From Out of Chaos Comes The Cosmos
I met up with an old flame a few years back. While we caught up on events, respective marriages, children and careers, he exclaimed to me, “Ah Kate! You’re living the dream!” While I understood that he knew that painting and being an artist was all I ever wanted to do, at the time, I felt he couldn’t be further from the truth. Didn’t he know exactly how hard it was to be an artist in this day and age? We don’t have patrons anymore. Our work is often poorly paid, and below the minimum wage. And there is a constant juggle going on between work that I want to create to satisfy my inner expression and creativity, and work that I have to do because it sells. Being self employed is not a cake walk.
The Buddha Garden is a painting that was born from a place that was far from living the dream. I was sat in my car on Merrion Square on one of the many fruitless Sundays, staring out of the window at my beautiful paintings hanging on the railings. If I earned €50 that day for the sale of a small paining I was doing well. But this was a day where nothing was moving and worse still, I’d fallen out with my neighbour. We weren’t that close really, but we’d had some interesting discussions on Buddhism, and I was feeling confused and powerless in the situation. That’s when I got the idea to paint my Buddha. It was a cry for peace and serenity which seemed very far from me at that point in time. I was so ‘not’ inspired that I felt I needed to get the wheels turning to try to raise myself up to a better place. I was choosing to make myself feel better this way. I was trying to understand the reference to the lotus flower that grows out from the mud towards the light. Sometimes inspiration can be born from desperation!
“Just like the lotus we too have the ability to rise from the mud, bloom out of the darkness, and radiate into the world.” Author Unknown
And so my Buddha emerged. This dreamy face in a garden of the most beautiful flowers; flowers that had featured many times before in my previous work. It was like they were all lining up to support me, give of their beauty, colour and fragrance to me, and console me by their presence. Doing the painting was therapeutic. I was creating a better space to inhabit. Out of a difficult situation, I had managed to create a nirvana, and to this day, it remains one of my favourite paintings.
Added to the imagery is the mantra-like prayer written by the Japanese founder of Reiki, Mikao Usui. The transcript is written in his own handwriting. It was a perfect piece to find its way into the painting as I believe that there is power in prayer, and indeed, a painting can be like a prayer or mantra in itself. It describes the journey of our experience here on earth and reminds us that we can reach within to find calm even if the rest of the world seems to be going mad. When we make time to do this, we can tap into what C.G. Jung called the collective unconscious. It is here that we encounter things beyond our own experience and knowing where we feel connected to God, our higher power, or whatever you call spirit in your life. By tuning in and connecting to this state we allow a healing to take place. The keyword here is ‘allow’, for holding on to emotional pain is a choice we make. It may have to be worked through again and again while we process it. It is indeed difficult being human. But we must never forget that source is always there. Our breath can and will carry us through to better times. We just need to meet it half way by showing up and allowing that flow of the good stuff to show up in our lives. To me, this painting was my way of reaching out to connect with source. It helped me move from a difficult space, to a feeling of expansiveness, which I can then share with others, which is the purpose of my work.
The Buddha Garden Description and Symbology
The Buddha Garden is a meditative painting which incorporates a copy of the Reiki Prayer written in Japanese in Mikao Usui's own handwriting. The Butterfly, symbol of transformation appears, flitting through the painting. It also represents the fleeting thoughts that we experience when we try to calm the mind in meditation. These thoughts never entirely go away leaving us to experience the pure bliss of silence; the moment when we feel totally at one with the universe. So it is represented here as part of the composition, moving in and out of form, taking its rightful place in the painting. It is here to remind us that we cannot stop ourselves from being human and that our minds will wander. But its symbolic meaning of transformation gives us a glimpse of the possibility of transcendence to a higher plane.
The dreaming Buddha face emerges as if out of a mist. The face represents all of us, our humanity. During meditation we are here, and we are not here. Drifting in and out as if in a dream. Here, earth connects with air, the physical with the spirit.
The colours that the flowers and butterfly bring, like rainbow light, replenish our chakras. The red butterfly for our earthly base chakra, Muladhara. Orange and Yellow sunflowers for our sacral and solar plexus chakras. The violet of the floxgloves for the third eye chakra, ajna. And for the Heart Chakra, the pink rose and the earth greens of the foliage. The Iris for blue representing the throat chakra, and speaking our truth. The white calla lilies represent white flames for Sahasrara for our crown chakra. Together they appear as a mala, or garland of flowers around the Buddha.
The words in the painting are as follows: