30 | July | 2014 | betsybeadhead

This piece is about finding myself in a land that doesn’t have any maps.

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There is a map on the left-hand side. It goes from being highly populated at the bottom to being barely populated at the top. There are a lot of place names for cities and villages on the bottom part of the map. But when you go further north, the place names get fewer and farther between, and they get different. The place names further north are the place names from the people who live there, and they are in Inuit.

They are harder for us to pronounce. Their alphabet looks entirely different from ours. It is full of circles and triangles. The Inuit did not have a written language for many years. The way that they explained to each other how to get from one area to another was with these huge stone sculptures, called inuksuit (plural of inuksuk). They aren’t art sculptures, they are assemblages of stones that are found in that place. The inuksuit are the only way to navigate in a land that is filled with snow and ice. They didn’t have cities and roads like we do, so they couldn’t say “Go 3 miles and then turn left onto Main Street.” There was no Main Street. There were no streets. It is a land of ice and snow.

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It is really rude that this land is called Newfoundland. It isn’t newly found. It never was lost. The people who lived there had found it. To say that it was found by new settlers means that no one was there at the time it was “found”. To call it Newfoundland is insulting to the people who were living there. It is to say that they are not people and that they do not own this land.

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I have used tissue paper to cover up some of the names and settlements of the people who moved in after the Inuit. I have done this to try and reclaim the land. I have also done this because I don’t want to look at those areas. These are scars upon the land. In a way, by putting tissue paper I am putting up a drift of snow. I am reclaiming that area. I am saying that area should not be in the possession of the white people. It should be in possession of the people who lived there before, and who still live there.

The inuksuk that I have used is a direction finding one. All inuksuit are different. One may indicate where is a good place to hunt, another where is a good place to find caribou or yet another that is a dangerous area.

This particular one shows you where to go. You look through the big inuksuk towards the little inuksuk. It points the way. When the little one is in the center of your view, you know that is the direction to go. You are pointed in the right direction.

But think about the people who were there before you. How did they figure out that was a safe way to go? It was very kind of them to leave the stones for you to tell you that this was the best travel route. But think about it. In order to do that, they had to come back safely. They went to the trouble of figuring out a safe passage to start off with and then they came back to put up a marker.

It reminds me of a sponsor in AA. They have gone through the difficulty of becoming sober and then they committed to helping you find your way too. It is the same as in Buddhism. Someone who is enlightened, a bodhisattva, renounces going to Nirvana for the sake of everyone else. Instead of leaving this plane of existence, they stay so that they can help others find their way. They show you where it is safe and where it is dangerous, just like these rocks do.

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I like this particular inuksuk not only because it indicates direction but also because it looks like a torii gate. They are part of the Shinto religion in Japan. They are not gates to keep people out. Rather, they are an indicator that you have stepped from the secular into the sacred. They let you know that you are on holy ground.

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This is made with canvas, acrylic paint, a map of Newfoundland, two Canadian stamps, watercolor pencil on water color paper, tissue paper, and matte medium.

Here is a behind-the-scenes illustration of how I created the main Inuksuk. (which is composed of two Inuksuit)

Here is the reference picture from a book from the library.

rock2

Here is my solution to how to “paint” it. I drew the stones onto heavy watercolor paper, using watercolor pencils. Once I was happy with them, I cut them out and glued them together on the canvas. I essentially created my own stones and stacked them. This meant that I could edit an area without affecting the entire piece.

rock1

Say you were given a set of instructions to build a house. All the pieces are cut out, all you and your crew have to do is assemble them. The architect thinks that you were provided hammers and some nails. But when you get to the job site, instead of hammers you have screwdrivers. You can’t possibly follow the instructions to build a house with screwdrivers. It just doesn’t work. It isn’t designed for that.

But you try anyway, because it is what you have and you have a job to do. Then the architect calls you up and asks you if you are finished yet. You say no, and he gets really mad. You didn’t know that you were supposed to have hammers. You think that screwdrivers are what you are supposed to use, because it is what you were provided.

You are way behind on the project and the architect is really upset. Somebody figured out how to use a screwdriver to dig out a hole in the wood and then put a nail in the hole, and tap it in with the other end of the screwdriver. It isn’t very good, but it is something. You’ve managed to put together a corner of the house this way.

After a few more phone calls and getting more and more upset and confused, the architect finally comes to the job site and he notices you don’t have the right tools. He sees what you have and how hard you’ve been trying with what you were provided, and he understands. He works alongside you for a bit, using the tool that you were given. He doesn’t have a way to get you any hammers, so he changes the plans and he makes them a lot easier.

God is the architect and we are the workers. Our human bodies are the screwdrivers.

We can’t possibly follow all of God’s instructions with the tool we were given. God had no way of knowing how frail and hungry these bodies are. They cause us to fear, so we don’t try anything difficult. They cause us to crave, so we do things we know we shouldn’t. Our senses are very limited, so our perceptions aren’t that great.

But then God the architect comes down to the worksite (Earth) to see us and work with us.

And God gets it. We can’t do what is expected of us. We can’t follow the plans the way they are written with the tools we were given. The only way God would know that was to see things from our perspective, in our limited, frail, needy bodies.

We aren’t off the hook, but the rules got modified. They were boiled down to the essentials. Instead of “eat this, don’t eat this” and “wash your hands this way” and “say this prayer at this time” and six-hundred-plus other rules, we got two.

Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.

Which really is only one rule. Love.

We can build anything with that rule.

We can build houses for the homeless. We can build schools to teach people how to read and take care of themselves. We can build hospitals so people can get well. We can build farms so we can grow healthy food. We can build gyms so we can exercise and get strong.

Love.

And you don’t even need a hammer or a screwdriver to use it.