I have a gift that I discovered in my twenties. I could read art and know how the people who made it felt when they made their art. This gift has developed a great deal since I started working with people to lessen their suffering, using art-making in the process. Today much more information comes to me through people’s art. And more still comes through my own art-work, done in people’s presence, or when I am aware of them.
I used to be a graphic designer and an illustrator. I wrote for children and a little bit for adults. I came to NYC in 1985, 40 years old, married with three children and started a new career as an illustrator only. A few years later I became involved with Chan Meditation Center and studied meditation and Buddhist knowledge with the late Master Sheng-yen from Taiwan. For twelve years I was in a process of deepening my meditation. I had many more experiences and insights and my life changed. After having illustrated more than 40 children’s books and writing two of them, I left this career too and went to NYU to study art therapy.
ByGiora Carmi
In some place Like in so many others For this moment The plant is attached to the tip of the world The balance of flat and broken and empty Of dots and leaves and feathers Depends on One very thin line In a way that is unknown to us The open chord of…
ByGiora Carmi
I just stopped at some point There was no point in going on The message was in how it could go on Forever. I used to be a graphic designer and an illustrator. I became involved with the Chan Meditation Center and studied meditation and Buddhist knowledge with the late Master Sheng-yen…
ByGiora Carmi
I’m reading this picture, based on its composition. This will be a preliminary reading. I’ll point out a few obvious things and see what I can gather from this. It is possible to read much more in the picture, and maybe I’ll do this in the next entry. It has two layers, as many of…
ByGiora Carmi
And today it happened. Today I understood how you can love everything in your earth life, including the suffering. Because you see the beauty of the game that you, the bigger you, has and is still creating. You are lead into a blind alley that you create and the keys are handed to you. And…
ByGiora Carmi
Discovering who you are is the main issue of life on earth. You can find yourself in many ways and in many places and things. Actually, in every thing. The best way is through doing what you love to do and taking this way as a trip to the depth of who you are. You…
ByGiora Carmi
The trees brush your window The precipice steals your breath The cloud calls you to fly with him. What do you want to do now? With your morning coffee cup in hand You let your dreams glide among the trees To the horizon and beyond. What do you want to do now? You know how…
ByGiora Carmi
You choose to be a therapist because you want to see if you can find yourself by going through the filter of another character. So you spend time with the other character and in the conversation the fences fall. Sooner or later you find yourself through him. And he finds himself through you. Then In…
ByGiora Carmi
Try this: Close your eyes. Sit comfortably somewhere of course. Find something that your senses detect. An example: The eyelids touching each other. Imagine that your whole world is made of transparent clay. This clay makes everything and is not seen. This clay makes everything it wants. The things it makes appear to our senses….
ByGiora Carmi
I looked at a previous painting. I started to read it again. Yesterday I read it psychologically (which you didn’t see), and the reading shifted to a bigger view of all psychology, as I’ve been doing lately. Obviously I am in a stage, in which I notice more and more the superficiality of the psychological…
ByGiora Carmi
I was born in Israel and my parents were idealistic pioneers. They built Israel from nothing, with all the others there of course. They wanted social justice, a place to live and grow their food, a place where they could have a country and a piece of land and they wanted their children to be…
ByGiora Carmi
Like Italo Calvino, who wrote about cities that never were, I too write. It is about our reality. Sometimes a living thing appears and it is a miracle that it stands at all. It stands for a very short time indeed, when there is no wind of course, without too many sets of eyes to…
ByGiora Carmi
All the colors stand around me, in bottles, tubes and pencils. They are looking quietly at what I do. What will I say? They are my audience now. I love them. They can do infinite things. They do not really look. I know. It is the whole who looks. The infinite listening-with-the-heart. The heart-of-listening. His…
