According to his biography on Earth Sanctuary, Chuck Pettis is a “visionary, designer, eco-artist, and author” and founder and owner of “Earth Sanctuary, a 72-acre nature reserve and meditation parkland on Whidbey Island, Washington.” He is a “dedicated practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, he deeply believes in the value of meditation,” and is the author, most recently, of Secrets of Sacred Space: Discover and Create Places of Power. Pettis is also the president of the Seattle-based Sakya Monastery. The image is from his site.
MW: What is Sakya Monastery, and how is it different from other Buddhist monasteries?
CP: For people seeking spiritual and personal growth, Sakya Monastery provides access to the Buddha’s teachings and guidance in a community of practitioners. Sakya Monastery provides a place to learn from highly qualified and spiritual Tibetan Lamas in a beautiful traditional setting.
Sakya Monastery provides people the opportunity to learn and practice authentic and traditional Tibetan Buddhist teachings.
MW: When did you first get involved with the monastery?
CP: I became involved with Sakya Monastery in 1995.
MW: To what extent does Sakya promote the arts?
Sakya Monastery does not promote the arts. Artwork in the form of paintings, statues, calligraphy and other media are a fundamental part of Tibetan Buddhist spiritual practices.
MW: What is Earth Sanctuary?
CP: Earth Sanctuary combines exemplary ecology with art and spirit to create a sanctuary for birds and wildlife and a peaceful place for personal renewal and spiritual connection. Earth Sanctuary is open every day of the year, rain or shine, during daylight hours. $7/person fee.
MW: To what extent is your eco-art based on Buddhist principles?
CP: Earth Sanctuary’s eco-art is universal in nature, being based on universal symbols and archetypes. We do have a number of Buddhist-based artworks. For example, we have a number of Tibetan Buddhist prayer flags around the property and also two Tibet-Tech prayer wheels.
MW: More generally, to what extent, if at all, is creating art a religious experience in Buddhism, as opposed to simply an act of creating works that then take on religious significance?
CP: At Sakya Monastery, we just had a workshop to create over 1,000 Tsa Tsa’s. ‘Tsa Tsa’ is a Tibetan term used to describe Buddha statues and relief images that are made as part of a particular meditation practice. Making tsa tsas is a preliminary spiritual practice used to eliminate obstacles, purify negativities, and create positive energy (merit). The tsa tsas were made with clay, that are then dried, and painted. These tsa tsa’s will then be placed inside a stupa to be build at the Tara Meditation Center at Earth Sanctuary, as a Tibetan Buddhist sacred space.
Continue reading ‘Interview: Chuck Pettis, Founder, Earth Sanctuary’
For those who didn’t have a chance to listen in live, click here to hear my interview with Bea Fields of Y-Talk Radio and Millennial Leaders. Bea is absolutely wonderful, and the interview was a lot of fun. You can subscribe to various feeds and podcasts on her site to hear the rest of her great interviews. Or click on the icon below:
According to the University of Arkansas Press’ site, “Hayan Charara was a visiting professor of poetry writing at the University of Texas at Austin in 2005. Before that he taught in New York City. He is the author of two collections of poetry, The Sadness of Others and The Alchemist’s Diary. Born in Detroit, Michigan, to immigrant parents, he currently lives in Texas. He is also a woodworker.” (Photo: Rawi)
MW: To what extent do you identify as an Arab American? How do you personally define the term? Is there a difference between an American Arab and an Arab American?
HC: “Arab American,” for me, is one of many identifications. I’m sure this is how many others see themselves — as Arab Americans, but also as Lebanese, or Palestinian, or men, women, husbands, wives, engineers, Detroiters, New Yorkers, Christians, Muslims, Jews, and so on.
As for the difference between “American Arab” and “Arab American,” I’m sure there is a distinction here that’s more than semantics, but I’m not aware of how others might be using them.
MW: In your introduction you first show some hesitation to define “Arab American” and to isolate a trend in the poets you gather in the anthology, but then you say that they all share an unapologetic identification with America. How do you reconcile these two points?
HC: My hesitation to define “Arab American” is a hesitation to give it a “once and for all” type of definition. This term means different things to different people. In my own family, we understood it differently. There are, among many of the poets in Inclined to Speak, an “unapologetically American” voices, which is to say that these poets are using an American vernacular, for instance, or are informed by American poetics (many of the poetic influences of the poets are American — not always, but often). These two things are compatible, too — that is a multi-faceted understanding of “Arab American” on the one hand, and the multi-faceted expressions of things American by the poets on the other.
MW: Are poets on the forefront of identity issues? Why or why not?
HC: It’s probably best to ask the poets themselves. I don’t know. Identity is certainly an issue dealt with, and one that readers and critics look to in poetry; but I can’t say for sure just how much of a priority is it for other poets.
Continue reading ‘Interview: Hayan Charara, “‘Arab American,’ for me, is one of many identifications.”’
My review of “Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry,” edited by Hayan Charara (University of Arkansas Press, 2008, site here) is in this week’s issue of The Arab American News.
Here’s part of the review:
The 39 poets, whose work is collected in Hayan Charara’s “Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry,” all bear some relation to the term “Arab American,” though each also resists such a title insofar as it is limiting. If “Inclined” can be said to expose one unifying theme that binds Arab American poets together, it is their resistance to be stereotyped as Arab Americans on the one hand, yet their insistence on Arab and American components to their identity and experiences.
Interview with Hayan to follow…
[Dallas Morning News] Another great religion and art story from the DMN. “Traditional Asian art draws little distinction between religious observance and artistic creation,” observes Kevin Richardson, “and there are Buddhists, Hindus and others who believe that a deity’s spirit resides in sculptures or carvings of his likeness.”
[Stamford Times] The Jewish Community Center (JCC) of Stamford is showing the work of “17-year-old artist Stanislav (Stass) Shpanin,” who “was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the youngest professional artist in the world.” Evidently Guiness hasn’t read about Freddie Linsky.
[mynews.in] Vidya Bhushan Rawat writes on “Art as medium of protest against powerful Brahmanical values” in Savi Savarkar’s work. The article is a bit dense.
Image: “Photo: Savi Sawarkar painting– Ambedkarite Monk.” From Vidya Bhushan Rawat’s article.
Some say books are doomed to disappear in an era of new media, but one way they can tread water for the time being is by keeping themselves in the news through controversies.
AFP reports on the Turin book fair, which “honours Israel on the 60th anniversary of the Jewish state’s creation.” Tariq Ramadan is criticizing Italian President Giorgio Napolitano’s scheduled appearance on the grounds that it will make the fair “a political and not a cultural event.”
Meanwhile, AP reveals that the most shunned book in libraries is not gory or satanic, or even sexually explicit. Instead, it’s Justin Richardson’s and Peter Parnell’s “And Tango Makes Three” (2005), a tale of a penguin brought up by (gasp!) two dads.
Walter Michael Miller is editor and publisher of arttattler.com, which provides “Commentary and surveillance of more than 800 current and recent art exhibitions around the world, organized geographically with archives of exhibitions from the last year, including architecture and design.” See also the Art Tattler blog here. (The image of Miller is from arttattler.com.)
MW: When and why did you start Art Tattler?
WMM: I started Art Tattler in September 2006, after having left Review, a regional visual art magazine I founded in 1998 in Kansas City, Missouri. I designed, published, and edited it. The name for the first nine months was Pangaeology.
MW: Since its launch, what patterns, if any, have you seen in religious art?
WMM: That would be hard to say, since there are elements of the metaphysical in virtually all art. I’m sure there are artists who would describe themselves as religious, but it could be a majority who describe themselves as ethical humanists, and some who would describe themselves as good businesspersons. It has always been the religious — the metaphysical — that has been the magnet in artwork that has drawn me in — what might not be readily seen in the art.
MW: How frequently would you guess exhibits feature a religious component or content?
WMM: Exhibitions, by and large, do not contain religious components or content. Here we have to make a distinction between modern and contemporary art and historical art. Historical art tends to be rife with obvious religious references because it was created in a time where the church was not only the state, but it was a major collector of art.
MW: Have you found there to be any regional patterns to exhibits of religious art?
WMM: It depends on how overt the religious references are in the art. Even in modern and contemporary Latin American art it is not unusual to see a Sacred Heart or a Virgin of Guadalupe represented, although they have attained the status of vernacular representations.
MW: How often do questions of censorship arise in response to exhibits?
WMM: Censorship rears its ugly head seldom. I fear more the reality of unconscious self-censorship in a xenophobic society and culture.
My review of “A View From The Bridge” and “Death Of A salesman” at The Arthur Miller Festival at Arena Stage is in The Jewish Press.
Willy Loman (center), with his two sons Hap (left) and Biff (right) in “Death of a Salesman” at Arena Stage.
Here’s the full statement from Aaron Davidman, artistic director of Traveling Jewish Theatre in San Francisco:
Hi Menachem,
Our production brought out what we considered to be the inherent Jewish identity of the Loman family and of Bernard and Charlie. All the men wore kipot only in the epilogue at the funeral, and it was the only moment of visual Jewish identity. The feel of Willy’s Jewishness came out in his speech and vocal intonation, how he carried himself, the fact the we are a Jewish theatre and that Corey Fischer is so well known as a Jewish actor exploring Jewish material. all these elements made Willy clearly Jewish. similar for Linda. But it was subjective. Some audiences members said the play was SO Jewish it made the play make sense to them. Others didn’t get how it was supposed to be Jewish.
We saw the boys as completely assimilated.
As for Miller, I have no idea what he might think.
Hope this helps.
Best,
Aaron
And then in response to my follow-ups:
To my knowledge, ours was the first overtly Jewish production. Oskar Eustis told me he always thought it was Jewish play. Others did as well.
Yes, they all wore kippot, but only at the funeral, and Biff and Hap removed theirs before they began to speak that scene, so it was very brief, as if they had to wear them for the ritual. I also had a live cello on stage.
I think it’s a stretch to say that Bernard and Charley are “practicing Jews.” There is nothing in the text to support that.
We said that they were more connected to their Jewish identity. To the value of learning and school. To more traditionally Jewish values. That knowing who you are gives you a better chance at success in this world. While Willy didn’t know who he was and bought the promise of capitalism and it destroyed him, like it does so many Americans who trade in the riches of their ethnic identity and custom to chase the false promise of the American dream.
[New Vision, via AllAfrica.com] “Public schools have a central role in molding the character of children,” says Martin Lwanga, arguing that Uganda cannot remove religion from school curricula.
[NY Times] PBS’ “The Jewish People: A Story of Survival” documentary “condenses four millenniums of atrocity into 60 minutes, allotting the pogroms the amount of time it takes to dust a coffee table.” Though it doesn’t deal entirely in victimology, “Most of what is talked about here could be learned from a Google search that combined the phrase ‘Jewish people, history of’ with ‘misery,’ ‘oppression’ or ‘prejudice,’ but the value of purely informational programming like this in the age of Wikipedia is in seeing how ideas and theories and narratives move people.”
(Image: From Michael Kimmelman’s great NY Times column “Simmering Anti-Semitism Mars a Vibrant Hungary.”)
[Guardian] A great line from Charlotte Gardner’s “Caught between baroque and a smoother pace”: “Despite the fashionably snappy pace of the opening movement, their smoother sound and sensitive phrasing and dynamics make the orchestra heave and sigh like Christ in the garden of Gethsemane.”
[Journal of the American Academy of Religion, subscription required] David D. Hall on Kate Peters’s “Print Culture and the Early Quakers” (though print culture evidently has nothing to do with illustrations of any sort), and Fatima Harrak reviews Earle H. Waugh’s “Memory, Music and Religion: Morocco’s Mystical Chanters.”
[Yeshiva World News] A very bizarre and offensive article on why right-wing Orthodox Jews do not pause for the siren in Israel that commemorates the victims of the Holocaust. For those whose Hebrew/Yiddish/Aramaic is shaky, here’s the gist: Orthodox Jews always trust in God and in miracles, so they don’t need to commemorate them. Only the secular folks require a moment every year to remember about God. Interestingly, these same Orthodox Jews commemorate their own relatives once a year through prayer and good deeds via yarzheit.
[Telegraph] A white horse, 33 times life size, will soon dwarf the Angel of the North. Is this a triumph of nature over religion?
[Jerusalem Post] “I bring Arab and Jewish art here so that people can see another kind of dialogue between artists in Israel,” says Abu Shakra, who directs the Israel-based Umm el-Fahm Art Gallery.
[Skidmore College] Art history professor Rob Linrothe has won a Getty grant to study “Esoteric Buddhist (Tantric) deity Vajrasattva within South, Southeast, and East Asian social and religious networks during the eighth through 12th centuries.”
[Tomah Journal] Score: The Tomah Area School District - 0, students who want to use religious art symbols - 1. Thank God this argument from one of the art teachers did not fly: “Gangs have been a concern at Tomah High School. Because of the myriad of gang symbols, some of which use religious type symbolism [we] felt that it would be impossible to differentiate between certain gang symbols and religious symbols.” (HT: Ed Brayton)
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[SF Chronicle] Here’s a peculiar lede from David Ian Miller: “If I asked you to name the major artists who have produced a body of work with strong religious themes, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Botticelli and Rembrandt would probably come to mind. Whomever you chose, chances are that Andy Warhol wouldn’t make the list.” Am I too involved in this religious art business that I am making assumptions, or don’t most folks know Warhol made a ton of religious works?
Image: “Jane Dillenberger, Berkeley art historian and author of “The Religious Art of Andy Warhol.” Photo by Nicholas Ukrainiec. SF Chronicle.”
