ON SILENCE

The painting above is titled ‘RETURN TO THE MOSAIC’, oil paint on linen, 30cm x 30cm

Next week I head into an artist residency in Finland titled SILENCE. This residency is an opportunity for me to be mostly silent for 1 month in a forest, meditate and make paintings. It will be winter, cold and quiet. Coming from an Australian summer, I’m wondering what silence means to me as an artist, and as a human being while I prepare to travel to the other side of our planet.

I feel we can’t know silence unless we are aware of the impact of distractions. When distracted, we are pulled in different directions and lose our centre. The ground beneath us feels unstable. Distraction is a spatial experience. I am distracted by something that is not me. I am not in this present moment. We compare ourselves to others and feel our inadequacies. We may have lists to achieve something and feel driven. We compete and strive. Competition and drive are not inherently bad. The difficulty is in losing our connection to the centre of our being. We can feel lost, and suffer. Suffering is hard. Who wants that?! 

Sometimes we consume without thought in order to relieve our discomfort. We may even consciously do it. Endless consumption can become a habit as we wrestle with ourselves to avoid silence. Silence can be confronting.

Silence is as much an inner condition as it is an outer environment. We can feel grounded and silent in a noisy atmosphere, or feel disturbed in an eerily quiet place. I recall the experience of sitting in a completely dark cave, without a sound. No forwards or backwards. Just the uneven ground beneath me. In that moment, I realised that silence has no limits. Perhaps that is why we say we ‘fall silent’.

In that fall, our senses are alive. We sense into the vast field of being. Preconceptions, past and future drop away. Silence is not about sound. Rather, it’s an embodied experience. We become silent. We become this present moment. The boundary that separates inside from outside is lost.

Daydreams arise. Imagination freely plays in the continuum of inner and outer worlds. Like a child lying on the grass while looking at the sky, my finger traces the clouds and I wonder,

‘what if I was that cloud? What would I become?’

I’ve always been a lover of silence. The place where the blank canvas, the sky and imagination intersect. 

Many of us have experienced a state of flow. A state where we are so in the moment that things become effortless. It’s quite a common experience. Flow states arise out of focused attention in the present moment. Here is a link to a CBC podcast that is a fascinating look into flow states.

‘WHEN THE IMPOSSIBLE BECOME POSSIBLE’ 

As a meditator and an artist, cultivating the possibility for a flow state to arise is a practice. I realise I don’t have to go to Finland to get into a state of flow. However, a month without distraction, to focus on making art, with other people doing the same is an incredible opportunity. 

This residency is with Arteles Creative Centre and you can find out about it though this link. 

https://www.arteles.org/

My next post will be while in residency and I have no idea what will emerge. Please feel free to share my blogs with anyone you think may be interested. If you are new to my posts you can sign up through my website.

www.lynnlobo.com

Warmly Lynn