Limits of our seeing, depth in our listening

When we fail to notice the limits of how things look to us, we can inflict a great deal of harm. It is seeing-listening that opens us to human connection.

 

Three stories I heard this week about how deeply our physical appearance affects our lives

Her right arm in a cast and sling, this visionary and hard-working woman was stunned at how thoughtfully people responded to her apparent need for help. No one has made any such allowances for her, she noted, during times when she has actually felt a lot worse.

A courageous young woman struggling with multiple auto-immune diagnoses was dismayed when she heard other women in her online support groups describe how physicians treated them dismissively because Ankylosing Spondylitis is considered “a man’s disease.” 

A skilled, team-playing and tenacious contractor who was let go from her federal position considers her options as she applies for other jobs. The medical marijuana industry attracts her.  She can see herself learning about the industry and ultimately opening her own dispensary.  She also sees the industry as “nontraditional,” offering her freedom to show up where she is less constrained, less hindered by how she is seen in white-male-dominated workplaces: as her gender and skin color.

 

Bias is another way to describe the limits of how things look to us, and limit our capacity to connect

None of us is without our filters as we make our way through life. Even amongst family, close friends and associates, our personal suffering, both emotional and physical, can be “missed” or “dismissed” because we look fine, seem cheerful, have a pretty good energy level. We display no obvious signifiers of distress. No arm in a sling. And when we talk about our distress, what we say, how we are heard, may not override the visual conclusion already reached: oh, she’s really fine.

This is one reason we often turn to people who we know are going through the same thing.

There are other settings – medical or workplace – where the biases, and the harm of our limited “seeing” go deeper. This can play out with the physician reluctant to order lab tests you ask for, or undervaluing your mood, stress, or pain symptoms. The average time from onset to diagnosis if fibromyalgia, for example, is 5-8 years.  Or the lack of opportunities for women and people of color to advance and to occupy positions of influence and leadership.

When we are not aware of our filters, our biases, we are unable ourselves to be full human beings. Nor are we able to meet others as full human beings.

 

Seeing-Listening takes us below surface appearances, where we can be aware of our own biases and meet a fully dimensional human being 

Going by my appearance, one may comment on my outfit, the bags under my eyes, or the expression on my face, and ask “What’s going on?” Then comes the listening (or not.) My tone of voice. My word choices, metaphor of the day. I may feel invited to open up – or close down. But when a friend, a colleague, or a medical professional listens to me deeply, non-judgmentally, with curiosity and nuance, I experience a renewed wholeness.

As a healer, it took me a long time to understand why my clients weren’t put off by my taking notes when I sit with them, and even why the note-taking doesn’t distract me and take my attention elsewhere. It’s about the listening I am able to presence while I take notes. A listening that includes awareness of my own filters. As I can do that, I find I am Seeing-Listening:  I can take in the glorious particulars of her appearance, her story, as she sits across from me, and also the heartfulness of our shared, and flawed, human condition. As I See-Listen, an exchange of giving and receiving flows between us. And in any given moment, either of us may be receiving, either of us giving.

Even in environments fraught with structural barriers for women and people of color, when we can make space for more than transactional relationships, when we set our intention on connecting to one another, there are opportunities to meet across our differences. There are opportunities to bear one another. To appreciate one another. It is Seeing-Listening that allows another person, however different from us, to show up as the full human being they are, not as a representative of their gender or ethnicity or religious practice. Not as a boss or peer or subordinate, but as a whole human being.

It will take many types of collective efforts to remedy the coarseness of our national conversation, as well as our structural problems, the policies and practices of our government and private institutions.

But there is no choice closer at hand to us as individuals in relationship, whatever the personal or professional context. All it takes is a pause to remember: this angry/strange/different person in front of me may have more sorrows than joys, and still has a human heart.  Offer the gift of Seeing-Listening, even in small ways, as you go about your day. You too may start to wonder who is the giver, who the receiver.

Aloneness and connection: the theme of our universe

From the viewpoint of Kabbalah, relationship is the entire theme of creation. 

The One has become Two and then Many, yet each and every part remains connected to every other and to the whole. The transcendent and the immanent, the personal and the impersonal, the material and the highest realms of spirit are present everywhere.

Our essential dilemma as humans likewise is rooted in the underlying conditions of separation and connection.

We feel both our essential aloneness, and the vast possibilities of what it can mean to give and to receive in relationship. 

This is true whether we consider the nature of our relationship with a friend, a significant other, or The Significant Other who devotional poets have long called The Beloved.

The single word “cleave” carries the essential paradoxical dynamic of relationship. This Janus word looks in opposite directions at the same time, signifying both to separate or hew apart, as well as to adhere closely, with strength of attachment. Without the hewing, there is only enmeshment: no real connection, no space into which giving and receiving can be offered.

 

Cleaving

by Sara Eisenberg

 

I have long forgotten what I was made for:

to cleave, to cling and to hew all

at once.

 

With two fingers I tap

on the clear frigid air

of this first morning of the new year,

it shatters but holds together.

 

That same air must pass through

warming shades of blue

wool across nose and mouth to deliver

its essential lode to lungs that

have a new freedom I cannot account for.

 

I cross the room, walk smack into swags of

unseasonable gossamer, that sticky stuff

that has ambushed me in the late-summer garden,

and now presses itself into my crevices as if sealing a vow between

two solids.

 

No longer am I spread out over vast distances, destined

to spin, order and turn worlds,

harbor and protect legions, heedless of sleep: labors suitable to

whole colonies of social insects.

 

To be in my very own skin

where there is space between us

where breath may pass, and words, and love,

that cleaving we were made for.


Banner photo: Duke Gardens by Pat Merriman, Hillsborough Art Gallery, Hillsborough, North Carolina

 

A Touch of Hands: An Interview with Artist Sheri Hoeger

 

I’m delighted to continue my interview series by introducing visual artist Sheri Hoeger. Her recent series of paintings, A Touch of Hands: An Invitation to Loving Connection tells the story of Sheri’s personal journey towards wholeness, integration, and a new sense of mission in her art.

Sheri and I “met” as we responded to writing prompts through Tracking Wonder’s Quest 2016. We found we share a love of the textures of bark, sand, and rust, photos of our loved ones from the back – and the preciousness of waking up to life in each moment, whether that be a moment of joy, sorrow, or dailiness.

In her early adult years, Sheri’s work as a manicurist hinted at where she might be heading. Introduced to the airbrush, she brought out the beauty of her clients’ hands, garnering a local reputation for her custom nail designs. Then, as an interior decorative artisan since 1988, Sheri applied her skills to walls, floors, fabric, furniture and accessories.

Demand for her designs led her to launch her stencil line in 1992 as The Mad Stencilist. Her work has been featured in numerous books, magazines and on television. As lead designer and director of Big Oak Arts, she offered workshops and classes in the fine and decorative arts nestled in a beautiful setting in the Sierra foothills in Placerville, California.

This brings us to A Touch of Hands: An Invitation to Loving Connection, a series of paintings that Sheri describes as her “real” work– the result of her journey of recovery after the loss of three siblings in two years.

The project transforms the most painful time of the artist’s life into a “celebration of all the things a touch of hands can mean.” A celebration, too, of what she describes as her own “mindful practice of reaching out and sharing more, day in and day out. Folding it into my habits like chocolate chips into the dough.”

I am deeply touched by Sheri’s story. While two of her siblings lay dying, she took photos of one of her hands holding one of theirs- “clasped in love and pain and support, knowing their time here was not to be long.” She filed the pictures away, telling herself, “Some day, when I’m ready to do my serious artwork, I will paint them.”

After her losses, Sheri didn’t “soldier on.” She kindly allowed herself the time necessary to recuperate, and months later, she struck up a friendship with another woman. While listening to a presentation one evening, Sheri’s friend held her hand, and then snapped a picture of their hands with her phone camera. When Sheri received this photo in a text the following morning, she realized the synchronicity. Her friend didn’t know about the pictures Sheri had filed away. The time had come.

Sheri launched her A Touch of Hands series in the fall, her “straight-from-the-gut-through-the-heart work,” with an interactive Facebook page where she invites her readers to post photos of hands and the stories behind them.

A keen observer, Sheri is able to hold the beauty of the world along with the difficulties and complications of life. With honesty AND kindness, she acknowledges the messiness and then chooses to make something beautiful in response.

I trained myself to lock onto what I find beautiful that is right in front of me. Even in the most dire of circumstances the sight of an egret or the croak of a frog can lift my spirits. It triggers my sense of wonder, which brings me joy. It comforts me to know that all the rhythms of life are underlying even my saddest song. ~Sheri Hoeger

Sheri’s open-heartedness is married to her openhandedness: kindness, generosity, risk-taking, a mastered paintbrush. This allows her to transform photographic images with her intention, heart and brushstrokes, into living portraits of relationship.

There is such potent healing power in the way she connects people to the beauty in their lives.

The paintings don’t just tell my story, they tell all of our stories through something we all experience, something that is so important to our well-being and so common that many of us don’t really notice. But what if we were more mindful? ~Sheri Hoeger

IMG_3636


AN INTERVIEW WITH SHERI HOEGER

Connection, comfort and deeper understanding are my currency, and knowing that I’m doing something that feels important.

Artist Sheri Hoeger
Artist Sheri Hoeger

Sara: For many years you have worked primarily as a decorative artist, in others’ homes and spaces, and found great satisfaction and joy in creating for them visual connections with what was important to them. How has that prepared you now to launch your own your “straight-from-the-gut-through-your-heart” work, A Touch of Hands?

Sheri: I have always been happy to explore and paint so many kinds of things because I was working for other people.

I remember a client wanting to have oranges underneath her whole archway. I thought, “Oranges? I don’t know why she wants oranges.” Then I started drawing oranges, and “Omigosh, look at how the leaves are, how could I not have always loved oranges?”
IMG_3676I interviewed people at length, and incorporated things that were symbolic or metaphors that only family would get, little private jokes. Or with a pet portrait, the owner wants to capture that love, how it feels to be with their animal.

My favorite projects were always where I could help connect people to what was important to them, the love in their lives. Somehow those thoughts and intentions come through in the painting.

When painting for myself, that became difficult. If images were beautiful to me, they seemed to have equal weight. So, if I didn’t have a commission to work on, I painted what I thought was beautiful and would sell.

What was missing in my own studio work was a “why” that was deeper than a pretty picture as a vehicle for my entertainment, skill-building and gratification.

 

IMG_3635

Sara: It seems that A Touch of Hands is deepening your own wholeness, marrying your level of mastery in painting with your own personal meaning, rather than just the personal meaning for a client, as well as bringing your own process and voice out in a different way. You seem to be arriving at a new inner and outer stance.

Sheri: A Touch of Hands satisfies my craving for deeper meaning through my art.  I feel like I am finally in touch as a fine artist with what is important to me to paint. The paintings don’t just tell my story, they tell all of our stories through something we all experience, and is so important to our well-being and so common that many of us don’t really notice. But what if we were more mindful? We touch our mates’ hands, our grandkids’ hands, we shake hands on a deal, we touch hands that have meaning in so many ways, and we take it so much for granted. That’s part of my mission, I think –  here’s a moment of touching hands and it means so many things, and trying to capture that moment in the painting and also remind people that they have those kinds of moments all of the time.

I think of it as a collaborative effort and invite interaction on a Facebook page. It’s been really freeing to just put it out there and see where it leads. The images are resonating with people because the relationships, emotions and circumstances are universal. Each one is a statement in itself, but as a collection I feel they are even more powerful.

This is also born of a wider shift. It’s kind of a new thing for me to be writing a lot and putting it out where people can actually read it, to share the occasional honest and disarming insight that I once would have kept to myself. It helps me make sense of my experiences when I can share some of the wisdom gained. Whether it is through my work or other aspects of relationship, I fulfill my purpose when I have that kind of impact.

 

IMG_3631

 

Sara: What you are offering here is a very different kind of exchange in the art world.

Sheri: There have been some really beautiful contributions on the Facebook page. My intention is to sometimes use those images as resource material for the paintings. Monetary income does not drive the project, as I give most of the paintings to those who have modeled for them. Connection, comfort and deeper understanding are my currency, and knowing that I’m doing something that feels important.

 

To see more of her work and for a few  tips to improve your powers of observation,

read my full interview with Sheri Hoeger HERE


Visit Sheri’s A Touch of Hands Facebook page HERE

Visit Sheri’s website HERE

More interviews HERE and HERE