My second contemplative prayer group reflection was due yesterday. The assignment is very open-ended: a 700 word essay about our experience or an art piece with a short description. The only theme I could think about was how the program feels very nebulous and ad hoc to me. We learn a bunch of tools, and then what? Meanwhile the ongoing (and tired) cliche at work is that we are building a plane while flying it, especially as we struggle to meet the status quo with fewer resources.
I set that aside for a bit and spent last Saturday patronizing bookstores all over Minneapolis. I had a few coupons left over from Independent Bookstore Day back in April and wanted to use them before they expired. At one bookstore, I picked up a copy of Lynda Barry’s Making Comics. That evening, I tried a few of the exercises in it. For the exercise to draw oneself as a fruit or vegetable, I drew an adorable tamarind person.
The next day, after church, I sat down with my sketchbook and forced myself to draw something. The result was a partially built plane with tamarind people crawling all over it. That was the original sketch for what became my reflective piece. I wrote for my assignment,
I’ve been struggling with the Transforming Hearts program because there does not seem to be a clearly defined goal. As a former teacher, I’m used to “By the end of this course, participants will …” Instead, we have been learning random things, represented by the panels for the plane’s wing in the image. Much like the people holding the panels, we are struggling to figure out how they fit together. Meanwhile, the course continues coasting along as everyone, I think including the organizers, tries to figure out what we are doing.
This image is a simplified version of my sketch, which included the whole plane, including people meditating and a lot more panels lying around. The panels being used (debated over?) include one with a spiral (the simplest form of labyrinth), one with a lit candle, and one with a singing bowl with its cushion and mallet. Our group has used all of these in various prayer practices.
I had stated in my blog entry for my first reflection that I was hoping to create a sculpture this time. That didn’t happen, but now I want to make a crochet or plush tamarind person and I found a mini singing bowl to use as a prop, so maybe next time? The next reflection will be due in about four months.
The image below is my reflective piece, a cartoon of tamarind people building a plane while flying it. This one has not been posted on deviantArt yet.
