Zen Calligraphy and Healing

The last several days have been very difficult. The at-home nurses tell me, out of their extensive experience, that there is a trial-and-error period for new ileostomy patients like myself, while the stoma is still healing, changing size and shape, that involves finding the right appliances to use for the long term. Well, it has indeed been a trial full of many errors. In the past several days, the ostomy bags have come loose many times, leaked many times, needed to be replaced often, and I've lost sleep over it. This morning I really hit the exhaustion wall. I was so exhausted I couldn't even cry out my frustration anymore. Now, tonight, having rested all day long, I do feel better, and I'm hoping that I can get better sleep tonight, better than the past three days.



A few days into this trial, I pulled out the brushes and ink and brush pens, and sat down at my table on the porch to make some enso, to try and center and settle my mind. You can always tell how grounded and centered you are by drawing enso. Enso are circle cosmograms, that represent the circle of all things.



If you are grounded and centered, you will be able to draw a nearly perfect circle with a single stroke of the ink-filled brush. If your mind is not at ease, not empty, not in the state of no-mind, your enso circles will be imperfect, not circles, maybe not even round. I pulled out a stack of my good calligraphy cardstock paper, and made several enso. I started out poorly, and then gradually slowed down, took some breaths, and did some better enso. A kind of brush meditation.



Then it occurred to me that I also needed to do slogan practice. Slogan practice, used in both Japanese Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, is meditation on wisdom sayings. Slogans can be almost stereotypical, but contemplation of them can take you very deep, past the words, past the thought, into the being. So I took some of the enso that I had just made, changed brushes, and began filling them in with slogans and other sayings, and even a few drawings.







I realized that I needed to make art. But not just art to make art. When this healing process has setbacks like the drama I've been having around the ostomy bags failing for so many days and nights—setbacks that really frustrate, and more than once brought me to helpless tears—I thought I might take some of these enso and slogans and make them into a poster for myself.



I will put one or two of them up on the walls, where I can see them often, to remind me to find my center and return to my ground of being, when I fall off. Zen sayings as art posters to remind myself to return to center. To calm the mind. To let go of the suffering and just be in the moment.



Sometimes the frustration edges over into despair, and you feel like these trials will never be over. The nurses and doctors tell me they will, but not all of me believes that yet. I'm in the middle of this mess, it's my body, no one else's, and this has been really hard. My artist friend Alex, who has his own experience with bodily trials, reminds me that me feelings in this difficult time are legitimate and well-earned. He helped me today by validating what I was feeling, rather than trying to "fix" it.





So I will put up a couple of the most resonant of this Zen calligraphy enso drawings on my walls, where they will remind me to slow down, be patient, and go with the flow. Get through the process, don't fight it. Wisdom I very much need to hear right now.





I also remind myself that life will go on, even if right now it's not of very good quality. I will endure. I will not fade away. I will somehow make it through. How, and when, at this moment I cannot envision. All I really want right now is to catch up on the rest and recuperation that has eluded me these past few days.

Teaching Myself to Draw 7

Last week I went into the clinic for another IV drug therapy treatment for my chronic illness. I was anxious, and got little sleep the night before. Anxious because over the preceding two weeks I had developed a severe cough which had turned into walking pneumonia. I have a long history of bronchitis and walking pneumonia, and once you've had those you remain susceptible to them in future. I had also had a bad week personally, and was drained and tired. So I went in with some anxiety. The doctor gave, me some antibiotics, ordered a chest x-ray, and said I was okay to do the IV drug therapy. That had been in doubt, because the IV drug can aggravative pneumonia, and has the side effect of suppressing the immune system. But I got my treatment, got through it, and that evening I was able to play the Monster Jam gig in Madison. It was a long and tiring day, but I did better with it than I had anticipated.

While I was sitting there for several hours with a needle in my arm, this time out I brought my sketchbook/journal along, and some pencils. I was really tired from not sleeping the previous night, but too wound up to actually nap. I closed my eyes a few times, but I didn't sleep. Instead I made several drawings. On previous occasions I'd brought a novel to read, or spent most of my time talking to other patients receiving drug therapies. THis time out, for whatever reason, I was in the mood to draw.

For a few weeks now, I've been getting lots of images arising in my mind of iconic and shamanic beings. The kinds of images you see on the walls of the ancient caves of Lascaux and Trois Frères, caves in France full of the earliest known art made by humans. This suits me, as I am more interested in this kind of iconographic art than in being just another colored pencil artist who does photorealistic drawings. I am moving more towards iconic, mythic, and shamanic artwork as I continue to learn to draw with pencils. I've made several drawings from nature, which are indeed more realistic drawings, but mostly as exercises in technique, not as finished pieces. On this day of making drawings, I drew entirely on imagination, on the images I was seeing inside my own mind. The gods have been talking, and I've been listening.



This pair of drawings was made back to back. First I drew the stylized stag, then the drawing of The Wild Hunt. I am interested in exploring drawing the stag, the horned king of the forest, for its mythopoetic strength as an image. I've been feeling the presence a lot lately of The Horned One, Herne the Hunter, the Horned God, leader of The Wild Hunt that rides on Twelfth Night to chase the winter dark back to its home in the distant lands at the back of the north wind. The stag is a symbol of all that, and of the Horned One.

It came to me while making this drawing that the stag was standing knee deep in a quiet northern lake, reflected in the still water. So that's what I drew.

The drawing of the The Wild Hunt, which came next, was all about action, stylized shapes of hounds hunting across the turbid sky, under a fitful waxing moon. Again, not trying to be realistic here, but trying to evoke an archetype.


moon water haiku

This and the next drawing were warm-ups, calligraphic haiga made with a Japanese brush pen. Enso becomes moon becomes scene. Following the brush, wherever it leads.


moonrise

Finally, I made this stag and moon drawing, while still of thinking of iconic cave-painting style imagery. I drew it with the Japanese brush pen I usually carry around in my pants pocket. I was thinking of a sculpture made of driftwood in the shape of the wild stag of the hunt. This is the sort of sculpture, made of natural materials, that transforms one thing into another: truly transformational, liminal, shamanic, alchemical. Changing shapes.


waning moon
driftwood effigy god

Then I was moved to try something new. I had the time, after all, sitting there with a needle in my arm. So I pulled out the colored pencils, and added to the brush drawing.



I haven't experimented much with this type of drawing before, mixing ink and pencil drawings. This turns a corner for me conceptually, in terms of drawing technique and of subject matter.

Again, I am more drawn to iconic, shamanic imagery for making these kinds of drawing. I'm not really interested in making photorealistic drawings of dogs and children, or of anything else for that matter. I can always make an actual photograph, if I want to. So for drawings, right now anyway I am interested in drawing not only what I see—trees, the land, rocks—but what I see in my mind's eye—those archetypes and mythopoetic images I made here.

Teaching Myself to Draw 6

I was supposed to meet a friend for tea and conversation at the local Starbucks (of all places) this morning, just to hang out and catch up. Well, I got stood up. But it was a lovely morning, not a cloud in the sky, not humid, not too warm: a pleasant summer day. So I took my Earl Grey tea (I don't drink coffee, which is why Starbucks is not my usual hangout) and sat outside on the patio, at a table shaded by one of those big umbrellas, while I waited.

It was not a waste, and I wasn't upset about being stood up, because it was a pleasant getaway from home for an hour or so. I sipped my tea and wrote in my journal.

And I made a couple of drawings, and worked on a couple of poems.

This ash tree was the best drawing of the morning. Made my with my Japanese brush pen, it's a depiction of the ash tree across the parking lot from where I was sitting. The long fronds of the leaves were blowing gently in the breeze, making patterns of pale green over the dark shade of the tree's branches, against the pale cloudless sky.

This is a pretty good drawing, I think. It captures the subtle movement of the breeze in the leaves. It seemed proper to sketch those leaves as pointillistic dots, following the curves and lines they made while moving in the wind. I also think the relative thicknesses and forms of the branches came out rather well. I'm learning to control the thick and thin strokes of the brush: the main trunk was drawn in one stroke, from top to bottom, across the length of the page.

So I'm still teaching myself to draw. I'm liking the results more, now, when I attempt to depict something natural and real, rather than an abstract drawing or brush-calligraphy piece out of my imagination.

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Here's my usual enso warm-up drawing. I've made it a habit, when starting out a brush-drawing session, to warm up, or loosen up, by filling a sketchbook page with enso. Sometimes something emerges from that, most of the time it's just a sktech page. This session I started out with a bunch of enso, as usual, and it quickly turned into a set of raindrop circles on the still water of a pond. The still moment when the rain has only just started, the drops just beginning to fall. That smell of fresh rain in the air.

Brush Mind Poems

Two brush mind book poems, from my journal. Written on two different occasions, months apart, but following the same brush-mind to place brush pen to paper.



the black pitch
of the old boat

the old shorebound sailor
remembers, nodding by the fire

cold harbors, cold rooms
nights at sea when the mast iced

another log set on the hearth
cold bones never warm enough, growing colder

a gold cloud in summer
lee of the hummingbird's lair

falcons over sparrows
the shaved fields still fallow

the sun calls at last
to its lost boon companion

the fire's gone out, hands on the rocker
chair's arms as cold as the hearthstone

A bit of a memory of my grandfather, the sailor who left his home in Norway's Arctic seacoast north to emigrate to Michigan. But never leaving the sea, as the house he built in Muskegon was less than a mile from Muskegon Lake, and thus not far from the inland sea, Lake Michigan.

Also a bit of a poetic homage to that northern poet whose voice I keep finding in my own, whenever I write about norther things, about granite and sea and weather and the winter's cold: George Mackay Brown.

And looking back, written out of my own cold feelings, these past few months when the illness and anemia made me unseasonably shiver with chills.



blue twilight
fading evening light
evening star crystallizes
start of western sun
westing down to dusk
down darkening grove
darkening cardinal's red
cardinal ordained to weep
ordinal compass rose
risen eastern shine

Form emerging as the poem proceeds—just playing around with form and internal rhyme—middle rhyme becomes first word of next line, more or less. Making a sort of circle around the evening sky, as well as in the poem. (Probably need to drop that first line. Or maybe it's the title?)

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I don't care about form. I think the contemporary obsession with poetry's formal craft is a symptom of having nothing to say. I don't go out of my way to find forms; although sometimes, like this, they arise organically out of the poem, during the writing process. Sometimes you emphasize that effect later. Sometimes, a form appears immediately upon starting the first line, like that feeling that emerges when you just know the phone's going to ring an instant before it does.

But I don't care about form: I care about the musical properties of rhythm, pattern, and silence. Those concerns can lead to generating form. But form is musical, generative, organic. It comes out of the poem itself, rather than being imposed upon the form beforehand. Let the dogs run. Don't hobble them before the gate's even open.

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Maybe not great or even very good poems; seeds of something for later, perhaps. Examples of the brush-mind journal process. A lot of poems start this way for me, momentary inspirations and random scraps in the journal, then get revised into something better, later, or abandoned as not being worth it. Most poems that start this way need tightening; there's almost always a few words that clutter, or a line that's a warm-up line, something to get the poem going, to oil the gears, and needs to be dropped.

I could have used a stronger word than "dropped" to talk about revision. Excision, chopped, cut out, some other surgical or sculptural metaphor. How violently we describe the revision process sometimes; it makes me wonder if those writers who use violent metaphors to describe the writing and revising processes aren't accidentally saying something about self-hatred and self-esteem.

The creative writing process has to allow for less-than-stellar work as nobody writes winners every time; if an artist does try to convince you that they only make good work, they're either lying or self-deluded. Remember that most artists only show you their good work, not their work-in-process pieces. Remember too that finishing a piece can be an elusive process; sometimes you come back to it, years later, and finally know what to do, to make it come alive. Sometimes you just have to abandon it, and try again from scratch.

I find that for me, the poems that fall into the middle zone, between first/second drafts and coming back years later, are often the worst poems. I usually wait for a poem a strike. I don't go looking. And I learned long ago that trying to force a poem always, always turns it into an intellect-driven process, and kills any life in the poem itself. I can write to prompts, if I feel the gods and archetypes tapping on my shoulder. Otherwise, it's stale. I've said it before: poems written only from the head always fail. Precisely because there's no heart in them. So, I tend to find my best poems at the extremes: immediate appearance, done very quickly, not much revision; or long, long gestation followed by even longer revision. Sometimes waiting is everything. It's the poems in the middle, which you try to fix too soon, or which you over-revise, that end up dying. Some people like those poems, if they see them; but I usually don't.

Mountain Dream Drawing

In my dreams last night, the vivid last dream before waking, I am preparing to take off for the mountains; it’ll be cold, and I’ll be camping; my truck is all packed, I'm just trying to get away; people delay me with chores and chat, and slow down my progress; I take a wrong turn at the exit ramp for the highway into the mountains; so I pull off where I can get turned around, get gas and get going; I have a good chat with a park ranger overseer at the station who’s an old woman, practical and down to earth; eventually I find a gas station and get back on the two-lane that goes up the grade to the high peaks, up over a curving bridge and onto the climbing road.



I say I'm going to the Tetons, in my dream, but the mountains I'm going to are parked much higher up, like in the Colorado Front Range, towards Rocky Mountain National Park, a patch of white-capped jagged peaks at the top of a spine of mountain ranges.



I've had recurring dreams of being in the mountains; of going up, and coming down; of camping, hiking, traveling, driving. A recurring dream of being in a small city in a valley at the base of some very high mountains, then going up through a long valley which gets steeper and steeper till I arrive at a cirque valley hanging above the world; you can stand at the mouth of the valley and see forever, the air very thin and cold and bracing. When I was studying geology in the Tetons, age 18, we climbed up to one of the high cirque valleys, at the top of which was an active glacier, and looking east across Jackson Hole, and on into the Gros Ventre range, you really did feel like you could see forever. Maybe these mountains are the high mountains of my dreams, that I’ve been to in more than one dream, over the years, very high up, very isolated, exquisitely beautiful.

Rock Gardens on Paper

Brush Mind Drawings

Sitting at the auto repair place waiting for the mechanics to finish fixing my transmission, completely bored with the TV wasteland drone, take out brush and journal, make a few brush-mind drawings, a sunny pleasant afternoon for meditative art-making. The rains, the rains will wash them all away.

Brush-Mind Book

My sister, artist Pam Barick, makes handmade books. She finds good paper stock, interesting art-paper for covers, then creates handmade blank books, to give as gifts. I use some of these books for my handwritten journals, from time to time. I use others for gathering random thoughts in one place, notes, ideas, even recipes.



I have one particular book my sister made that I use for brush calligraphy drawing and writing. I may only write or draw in this handmade journal a few times a year. Gradually the book is becoming a collection of artistic thoughts, images, drawings, and sayings, mostly Zen-related, in the calligraphic haiga tradition, and mostly inspired by and following in the footsteps of Western Zen artist-writers Paul Reps and Frederick Franck. I reserve this handmade journal for this particular body of work. I keep the book close at hand, most of the time, even though I don't make marks in it very often. Sometimes I go back through it, to remind myself of an insight I may have had a year ago, that I have since forgotten and need to remember. Sometimes I pick it up and wonder, who made this? certainly not I! It's not an artist's sketchbook, it's not full of technically-perfect drawings, it's not not full of private journal entries. (There are one or two, that's all.) It's a handmade book full of handwritten jottings.



It's a brush-mind book, a book in which the writer is following the brush, often starting with an enso that becomes a drawing. A thought that grows into something more. A quiet book, a contemplative book.

One day it will be finished—only in the sense that there will be no more blank pages available to be filled. One that day, I will open another of my sister's handmade blank journal books (I have a stash I've set aside just for this purpose), and begin again this brush-mind work. Or, rather, continue it, in a new volume. The brush-mind book doesn't end, it doesn't conclude, it goes on.

Brush-mind happens in my other journals, too. My journals used to be written thoughts only, my inner strivings, my figuring it out by writing it out journal, my thinking-is-linking journal. Poems have often been begotten therein. Now those "regular" journals also contain brush-mind drawings, sayings, enso, and things that could easily fit into this brush-mind book. I don't try to contain it in one place, one arena. Following the brush, wherever it leads you, is what brush-mind is all about.

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I recommend that writers, artists, and other creatives make and keep some version of a brush-mind book. If you keep a brush-mind book, there are a few things to remember.

Keeping a brush-mind book is not about "making art." It's not about craft, or perfectionism, or brilliance. It's a very small, quiet book, which you keep for your own contemplation. There is no-one to critique your brush-mind book, not even yourself. Get out of that artist's mind, and into a mind much quieter and simpler. Don't edit yourself. Be spontaneous. Let a drawing be less than wonderful, because even though it's not a perfect work of art, it contains the spirit and feeling of the moment you drew it.

Keeping a brush-mind book ought to be a sensual experience, as well as a contemplative one. If you make your own book, make it out of fine paper, exquisite cover-imagery, and good materials. Make it durable, make it lovely to hold in the hand and page through. Don't skimp on your personal satisfaction. There is nothing wrong with purchasing a journal-book to use as a brush-mind book. Just make sure that's it a beautiful book that you love to hold and contemplate. Find an interesting blank book at a bookstore or art-supply store. Maybe it will have on its cover an image from your favorite artist, or a saying by your favorite poet.

You can copy aphorisms and poems into the book, to gather together the wisdom that inspires and directs your life and work.

Use a fine pen. Go out of your way to purchase the most beautiful pen you can find. That pen or brush you always wanted, but never gave yourself permission to own before now. Writing with a fine pen or brush needs to be a sensual and pleasurable experience in its own rite. I use Japanese calligraphy brush pens for my brush-mind book, especially one particular Pentel refillable cartridge brush-pen manufactured in Japan and only available in the USA at Japanese stationary stores that import Japanese writing materials. I could buy this brush-pen online, and yet I enjoy shopping for it in person. Whenever I'm in San Francisco, I stock up. I go way out of my way to find and use these kinds of pens. I turn my pen-hunting into its own adventure, and make it into a meaningful, pleasurable experience in its own rite.

All these side-paths and by-ways turn your brush-mind book into something special, something unique, something to be treasured and kept for years. We value most that which we have worked to attain. We value most that which we have sacrificed our time and effort to obtain. Be consciously aware of this when you go looking for materials for your art. Don't be casual, and don't be callous, and take it for granted. Be mindful.

Becoming mindful is why we keep a brush-mind book. Making a brush-mind book, and drawing in it, and writing in it, is a form of mindfulness practice in itself. A form of art-as-meditation, art-as-mindfulness. You're not making great art in your brush-mind book: you're making your self.

Calligraphic Haiga

A haiga is a form related to haiku. Traditionally, this was artwork coupled with a haiku or waka done in brush calligraphy: the poem and image being complimentary, and making up a combined artwork: an illuminated or illustrated poem. In more modern times, there has been a modernization of the form that couples English-language haiku with photography.

Every so often, I feel the urge to pick up one of my brush calligraphy pens and spontanesouly write short poems, maybe or maybe not haiku, with drawings, illuminations, and illustrations. For example:



I acknowledge an influence here, as well, from Paul Reps, whose picture-poems, which I first encountered in his book Zen Telegrams, are spontaneous expressions of the Zen spirit. Reps, who was one of the first influential students of Zen from the West, and was also a translator and commentator (for example, the famous Zen teaching pictures, the Ten Oxherding Pictures), tossed off a large number of his picture-poems, which were often later collected into small books of rare beauty and startlingly clear expressiveness, even as his topic was often the removal of the self from the picture. I first encountered Reps' work in my teens, in the early 1970s, and I do think they contributed towards me eventually doing these brush pieces.



This practice of calligraphic haiga is a recent one, for me, faciliated by my use of imported japanese brush-pens, and a renewed interest in calligraphy in general. Western-style lettering calligraphy is an artform I practiced some time ago, but as it feeds into that aspect of my personality that leads to perfectionism, it got to be too dangerous to pursue. As a recovering perfectionist, I do my best not to awaken that particular obsessive tendency, if at all possible. Haiga are looser, and in the Reps manner, more spontaneous, than Western-style calligraphy, and delightfully easy to get into. As for Japanese sumi-e style painting and calligraphy, much of the preparation is spent in meditative practice: the ritual laying out of implements, which helps focus and calm the mind, and prepare one for the directed action of spontaneous artmaking-with-attention.



Everything one does, no matter what, is an artistic practice, as long as one is paying close, focused attention, and doing it with conscious intention. Everything is a meditation. Everything is a creative practice. I do my best to get into this mindset as continuously as I can during the day, and I make a special point of doing it while cooking a meal. In other words, Paying Attention turns anything and everything into a contemplative artistic creative process. That includes driving the car, eating, walking, traditional artistic practices such as painting, taking photographs and music; it also includes mowing the lawn, raking leaves, and making love.

So, I approach brush calligraphy painting from that same mindset.



Making these haiga pieces this way is something I have evolved towards, over several years. I have been inspired in part by other poets I have encountered recently who have put forth haiga, mostly with photos. Although I've been doing these brush paintings again for the past year, after not doing them for a very long time, I don't think I would have begun doing them again but for those encounters with other haiga, for which I remain grateful.

The other reason I started doing these brush calligraphy pieces again was because i found the right brush-pens again, after not having any for several years. More on that below.

I originally did Japanese-style brush calligraphy when studying Ki Aikido, an advanced Japanese martial art, starting in 1988 or so. We would every so often spend entire practice sessions doing calligraphy, or various forms of breathing meditation; next session, when we went back to practicing the actual martial arts, we all had improved.

(Ki Aikido is an art that intentionally and consciously teaches mind-body coordination, and uses several teaching means to develop it. Actually, every martial art teaches mind-body unity, but most of them achieve that after maybe a million practice punches or kicks or whatever; in other words, they teach it indirectly, and never talk about it. Ki Aikido starts teaching it openly, in the very first session of every beginner's class.)

I had already been a trained calligrapher and music copyist in the Western manner: italic scripts, fine pens, texts copied out as illuminated manuscripts, etc. Taking up the brush was not a big step, for me, but a natural progression. I was a journeyman music copyist in music school, and after; I copied orchestral parts for several new orchestral pieces, and at least one off-Broadway musical. Back in the days before music softwares like Finale and Sibelius, all orchestral parts were hand-copied. I studied with a master copyist while still a composition student, and got quite good at it; one or two pages of my own musical scores have even been framed as fine art. (Which is silly but true.)

When I was a young man, I used to think that I couldn't draw and I couldn't paint. I believed I had no skill at it. It was all cartoony and horrible, and I was very judgmental of my own work. I couldn't draw realistically to save my life; I still can't, really, at least not up to those photorealistic art-school standards most people think of as "realistic drawing." I've never been through art school "drawing boot camp," and I don't care to. (I went through music theory/history boot camp, and that was enough of that.) You know how it can be in families, when siblings are assigned roles to play by the group, usually quite unconsciously: my sister was the designated visual artist, and I was the designated musician. In fact, we're both capable of both, and both good at several creative media. But that was one reason I focused on photography and music for so many years, among the other arts I practice.

In the past few years, I finally got over all that, and after several years away from calligraphy and drawing, I have taken them up again. Everything I learned in the intervening years is obviously present now, and I notice that I have much greater mastery of the brush than I ever did before. (Just as in Aikido, indirect practice still improved our ability to do the techniques more effectively.) Using the left hand as well as the right hand has been part of this, too.

I spend probably half my day on indirect practice; for example, whenever I'm driving, I practice what I learned in Aikido about mind-body unity, and feeling the car's movements as in my own body; for another example, whenever I am tapping on a table-top, I am practicing musical skills with mind-body unity. This mindset has come to permeate everything I do. I am a person of just ordinary strengths; but I have been trained to use my strengths to their most efficient peak, using mind-body coordination. It comes in pretty handy at times.

One key element to every brush session that comes from the formal methods of Japanese caaligraphy is to treat every action as a meditation: begin by sitting quietly and calmly, and become still: yes, this is a meditative practice. I sometimes sit quietly for a full two or three minutes, eyes closed about halfway, or with soft focus, not looking at anything really, before I ever pick up the brush. I learned to do this it this way because I studied it in the Japanese manner. In Japanese calligraphy, one first becomes centered and grounded, and only then picks up the brush or pen. Next, it is traditional to practice doing a few enso, which are circles made in one stroke:



Traditionally, the circle is left open, rather than closed, to let the spirit breathe in and out. If one is truly calm, centered, and grounded, it is possible to brush an almost-perfect circle. (Conventional wisdom says that it is impossible for a human to draw a perfect circle. This is disproven by generations of Japanese calligraphers. There are plenty of sumi-e paintings that quietly, with no fanfare, prove otherwise.) Traditionally, the enso stroke is begun in the lower left, and circles clockwise to completion; I often begin in the upper left quadrant, though.

The tools one needs are simple, and nowadays readily easy to acquire: good paper, ink, and a sumi-e style brush. The basic materials can be be found at almost every college art-department supply store.

For these pieces, I used various-size brush pens, which are fine nylon-bristle brushes fed by ink cartridges, like a good cartrige pen you might find at Colorado Pens (which I dare not enter, lest I be overcome by one of my few addictions in life: pen lust!). These Japanese brush-pens, by the way, I have only ever found at Japanese stationery stores in cities large enough to have a good enough population to warrant them; and one or two extremely complete artist's supply stores. I look for them in every art store I go into, and while most good art supply stores will have basic sumi-e supplies, they typically have traditional brushes and inks, rather than the brush-pens I like.

I prefer these brush-pens currently for one very simple reason: spontaneity. In traditional calligraphy, and sumi-e painting, there is set-up time involved. What I typically do lately is always have a brush-pen and a journal-book in my backpack, on hand. I have several artists' sketchbooks lying around, of varying sizes. Any time, anywhere, whenever I am so moved, I can pull out one of these pens and notebooks, and make a piece. My artist sister also makes hand-made blank books using excellent paper; I often keep one of these books to hand.

The occasions in which one is called to take up the brush are various and numerous: After walking the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, one warm winter afternoon, I sat on the bench by the labyrinth and filled several pages of one of my sister's handmade blank books. (Obviously, walking meditation also gets one calm and centered.) I was at a weekend retreat for men artists in the woods north of Chicago last fall, and while everyone else was doing a guided writing practice, I felt moved to take up my brush-pen and the haiga I presented here were some of the result: combined words and images. I later showed them to the rest of the group, and received a lot of encouragement to continue this as an artform for myself. I have been at the Pacific Ocean shore, in both Oregon and California, and after clambering around the cliffs and beaches, hunting dreamstones and making site-specific landscape-art sculptures, I've taken up the pen and done on-site brush haiku with pictures.

So, this is an artistic medium, a meditation practice, a contemplative method of observing the world, and much more—all at once.