LIVING LANDSCAPES

6/5/2020

in memoriam Greg Easley

Just as an artist paints a landscape so that its appearance leads to its essence, so that it seems the landscape itself, its hills, flowers, trees, their shapes and colors all are in service to the life collectively lived by all the artist sees and loves and is moved to paint to engage with like a lover.

The truth is conveyed not in words, but in reflection and to some extent co-embodiment. The painter feels the landscape not only with through the eyes but certainly with the heart, the hearing (though each painting conveys sound, if it does, through implicit vibrations of shape and color and brushstroke) – amazing that every painting for all its power is silent, just as music itself is invisible.

As therapists we look upon the client similarly to the painter. But of course here we have the addition of hearing their voice, especially before and after the session, we get to see conscious and unconscious expressive gestures with their hands, arms, the head, the whole body; and what they say and how they say it giving us more, ever wider windows into who this person most truly is. While, like a landscape, we know its innermost essence remains a mystery – that’s the source of the artist’s and the therapist’s continual fascination with their subject, almost like a repeated worship.

After our initial dialogue with body, mind and spirit we begin to work at the table as if it were the painting easel or the surface upon which a sculpture may begin to be formed.

First hands gently touch, we can feel surface tension, the character of skin, like an artist in a landscape walking up to the fruit tree and feeling the texture of the peach or apple and that giving them a yet more deep love and knowledge of what is living here.

Then we begin moving what is on or beneath the skin, every movement or restriction telling us the story of this living landscape if we were but to let these feelings turn into knowledge, letting that knowledge affect own bodymind so that each of our movements revealed them to us and ideally reveal them to themselves more deeply.

In painting the landscape or portrait, the effect is not complete until the painting is done, but in therapy every step changes the journey, every touch becomes immediately an action potential for self-awareness and possible transformation.

So we soon (or later) begin a partnership during which the living landscape (each of us being just an elaborate form of earth life) reveals itself to itself, even with ideas it didn’t know were there, emotions felt and newly arisen, sensations that tell us more about who we are, how we’re shaped, how we can move, connected to all that goes on in the self and in connection with the earth, all beings and under and with the stars all around us.

Of course we are made in God’s image, we are creators of ourselves as much as the mountain has created its own being through its shapes, its plant and animal inhabitants.

Every living being is a miracle and humans have the unique capacity to know that, in every part of our body, in our mind, heart and spirit and the miraculous unity thereof.

And the role of the therapist is to help the self reveal itself to itself like perhaps a mountain feeling the grandeur of its own particular existence. This living landscape then descends from our table as if the painting were to come off the easel of its own accord and painting and landscape knowing each other as true reflections of each other and of the greater being in which they and all of us share.

André Derain - “Landscape by the Sea, Čotes d’Azur”