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Orientation for the Journey:
Virtually, this trip is free. It can
happen anytime but, mostly in China and other places in the
world, it happens in the evening when you invite a select few
over to your home for something to feed the body, something to
drink to relax the mind and something to explore, like a long
Ming Dynasty hand scroll. It is expected that each guest brings
stories and their insights into the journey. Sometimes the
journey is simple, a hike through the mountains (an easy
imaginative walk of the eye from a place to step into the scene,
a place to rest and view where you might be going, a jump of the
imagination to a higher view with a place to relax and
contemplate where you have been, and finally another jump of the
imagination to a “high view” where our minds and spirits can
“fly” to any heights that we can imagine. Finally, above the
highest mountain is a poem, a description and the owners’ seals
(stamps of who owned the scroll before and who has made this
trip in the past). If we have been schooled in seeing from the
Western cultures, we are surprised that this form does not
follow a Greek or Renaissance pattern of seeing: foreground,
middle ground and then background on a boxed stage (perspective
seeing). Opera lovers, those remembering the Broadway stage and
visiting the treasures of Western painting are comfortable with
this system of seeing. If, though, you come from an Oriental or
Byzantine or Cubist culture, you will have no problems in seeing
a Northern Sung hanging scroll which works on the system of:
foreground, a space, middle ground, another space, and finally a
high view with writing.
Pack well but
simple! In a world that searches for peace, it is important
that we walk together in our journeys, our hikes of the
imagination, and that we share our different visions and our
different ways of viewing the wonders of this place that we
call, “Earth, sky, water, us!”
In Southern Sung hand scrolls, the journey is
usually a relaxing visual trip through the lake country, which
has no high mountains but soft rolling hills, islands, places to
stop and reflect on where we have been, and a destination. It is
taken with friends, visually in the work and actually as our
guests for an evening. It uses the basic elements of the world:
air (the breath that symbolizes our life), water (the flow of
living, which moves downhill through a natural course), fire
(the ch’i, spirit, of our lives which can be seen in the quality
of the brushstrokes the first rule of Chinese painting: ch’i
yun) and earth (the grounding of ourselves in nature, planting
our feet in actual time and place).
What the Ming Dynasty added to the Sung vision
was a twist to historical tradition, a surprise for our lives so
that we do not get locked into the past, the present or the
future, but, like the water that we represent and sail upon,
we fold around any obstacle in our path. It teaches us that
peace, when we become too comfortable with it in one form, can
change suddenly but, in that shock of change, can reveal deeper
meanings to “peace.”
An Invitation: Come with me for an evening of
fellowship, sharing, sipping something that warms the heart and
spirit (even if it is cold water), and journeying in an ancient
culture across a lake, through the rolling hills and into the
mountains. The price is high: your time, your attention and your
insightful cooperation. At any point, judge if your reward is
worth the trip.
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