The Transformative Power of Sacred Art-Making

When I began teaching Western women the sacred art of Tibetan appliqué in 2008, I thought I was just teaching stitching technique. My students quickly set me straight. It turns out I had seriously underestimated the power of tradition and transmission. Through teaching, I discovered the transformative effect of the sacred textile art I'd been making for 20 years.
I had lived in northern India for nine years and learned to make silk thangkas in apprenticeship to Tibetan master craftsmen.
A thangka is rollable wall hanging, a scroll, depicting a sacred image or spiritual teacher. Most thangkas are painted on canvas and framed in brocade, but I studied a rarer type of thangka in which the images are built from hundreds of pieces of silk, outlined in hand-wrapped horsehair, assembled in an intricate patchwork.
Six days a week for four years, I sat alongside young Tibetans in a sewing workshop just outside the Dalai Lama's temple. The environment was infused with dharma. Sounds of teaching and practice echoed from every window and courtyard. I attended Buddhist philosophy classes in the morning with learned Tibetan scholars (geshe) and then trudged up the steep hill to the workshop where I stitched thangkas all afternoon.
I had absorbed the dharma this community breathed, and it came out through my fingers into the thangkas I stitched. But I was no dharma teacher, and only an inconsistent meditator. I told prospective students that I would teach them stitching techniques, made sacred only by association. They should not expect spiritual illumination from me. They must seek that elsewhere, I thought.
Little did I know, each line and stitch of this artwork carries the light of the buddhas and of generations of artists and practitioners. You can't escape the deeper lessons woven into the fabric of this lineage.
I was living in Italy, married and making thangkas on commission, when an American woman in France contacted me and sparked the creation of the Stitching Buddhas Virtual Apprentice Program. Louise had returned to France after many years of following her husband's job from country to country while raising young children. Now, she was seeking an occupation, something meaningful to do with her energies.
Louise had been trained as a costume designer and was a practicing Buddhist. When she saw her first silk thangka on the internet, it struck her as a natural coupling of her creative background with her spiritual practice. I had the same feeling sixteen years earlier when I walked into a Tibetan appliqué studio in India. Could I now offer this gift to others?
Working with needle and thread re-awakens our tactile intelligence. Eyes and ears are not our only receptors for learning. The rational mind is not our only mode of understanding. And the voice is surely not our only instrument for communicating. We perceive, learn, and communicate through our fingers as well. But in the 21st century, our range of manual engagement has been reduced to tapping smooth keys and swiping touch-screens.
People who knit or quilt or work on a potter's wheel have experienced the mindful quality that can arise in slow, deliberate movement and tactile sensation. Doing something by hand slows down the busyness of life - if only momentarily.
Not only that, but the thread becomes a metaphor for your life. You see how things get tangled when you don't pay attention. You see where perfectionism trips you up, where you are afraid to move forward and how, sometimes, the more effort you exert the worse things get. Sometimes gentleness and a relaxed approach are needed. These patterns become evident in the stitching, and awareness filters into other activities.
The Tibetan appliqué tradition flows from an ancient spiritual lineage of artists, teachers and practitioners who have created and used its images in their practice. When we stitch, we receive their transmission through our fingers.
People often ask if I meditate while I stitch. I say this stitching IS meditation.
Literally, the Tibetan word for meditation (gom) means to familiarize. Through meditation, we familiarize ourselves with desirable mind states - expansive, loving, generous, imperturbable mind states - in an effort to make them habitual.
When we stitch a thangka or even a lotus flower, we are in the presence of enlightenment. We familiarize ourselves with enlightened beings, and therefore with the highest qualities of our own nature. The images in our hands symbolize the clearest, highest, best parts of ourselves and of humanity. Stitch by stitch, we allow these qualities to fill us.
Most of my students, the Stitching Buddhas, are women in the 50s and 60s. They are well educated. Many have worked in healing professions such as nursing, medicine, social work, and psychotherapy. Many are mothers of grown children. They come to the practice with an awareness of limited time. Some face diminishing eyesight or challenges to their manual dexterity. Some have no sewing experience at all. They're not preparing for a career in thangka-making. They are seeking to live their life meaningfully and happily, and to leave something beautiful in their wake.
Buddhism encourages us to recognize our good fortune and to use this precious human life well. Human rebirth is rare and hard to come by. With gratitude in her heart, each woman-buddha stitches her response to Mary Oliver's sumptuous question: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

A Short SF Vignette

A Short SF Vignette
(The Kerberos Narrative) 2048 A.D.
Kerberos, orbits 60,000-km planet Pluto; Pluto which has five moons, and in comparison in distance, Earth being 93-million miles from the sun, Pluto, is 4-billion miles from Earth. But Kerberos is where our story leads us. It is the most obscure of the five moons I do believe, all being nearby the Kuiper Belt. Kerberos' largest lobe is but 8-km across and its smaller lobe being only 5-km across.
Because of its isolation from the other moons, and its small size, asteroids being larger, this dwarf moon has a weird inhabitants-and perhaps for good reason was selected over the other four moons, and not by accident. They harbor the Black Moon Widows (spiders as large and some larger than those old iron frying pans my mother used to use when I was just a lad of ten; you could cook a whole chick in that frying pan, it weighed six-pounds, no kidding).
The moon is so infested with them, they constantly are bumping heads, so the last report read coming from the spacecraft, Enceladus, named after Saturn's moon for whatever reasons. So comes the information, via, to me from the Space Center in Louisiana.
The Narrative
The moon's light indicated to those of the spacecraft Enceladus I (Earth Time, 10,000 B.C.), that it was to a certain degree a living moon, and thus, provided an atmosphere, thin as it was, there was one. Although the moon has darkened over time, a result of chemical changes triggered by sunlight, cosmic rays, and the mass of Black Moon Widows, or spiders, those that have survived the invasion to multiply in the ten-thousand years since Enceladus I, dropped those creatures off, to its astronomical figure of one billion now, and now being the year 2048.
Let me say, and in saying, get ahead of myself, which will do this account no harm, that the Widows, they kill their male mates, for a song and a dance, and when hungry, are a strain that contaminates wherever they are, whatever they touch, and like a hard-shelled cockroach, hard to kill, and therefore could not be allowed to remain on the far-off planet beyond Earth's solar system by the crew members of the spacecraft Enceladus I.
It might be of interest to the reader, this spacecraft that was being monitored by the Louisiana Space Center Enceladus II, now in the year 2048 A.D., came from what is referred to as the Dark or Black Galaxy; via, a wormhole. The planet is referred to by its acronym, SSARG, which has two moons.
That said, it was horribly ominous for the Captain of the Enceladus II, and the spacecraft's crew, after 10,000-years down the road to go back to that moon, like opening up a can of worms, or like opening and closing of a funeral, long forgotten, -what did they expect to find? Other than, spider corpses. I mean, we have a 10,000-year separation a huge gap in time, one thousand spiders (dropped into what they thought was an endless well, with explosives caving the walls in on the Widows) had turned into one billion in that gap of time. Interplanetary breeding, that was not the plan, but for the spiders to die, and they didn't, perhaps one hundred escaped, and colonized the moon, by cannibalization perhaps.
Had you asked the Captain of the spacecraft, Enceladus I, 8000 B.C., that this tiny moon would contain a billion spiders of this size, he'd had said, "It's not believable" but we must now stick with Enceladus II, and the year 2048.
The Enceladus II, had returned as what might be called a routine trip, to investigate this tiny moon, for future possibilities. At this juncture, the spacecraft's captain knew nothing of its inhabitants, blotted out by all nearly all light now, and only shadows reflecting of the moons higher or more pronounced geological structures, such as craters and mountains, and valleys. Hence, the dark Widows covered per near every inch of the moon, making it even darker, as if the terrain was of some dark soil, or rocky material. With the knowledge of the previous voyage, and the rock hard surface that it was, they landed. Instantly there came a clambering, on the ship outer surface, a horrible droning and hammering, it brought a chill to the crew of astronauts, deadliness overwhelmed them.
Henceforward, the Captain seeing only the dark mass as gravel outside his porthole, weapon in hand, life support suite on, threw open the door-and the Widows had a feast, and the spacecraft, still remains in Limbo.

A Short SF Vignette - The Hidden Scrolls of Mars (Earth Time, 100,000 BC)

"I hope, nobody finds these writings! If one does, it means someone else between Earth and Mars or some other planet has been here, and God help them if they have no way off this planet. That is to say, they'll most likely have to face these awful solar winds and storms which you will find out are quick and intense. They have stripped away most of Mars' atmosphere, edged rock formations, rivers. I am the last person left here, most of us left, escaped to earth a decade ago. Earth is quite primitive to our race yet it is rich with life. We look more like the Cro-Magnon, and they, well, only time will tell, I venture to say, an earlier stage of mankind.
From my radio reports, some of our spacecraft had an emergency landing on an asteroid. What their fate will be, time will tell.
I am Commander Mruts, I stayed behind, voluntarily, for the simple reason-if not, then what? And someone had to man the last of Mars' stations, and monitor what needs checking, watching, observing. Although I get updates from Earth and the Asteroid.
They have now been gone five years. I am writing these scrolls out, for posterity, should anyone find them in the future. I do understand our astronauts, and those civilians on those spacecraft's, were hurled through space, it turned out to be a nasty trip, with a comet nearly shifting the ships courses as it orbited by. The Asteroid, will not allow the Martians to live much longer I am told, their supplies are down, as is their fuel, and there appears to be no escape, or launch ability.
We call Earth the blue planet, and Mars the red planet. At one time Mars was shrouded in thick gases which supported our presence, and we had much water on the surface, many rivers. Like Earth, at one time our presence of air, I mean its content was antiquated, our Co2 level & O/O2, level within the atmosphere was like Earth's is today ((the oxygen within the air consisting of 21% of the atmosphere by volume) (a diatomic gas)), today on Mars that number is less than 5% of Earth's, and our water supply on the surface is completely frozen solid. And the atmosphere is so thin, being removed from high, to higher altitudes yearly, through interactions with the sun, we have built underground abodes, which supply most of our daily survival needs.
On the other hand, as I have been informed, Earth has a global magnetic field that continues to operate and protect the life within its climate system, but I suppose it could in time be altered in a very similar manner Mars' has been. Should their moon be kicked off its orbit, or an asteroid half the size of Pluto tumble outside its belt, sideswipe it, and move it a foot here or there, consequently, their moon protects them quite well from the sun, and its orbit; yet at present, makes it favorable to light the night, and shade the day for Earth, how fortunate, God has been gracious to the Earthlings.
On another subject, we must mingle with the Neanderthal, which we call their primitive race, and what will we get in the future is any man's guess. Perhaps we'll all die out, and God will take a few of our DNA, and their DNA, and implant them into a new kind of man! Who's to say?
Again I stress, I hear oxygen and carbon dioxide are plentiful on Earth, this is important as is water for the planet life overall, which keeps this balance between mammals and vegetation and flora.
I must say, alas, our magnetic field is crushed, so there is no coming back to Mars other than for old time sake, and so here goes 4.5 billion years of history, to a nearly unusable, unstable, unpredictable planet, other than holding down a station for whatever purposes. I mean we are 50-million miles from Earth, and 43-million miles from the sun, kind of lost in the Gobi Desert of space.
I hate going out to the surface, hard to breath, and the temperature is above 150c at present. But reader, do not dismay, I volunteered for this, someone had to."
Update
In the year, 2050 A.D., the scrolls of Mars were found, during an exploration of the planet by none other than an old space dog and his astronaut master, Staff Sergeant Hector Hecker, of the U.S.A Independent Space Continuum, (privately owned by Donald Frump, a billionaire), whom was from St. Paul, Minnesota; the dog, weather-beaten went by the name Max III; Max's great grandfather fought in the Afghanistan War, and thus, Max III is now in the annals of Interplanetary Space Exploration. As for the Staff Sergeant he didn't do the finding, and well, -dogs have their rights too.