Wendy's Memorial Message

Wendy passed away on June 11, 2013.  This is the message that she left for all of us...

What I’d like read at the memorial service after my death.

setting: Clermont State Park, on the lawn overlooking the river.

Dear friends, family, loved ones all,

I miss you.  And yet, know, that I am always with you.  Please know, believe, trust me - I have crossed over into a realm of extraordinary and limitless love.  What i know and experience in this realm is infinite expansive and unconditional love, a place of beautiful light and where beings communicate entirely through the heart - a deep and profound language of the heart.  

Before I was handed the cancer diagnosis, I likely could not have said such a thing.   That signalled the beginning of experiences and understandings never known before, at least not consciously.

It was through an ever-growing and deepening meditation and energy dance since the early months of the cancer diagnosis, that I touched again and again the extraordinary love of the cosmos.  One distinct example was when, during a session, I felt clearly and joyously and with tremendous gratitude that the cosmos, my Grande Mama, thrilled at being asked for help and love, that she absolutely adored giving and giving and giving.    There was/is no limit to what she will give.  I could not ask too often.  She simply always wanted to help, always wanted, wants, to share her love.  This really turns her on.  She loves to love.  

And that love is always “in the air”, so to speak.  It’s available to all of us in every moment.  It is the fabric of our beings, our environment, our cosmos.  It is the language most powerful, most awesome, most glorious.  Did you know that the heart is has a stronger electric magnetic field than the brain?  The electric field is about 100 times that of the brain.  And the heart’s magnetic field is 5000 times that of the brain.  It is flat out the single most powerful organ in our bodies.  And, sadly, in our society, it is sorely underused.  

Live from your hearts, dear loved ones.  Move according to what it feels and suggests.  We all know this experience when we fall in love, marry a mate or cherish a dear friend.  But what of all the other times, all the so-called ordinary moments of your lives.  What if you swam in the juices of love and compassion and let these guide you?  The way our brains and ego operate is to divide us.  The way of the heart is to bring us together, to remind us of just how fine we are, how magnificent truly.  Our society is sick from the over-emphasis on the brain and “rational” thought and the ego.   Don’t wait for special occasions to share love, to live your love, to let someone know that you love them, that they bring joy into your life, or to imagine the suffering of another, or to see and honor how extraordinary you are.    Do it in every moment.

for months before death, i did not fear death.  the approach to death troubled me, but not death.

drawing by Shuster

"in and out conch whispering in my ear"  
charcoal by Wendy Shuster 


to see more images of Shuster's work, go to this page.

 

painting by Zao Wou Ki


"The existence of sensitive people is an advantage for humankind because it is this group that best expresses humanity's creative urges and needs.  Through their instinctual responses the world is best interpreted.  Under normal circumstances, they are artists or artisans, seekers, inventors, shamans, poets, prophets.  There would be valid and powerful evolutionary reasons for the survival of genetic material coding for sensitivity.  It is not diseases that are being inherited but a trait of intrinsic survival value to human beings.  Sensitivity is transmuted into suffering and disorders only when the world is unable to heed the exquisitely tuned physiological and psychic responses of the sensitive individual."   - Gabor Maté


image of painting found at Marlborough New York gallery website
passage by Gabor Maté found in his book Scattered

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The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar’s House

by Howard Nemerov

in memory of the painters Paul Klee

and Paul Terence Feeley

I

The painter’s eye follows relation out.

His work is not to paint the visible,

He says, it is to render visible.

Being a man, and not a god, he stands

Already in a world of sense, from which

He borrows, to begin with, mental things

Chiefly, the abstract elements of language:

The point, the line, the plane, the colors and

The geometric shapes. Of these he spins

Relation out, he weaves its fabric up

So that it speaks darkly, as music does

Singing the secret history of the mind.

And when in this the visible world appears,

As it does do, mountain, flower, cloud, and tree,

All haunted here and there with the human face,

It happens as by accident, although

The accident is of design. It is because

Language first rises from the speechless world

That the painterly intelligence

Can say correctly that he makes his world,

Not imitates the one before his eyes.

Hence the delightsome gardens, the dark shores,

The terrifying forests where nightfall

Enfolds a lost and tired traveler.

And hence the careless crowd deludes itself

By likening his hieroglyphic signs

And secret alphabets to the drawing of a child.

That likeness is significant the other side

Of what they see, for his simplicities

Are not the first ones, but the furthest ones,

Final refinements of his thought made visible.

He is the painter of the human mind

Finding and faithfully reflecting the mindfulness

That is in things, and not the things themselves.

For such a man, art is an act of faith:

Prayer the study of it, as Blake says,

And praise the practice; nor does he divide

Making from teaching, or from theory.

The three are one, and in his hours of art

There shines a happiness through darkest themes,

As though spirit and sense were not at odds.

II

The painter as an allegory of the mind

At genesis. He takes a burlap bag,

Tears it open and tacks it on a stretcher.

He paints it black because, as he has said,

Everything looks different on black.

Suppose the burlap bag to be the universe,

And black because its volume is the void

Before the stars were. At the painter’s hand

Volume becomes one-sidedly a surface,

And all his depths are on the face of it.

Against this flat abyss, this groundless ground

Of zero thickness stretched against the cold

Dark silence of the Absolutely Not,

Material worlds arise, the colored earths

And oil of plants that imitate the light.

They imitate the light that is in thought,

For the mind relates to thinking as the eye

Relates to light. Only because the world

Already is a language can the painter speak

According to his grammar of the ground.

It is archaic speech, that has not yet

Divided out its cadences in words;

It is a language for the oldest spells

About how some thoughts rose into the mind

While others, stranger still, sleep in the world.

So grows the garden green, the sun vermilion.

He sees the rose flame up and fade and fall

And be the same rose still, the radiant in red.

He paints his language, and his language is

The theory of what the painter thinks.

III

The painter’s eye attends to death and birth

Together, seeing a single energy

Momently manifest in every form,

As in the tree the growing of the tree

Exploding from the seed not more nor less

Than from the void condensing down and in,

Summoning sun and rain. He views the tree,

The great tree standing in the garden, say,

As thrusting downward its vast spread and weight,

Growing its green height from the dark watered earth,

And as suspended weightless in the sky,

Haled forth and held up by the hair of its head.

He follows through the flowing of the forms

From the divisions of the trunk out to

The veinings of the leaf, and the leaf’s fall.

His pencil meditates the many in the one

After the method in the confluence of rivers,

The running of ravines on mountainsides,

And in the deltas of the nerves; he sees

How things must be continuous with themselves

As with whole worlds that they themselves are not,

In order that they may be so transformed.

He stands where the eternity of thought

Opens upon perspective time and space;

He watches mind become incarnate; then

He paints the tree.

IV

These thoughts have chiefly been about the painter Klee,

About how he in our hard time might stand to us

Especially whose lives concern themselves with learning

As patron of the practical intelligence of art,

And thence as model, modest and humorous in sufferings,

For all research that follows spirit where it goes.

That there should be much goodness in the world,

Much kindness and intelligence, candor and charm,

And that it all goes down in the dust after a while,

This is a subject for the steadiest meditations

Of the heart and mind, as for the tears

That clarify the eye toward charity.

So may it be to all of us, that at some times

In this bad time when faith in study seems to fail,

And when impatience in the street and still despair at home

Divide the mind to rule it, there shall be some comfort come

From the remembrance of so deep and clear a life as his

Whom I have thought of, for the wholeness of his mind,

As the painter dreaming in the scholar’s house,

His dream an emblem to us of the life of thought,

The same dream that then flared before intelligence

When light first went forth looking for the eye.

Howard Nemerov, “The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar’s House” from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977). Copyright © 1977 by Howard Nemerov.

painting by Paul Klee

image found here:  painting by Klee

painting: "Rising Moon"  by Hans Hofmann

We need a culture of creativity. We NEED Art.

We need art, and by that I mean both making and experiencing art. We need art not in another time, past or future, not when times are better, or more stable, or happier, but now. Art and art-making are not adjuncts to our lives, not extracurricular, or frivolous, but integral to our lives as fully realized, surviving and thriving, beings.  If art and art-making are treated as just another form or way to make a commodity, then, it becomes, or is, just that - production. Art and art-making as creative endeavors are an altogether different experience. It’s the difference between heart and object, intuition and an instruction manual, yellow and purple.

We need art and art-making to inspire and to exercise our imaginations, to move us differently, and to stimulate our creativity. Experiencing art or making art takes us down different paths in our hearts and minds, and our bodies travel different paths as we experience and make art too. We go deeper or differently into our emotions, we use different parts of our brains, otherwise difficult to activate, setting off reverberations in body and mind and community. What do we need in times of trouble? Creative thinking and moving and being. We need people, minds, imaginations that can see and move differently, people who can imagine a better future and, further, a better NOW. Experiencing art and making art increase the flexibility of our minds to see possibilities, to stir our natural born powers to create, to fly into new realms - to “fly” into territory, inner and outer, previously unexplored. Art, when the process is rooted in deep exploration and contemplation, shows us ways not to re-create or resurrect a broken system or past, but to create something that fits this moment, to create anew with learning and seeing and recycled material, to create something fresh and vital out of the ashes, something that is born of now.

Art and art-making are for the feel of the material in your hands, the sound in your ears, the meaning that touches your heart. These open us. And when we are open, naturally, we can receive. When we are sensitive, we can feel, and when we can feel, we understand our impact on everything and everyone in our surroundings and theirs on us. We feel more palpably our natural interconnectedness with all.

Peace, art and lively creativity for the New Year.

Wendy

painting by Hans Hofmann, "Rising Moon"

image found at Hans Hofmann website