Where Art and Science Meet

I find it intriguing to think how we rely on metaphors to describe chemical, physical, biological processes. Metaphors allow us to “see” and come to understand processes that are otherwise unknowable by our senses. We come to knowing through our imagination, using math, poetry, pictures, stories as metaphors. Metaphors, precisely because they come from our imagination and are fed by our subconscious selves, pack a powerful punch to both the brain and the heart.

Metaphors are sticky because they allow us to build new knowledge from what is already known and, in this way, allow us to make new neural connections or ways of knowing. Since they come to us unbidden, metaphors are necessarily subjective; the images that move us do so because they resonate with (in harmony or dissonance) our deep selves. Does the sperm penetrate the egg or does the egg receive the sperm? Is gravity bent by planets or curved from its own weight/forces? Does the protein merge with the cell or is the cell destroyed by the protein? There is no right or wrong metaphor but only a different perspectives or pathways into the cell, into space.

New animation technology makes this intersection of art and science more apparent. A recent NYT article on the subject highlights the new science animation taking hold in the field of cell biology. “The ability to animate gives biologists a chance to think about things in a whole new way,” says Janet Iwasa, a cell biologist who now works as a molecular animator at Harvard Medical School. “Just listening to scientists describe how the molecule moved in words wasn’t enough for me,” she said. “What brought it to life was really seeing it in motion.” At the “Inner Life of the Cell” (http://multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/media.html) you can see animation of how, for example, “cells internalize molecules on its surface; the three-legged white protein, clathrin triskelions forms a latticelike cage that causes the membrane to deform and form a vesicle.” Someone should put in music and other sound effects!

Here science is revealed through art; metaphor, images, stories and shown to be the imaginative practice that it is.

My devotion

Devotion: (v) 1. feelings of ardent love;
2. commitment to some purpose;

This morning I was thinking "to what I am devoted". This question did not come out of the blue. E, my yoga teacher, asked us all to consider this in the coming week. Patanjali's Sutra 1.23 states that devotion to god can lead to enlightenment, which in the yoga tradition, is a freedom from the fluctuations of an unruly mind.

I can tell you what I have ardent love for; my daughter's small soft hands, Red's fur, my grandmother's cheeks. I love the cold darkness of the mornings, catching a heron in flight, seeing the wild geese, bellies flecked with morning sun, flying low overhead. I can hear their wings beating the air. While surely love is part of devotion, love does not always come easily. So devotion can require hard work, repetition, daily practice.

I practice yoga, cultivating a writing life, being kind to bring me back to that ardent love space or compassion. These practices feel devotional not solely because they offer me so many gifts but because I practice even when it feels hard to do so, when I am faithless. In this way, perhaps, devotion entails a certain kind of hopelessness and surrender, letting go of things turning out this way or that way.

Practicing yoga when I feel very tired, heavy, anxious teaches me how such feelings change and move, are of my body but not my body. Writing when I hear voices that tell me "This is a waste of time, not very good, presumptuous of you," shows me compassion, humility, and courage. Being kind when I am angry, tired, afraid shows me that I am always connected to my heart even when the lines are frayed.

Devotion to something more than myself brings me gratitude and compassion for my body, mind, life just as it is and a greater acceptance of another's struggle. Where is god in all of this? For me, god resides in that restful, quiet, infinite space right beneath my breast bone, waiting to greet me whenever I return from straying; my devotional practices helping to bring me back, bring me back, bring me back to this home.

The Subtle Body

I spent the weekend studying yoga with Matthew Sanford. At 13, Matthew was in a car accident which killed his father and sister and left him with a broken spine. In learning how to embody, move, breath in his body - and after many many years of yoga practice and training (along with failure, giving up, pain, anger, love, and surrender) - Matthew has cultivated a remarkably sensitive, engaging, and profound connection to the body, the self, the soul and an amazing ability to show us all how to connect more deeply to ourselves.

Learning from Matthew was transformative. That there is an energy in the body that transcends muscles, bones, the hard wiring of nerves became apparent. Awareness of this energy offers great ease in the body, the psyche, the emotions, offers us a place to rest deeply and find comfort even for the most hard to love and dark inner places.

That this energy is the bodily experience of the divine which inspires us is something our culture or way of life can keep us from knowing; pushing us as it does relentlessly to look outside of ourselves, to the material world, for sustenance.

Allowing for this possibility of an embodied spirit can change the entire fabric of your life including the way you sit, eat, see the sky, touch your child, contemplate literature and death, make love, pray. From this perspective, God, cannot be conjured in the mind but is a lived and ever changing experience of the body, the skin, organs, bones, muscles, arteries, and blood.

Matthew has found the divine in his body (as his body) - even as it is broken, paralyzed, disfigured. Since all of us have "paralyzed" or "silent" parts in our bodies, along with pain, disfigurement, shame, and weakness, his experience and teaching can help us to find a way back to all those places we have abandoned and retreated from and in this way know our "unseparateness" from God (or wholeness, soul, truth, love, you put in your word for this).