One afternoon I receive a tearful, out-of-state phone call notifying me that a mutual friend is hospitalized with necrotizing influenza, the notorious and deadly ‘flesh-eating’ virus. Antibiotic treatments are failing and she is close to death. I quickly call my drumming and journeywork partner who drops what she was doing to join me. We conduct a traditional shamanic journey for help and information.
We begin by clearing the air with sage and with a rattle calling for assistance from the four cardinal directions, Father Sky, Mother Earth, and the Great Spirit. My drummer sets the rhythmic pace about the speed of a heartbeat while I enter the non-ordinary landscape of the lower world. My drummer observes me and intuitively knows when to sound the return drumbeat. She also receives imagery while drumming. We listen to one another’s journey story, taking careful notes and attending to any body-based sensations arising during the telling. We work individually on our respective images constructed of colors, shapes, and symbols we were told would have a healing benefit for my friend.
We carry the ‘visual medicine’ to a sacred grove of blackthorn and cedar trees. We tie the images onto the branches near the center of the grove. The sacred grove is a circular patch of overgrown land in the middle of town with a discernible atmosphere of specialness, such as the occasional visit of a red-tail hawk or resident barn owl.
Later that evening, my advisor and friend the North Wind comes crashing through our community at 50 miles an hour, driving sheets of rain horizontally against my window. Watching the tumultuous storm, I fear the artwork will be utterly demolished. I go to pick up the pieces the next morning only to discover the artwork intact. No colors bled from the rain, no paper is torn. The thin strings that suspend the work hold strong. We are awe-struck. Later that day, I receive a call that my friend has made a sudden recovery and is going to survive. Now, way beyond awe-struck, we feel profound wonder and gratitude. This is a remarkable validation, despite our own analytically based reservations. Clearly something sacred and
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synchronistic is operating that is beyond our comprehension and is immensely powerful.
Even now, as I recount the activities of those two days, I can hardly believe how our lives interconnect through nature and spirit. I feel privileged to have partici-pated in such a healing event. At the same time, let me reiterate that this experience and method are related to my personal life and private artwork. My work with older adults involves a more general application of shamanic principles.
Art, aging, and meaning
With adults in the public domain, the focus is on the spirit of shamanism, as described in the previously cited shamanic definition of health. This includes three basic elements:
1. the seeking of assistance from nature allies;
2. the experience of shapeshifting; and
3. the expanding of our sense of self to encompass our greater
‘beingness,’ our ecological identity.
Before examining the relationship of these elements to the art experience of older adults, it will be helpful to look at aging in general and the method I use for encouraging art making from this perspective.
Gerontological literature consistently stresses the fact that we as a society have no guiding vision or image of meaningfulness or purpose regarding growing old. Until very recently, the biomedical field has primarily defined the experience of aging. Biomedical research is focused on the elimination of aging through genetic advances. Thomas Cole (1986), from the University of Texas Department of Medical Humanities in Houston, has pointed out the paradox implicit in this thinking. How can we find value in the experience of aging while simultaneously seeking to eliminate it? Biomedical science tells us how we age, not why. The question of meaning or purpose remains unanswered; it is a spiritual problem unsolvable through our traditions of empiricism, rationalism, and objectivity. Having no vision of life as a whole has a profound negative effect; it fosters despair, depression, age-bias, and isolation.
To devalue age is to express, once again, our belief in a separate self, a belief in that ‘singular state of consciousness.’ Aging seriously challenges the primary American values of autonomy and independence, that isolated ego we call
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‘rugged individualism.’ This belief often must give way to the much feared and despised experiences of dependency, disability, and, ultimately, of death. Aging forces us to acknowledge our interdependence. Sensory and bodily changes, chronic illness, and disability are forms of ‘shapeshifting’ that permit, perhaps even force, our awareness to enter deeper levels of being. It is precisely at this interface that aging begins to show signs of special purpose or meaning, signs of a transformative character, of shamanic spirit. Aging calls into question our very notion of self. Who am I when I no longer recognize my body? Who am I when my mind does not remember a familiar face?
The lack of vision in the value of aging manifests itself in geriatric services and programs that are bereft of meaning. Programming has as its focus keeping people busy and arranging opportunities for socializing. Socializing is not bad in and of itself, but when it consists of playing childish games, watching television, and making prefabricated crafts, it is without depth or integrity. The arts can be of immense service in balancing this situation by attending to the question of meaning from a spiritual perspective. For me, this quest for meaning in aging and art making has found form in the principles and practices of shamanism.
Shamanism is not a tool or technique, but literally and figuratively a way of being in the world. We cannot make transformative events happen. They arise in their own time and naturally, provided the ground has been prepared. However, we can encourage spiritual possibilities through the structure of the physical environment. We can create an environment that is both healer and teacher. The open studio is my preferred healing/learning structure.
By open studio I refer to a space within a facility that is clearly and continu-ously available for art making. In the open studio, all materials are visible and accessible. For adults, this has the added benefit of self-direction, allowing them to choose when, how, where, and what will be involved in their artwork. This kind of space speaks to the user: you are trusted; there is that within you that knows what to create; anything is possible. There is beauty from nature all around in the form of books, photos, and natural objects such as stones, feathers, shells, sticks, leaves, flowers, smells, textures, sounds, colors, and patterns. It is a place of joy, beauty, calm, delight, play, work, love, and respect. It is a freshly plowed and fertile field. Art making from a shamanic point of view is not about fixing people, it is about creating environments where what is deep and true can find voice and form.
The following vignettes demonstrate my vision of the relationship of shamanism to aging and art and the effect of the open studio healing structure.
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Nature as ally: moving beyond metaphor
In more than two decades of work with older adults, I have witnessed a constant and persistent interest in images involving the elements of nature – flowers, trees, animals, landscapes, sky, water, etc. At first glance, the reasons for this interest may seem obvious; after all, isn’t art about beauty? Isn’t nature beautiful? Images of nature are acceptable and familiar subject matter for the older adults who came of age during the Great Depression. All of these statements are probably true, but truth is multi-layered.
For many art educators working with older audiences, images of nature are considered stereotypical, superficial artistic efforts and thus are discounted.
Focusing on the product only (the same emphasis I experienced in art school) is a detriment to the person and the image. For many art therapists, the imagery of the older person is examined for pathology, such as dementia or stroke damage.
Focusing on the image for pathology is also detrimental to the fullness of possi-bility and the search for meaning latent in the image. Both perspectives result from ‘separate-self ’ thinking and are limited in their usefulness in responding to the search for meaning.
In contrast to the ‘product only’ or the pathological focus described above, I wanted to ascertain what else may be enfolded in the work of elders. Thus I approached images with respect, whose root word means ‘to look again.’ In looking and listening with the inner hearing, the way one listens to the Wind, other meanings may whisper themselves. To ‘stick with the image,’ as psychol-ogist James Hillman (1989) insists, is the only way to be true to the imagination and the imaginal realms from which the image arises. The following story of Florence Kleinsteiber exemplifies this perspective in operation.
Florence Kleinsteiber, born in 1926, is a widow living alone in a modest, dilapidated wood frame house in a rural area of Oklahoma. I met her when she was 60 and was a participant in the first artist-in-residence program offered to seniors in rural areas of Oklahoma. I was the artist-in-residence who developed the program for the State Arts Council of Oklahoma.
We met once a week for eight weeks at a nutrition site for older adults. We created our images on the dining tables until it was time for lunch to be served. It was not an ‘art therapy’ program but a program of gentle and sensitive visual art instruction. Art instruction was offered periodically throughout the year for three years. During this time, Florence produced artwork in classes and on her own. She created her own ‘open studio’ in her home.
Florence, whose work and transformative process I had the privilege of doc-umenting as part of my doctoral thesis,2is unique in her depth of involvement in
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art making, but the nature of her experience is a familiar one for many elders.
This is an excerpt from my ten-year acquaintance with her.