What you are saying about patterns and repetition/routine makes so much sense and helped me understand why I am right now drawn to an art form that depends on presence and repetition.
Reading this, I realized that Petrykivka isn’t simply a painting technique for me. It’s a practice of returning. Returning to the same brushstrokes, the same movements, the same flowers, over and over again. I used to think that repetition was mostly about developing skill, but now I’m wondering if it’s also about developing relationship. Relationship with the brush, the paint, the surface I’m painting on, relationship with my hands and everything in my tiny studio space that surrounds me when I do art…
I’ve also noticed that somewhere in that repetition I enter a kind of trance. My hands know what they’re doing, and my mind becomes quiet enough for something else to arrive. Often it’s in the form of stories, images, memories, or insights about my own life. Sometimes I suddenly understand something about my day, a relationship, or my place in the world that wasn’t available to me before I started painting. It’s as though the repetitive movements create the conditions for another kind of listening.
It also made me think back to our gatherings. I now wonder if part of what made them so transformative wasn’t just the conversations themselves, but the fact that we kept returning to the same people, the same questions, and the same field of inquiry. Something accumulated. Something became visible that couldn’t have appeared in a single meeting.
Your article gave language to something I’ve been feeling for a long time but hadn’t yet understood. Thank you for writing it.
This is an excellent meditation on the quiet, obvious things that we cannot notice unless we repeatedly and faithfully make ourselves available to notice them.
I agree with your last statement about folklore. This is exactly what I find so appealing about folk stories, too. I think there is something very sobering and humbling about this sort of thing: what is considered uncommon is still, fundamentally, natural. It doesn't even have to mean that the future is reliably fixed any which way for every little thing-- just that, for some things, a course has been set and a person can tune into a glimpse of it-- if they sit on the proper channel.
It's a very beautiful thought.
Below I see Katya also phrase the "practice of returning". It makes me wonder about how much we have lost in the modern world-- outsourcing skills to technology, removing the tradition of apprenticeship, encouraging people to hop from place to place and thing to thing. Without faithful, specific repetition those channels for "noticing" begin to disappear. It's like a radio dial caught between stations.
Lovely writing, as always. Thank you for your pleasant thoughts.
This conversation bridges the gap between the ordinary and the magical. It invites the spirit into full embodiment and helps us recognize heaven has been right here all along.
What you are saying about patterns and repetition/routine makes so much sense and helped me understand why I am right now drawn to an art form that depends on presence and repetition.
Reading this, I realized that Petrykivka isn’t simply a painting technique for me. It’s a practice of returning. Returning to the same brushstrokes, the same movements, the same flowers, over and over again. I used to think that repetition was mostly about developing skill, but now I’m wondering if it’s also about developing relationship. Relationship with the brush, the paint, the surface I’m painting on, relationship with my hands and everything in my tiny studio space that surrounds me when I do art…
I’ve also noticed that somewhere in that repetition I enter a kind of trance. My hands know what they’re doing, and my mind becomes quiet enough for something else to arrive. Often it’s in the form of stories, images, memories, or insights about my own life. Sometimes I suddenly understand something about my day, a relationship, or my place in the world that wasn’t available to me before I started painting. It’s as though the repetitive movements create the conditions for another kind of listening.
It also made me think back to our gatherings. I now wonder if part of what made them so transformative wasn’t just the conversations themselves, but the fact that we kept returning to the same people, the same questions, and the same field of inquiry. Something accumulated. Something became visible that couldn’t have appeared in a single meeting.
Your article gave language to something I’ve been feeling for a long time but hadn’t yet understood. Thank you for writing it.
This is an excellent meditation on the quiet, obvious things that we cannot notice unless we repeatedly and faithfully make ourselves available to notice them.
I agree with your last statement about folklore. This is exactly what I find so appealing about folk stories, too. I think there is something very sobering and humbling about this sort of thing: what is considered uncommon is still, fundamentally, natural. It doesn't even have to mean that the future is reliably fixed any which way for every little thing-- just that, for some things, a course has been set and a person can tune into a glimpse of it-- if they sit on the proper channel.
It's a very beautiful thought.
Below I see Katya also phrase the "practice of returning". It makes me wonder about how much we have lost in the modern world-- outsourcing skills to technology, removing the tradition of apprenticeship, encouraging people to hop from place to place and thing to thing. Without faithful, specific repetition those channels for "noticing" begin to disappear. It's like a radio dial caught between stations.
Lovely writing, as always. Thank you for your pleasant thoughts.
This conversation bridges the gap between the ordinary and the magical. It invites the spirit into full embodiment and helps us recognize heaven has been right here all along.