation 5/22/18 | Watercolor Pastel on paper | 10" x 7"

August 31, 2018

On the morning of May 22, I drew a tarot card, made this small stick watercolor drawing/painting, and then wrote:

The little jiggity jaggedy path that your life has taken, with so much experienced already along the way, all culminates into a moment of clarity where you can see that you will be able to go here then there and then there and then there... And it doesn't matter if you don't know how, in fact that would take all the fun out of it. It's a moment of passage.

It was part of my 100-Day project, the second one I've done, in which I did a visual meditation every day for 100 days. There's a bit more to the process than what I just described, of course, and I'll try to convey to gist of it for those who are interested. But first I want to say that I am essentially outing myself here, certainly not in the way that so many of my loved ones have had to do, but I expect that some of what I say will come as a surprise to many. Others maybe not so much. I just ask that you read with objectivity, and I do not encourage anyone to abandon their critical thinking, ever.

The fact that someone so interested in science, enough to make art about it (and to nerd out at parties maybe a bit too much sometimes), is drawing tarot cards is going to feel like a disparity to many. I get that, and it's something I've had to process quite a lot before I got to the point where I began to use the cards, to do these daily visual meditations, and to out myself in a blog post. Much of the art I've created in the past couple of years has been an exploration of those things for me. In Universe, I chose to dive into the science behind some of the great questions in life, a very intellectual approach to them. My Candor paintings, by contrast, are a completely intuitive process. In the Emergence series, these two ways of processing information blended together. It wasn't until I hung them on the walls of my house in preparation for the East Austin Studio Tour in 2017 and walked around alone in quiet one night that I really fully recognized what I had been doing. That exercise of learning how to merge my intellectual mind and my intuitive mind, and when to rely on one more heavily than the other, is an on-going process, but at this point it's a very conscious process. My current in-progress series called Ornithomancy explores this even further.

My thoughts are evolving, and will continue to do so, but here's where I am now:

Science is how we explore our physical reality, the world we live in. That includes nature, what we think of as nature in terms of stars and the Earth and the animals and plants that live on it, but more broadly it includes different slices of reality than the ones we wander around in and can see, hear, taste, or feel, like the quantum level, like time, like consciousness. Considering our physical sensory limitations (the subject of Finding the Way), humans have figured out some pretty impressive things. There's still a lot we haven't figured out, and like the message above suggests, it doesn't matter if we don't know everything right now. The process of discovery and exploration is the fun part. The processes which we've figured those things out are a mixed bag of tool-making, the scientific method, observation, accident, ingenuity, logic, imagination, and intuition. And then there's this other thing. I don't know what to call it. I have an adversarial personal relationship with religion and don't expect that to change as long as I can look around and see that atrocities are being committed and power abused in the name of religion, despite the fact that there are people extremely close to me who are adherents to one or another of the various doctrines. The word spiritual makes me itchy, and it's too vague and loaded. There are plenty of other words and labels. I'm sure some of them will come to mind.

That other thing, it's not something we can measure, or that we have been able to figure out how to measure so far, so it doesn't fit into the practice of science. But I think there is enough anecdotal information that crosses cultures, ideologies, and demographics that it should not be dismissed in the way that it too often is simply because we haven't figured out how to observe it with our eyes or measure it with technological tools. There are an awful lot of people, myself included, who have had very odd experiences that they cannot explain. And just like how when I had my first child and I went to the hospital after my water broke only to be told, "No, your water didn't break because the Ph strips aren't showing evidence of that, you must have peed on the floor, go home (it wasn't pee and clearly, I'm still a little mad about that even after 15 years)," all those people know their own experiences even if they can't explain them or show evidence of them. Even if they are just plain old weird. And it's a tricky spot to be in.*

I learned as a teenager that if you talked about these experiences you would likely be ridiculed, possibly by one of your teachers in front of the whole class. That's no fun. But by that point I'd already been having experiences that were just weird, no getting around it. One memorable experience came in the form of a dream that some of my friends were in a bad car accident. I was frantic about it. One of them blew off my warnings. Then she called me late one night after being in a car accident, describing images that I had seen in my dream but hadn't told her the details of. The blurred rolling of the vehicle, the sun visor in her face. Another friend chose not to go out that night, and the spot where she had been sitting sustained so much damage that she likely would have been killed. I don't know how to explain that, and you can rest assured that it freaked me out... and you can draw a straight line from that experience to when I began questioning the nature of time. By the time I was in college and a young adult, I was distracted by other things. I had one very toxic relationship that had a similar effect as being made fun of in school. I stopped exploring those questions I had (among other stuff that took me years to work through). I tucked them away into a little box of I labeled as "Unknowable" and I walked around with it for a couple of decades, adding more odd experiences here and there as I moved through life.

Then one day I decided to unbox them (I have a project in mind that will reveal more of that story, but for the sake of brevity in an already long blog post, let's leave it at that for now). Fast forward to now, and I am at a point where I have been actively trying to understand those questions, as best as I can with what is available, and I have been actively cultivating what I consider to be a connection with That Other Thing. Reenter the tarot cards and visual meditation drawings, stage left (or right, it doesn't matter). Rather than rely on the inefficacy of labels for something we don't understand, can't explain, and comes packed with hefty preconceptions, I'm just going to describe that process in a little more detail. I think that's the best I can do.

In the mornings, I make a time and space to just be quiet. I get all my drawing materials ready. I pull out my deck of tarot cards. Some days I just wander around the room or sit and loosely shuffle the cards while thinking or even talking out loud about what is in my head... what's going on that day, what's unresolved, what are my goals, what am I struggling with? Some days I tend to be distracted and after talking or thinking through everything I sit and ground myself by listening to sounds, noticing light, temperature, the way my body feels. That helps to relax me. Other days I just sit and get to it with no specific questions in mind. Some days I use visualization techniques like walking down stairs and relaxing further with each step or sitting in a bubble of white light (hokey maybe, but effective).

The whole time I'm shuffling the cards. Sometimes this goes on for about ten minutes. Sometimes just one. All this time I'm not just talking to myself, I'm talking to my guides and support system that exists as part of That Other Thing. And they talk back. That's the whole point of this. When I'm ready I "hear" a prompt that says, "Three more." There's no sound. It's like a thought inside my head that isn't mine. That three shuffle heads-up is something that developed over the course of learning to read the cards. The first time I noticed it, after asking, "How many more times do I have to shuffle these damn cards?" I thought it worked so well that I've requested it moving forward.

Then I draw the card. Some days I understand it right away. Others I talk through it a bit. Sometimes (less and less) I pull out my tarot book and a phrase or word will jump out at me. Sometimes an image or a song or a scene from a movie will also pop into my head that feels related. Then I sit down in front of my drawing supplies, and again, what comes next varies. If an image has popped into my head (like this spider recently that made me laugh). Other days I just start making marks on the paper with no idea of what's going to come out. If I see an image starting to take shape I shift into a more deliberate mode and start refining details. Many of them are completely non-representational and it's simply the physical act that helps me process the information. Colors are chosen either through a strong urge towards that color to begin with or sometimes with my eyes closed (some entire drawings have been done with my eyes closed as well, but not often). When the drawing is finished, I write a caption for it that helps the message gel. Many rely heavily on metaphor. I'm sure to the outside observer they often feel vague, and when I post them on social media I revise the wording to generalize them and remove any personal information. By that point I usually understand it (at any time in that process), but there are days when I have no idea what it's about and I've learned that I have to wait for things to play out. Those are especially weird. I've received a few safety warnings that were helpful. There have been some that related to absolutely beautiful and moving experiences.

All of this was not something I would have imagined myself doing not that long ago, but it has been a definite snowball effect. I've now started creating custom visual meditations for other people which is a very similar process except that I'm asking my guides to connect with the other person's guides and inviting them to communicate via that process. Each of those times I have no idea what the drawing or the message is about, but I've had very good feedback from people that actually had me in tears a couple of times hearing how the imagery and the message related directly to something in their life. That alone has been a huge confirmation for me and increased my ability to trust this process.

So, yeah. That's the deal. I have no doubt there will be questions, judgements, and an array of reactions from people who know me or my work. But I think it's important to reveal this or else you're only getting my work on a surface level.

Updated April 2, 2019: For more on this body of work see my dedicated website for Visual Meditations and tarot readings, Open Window Meditations.

*I want to emphasize that I am in no way attempting to discredit science, nor will you hear me try to use some of the still open questions in science (such as dark energy) as evidence that the assertions I am making here are correct or real. I am saying very, very clearly: I can not explain this and currently no one can. I also do not think any non-scientific answers to these "great questions" that anyone has come up with is wholly accurate, but is simply a translation of information into a form that is easier for our human brains to process and a reflection of culture and the time we live in. But, I do trust my experiences, and as ever try to remain mindful of filling in the gaps with supposition. And, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, all that. I'm can't prove anything nor is my goal to convince anyone of anything.

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