I recently shared hpw trying to just exist in 17 seconds (how long perception takes to land) because 90 seconds is how long it takes for an emotional wave to happen. What happens to women, unfortunately, is that we're often shamed for having emotions even when they are a part of the healing process. Women get defined with Borderline Personality Disorder often due to these views, which I've written a lot on in my recent coursework that intersects with my life. 

Allowing for that space to connect on the path of the past and to the future in a different approach to time in terms we can use the Buddhist Abhidharma chart. This is of interest as Buddhist philosophy not only aligns with Einstein's relativity theory that says time is empty, but in using this charting of the Buddhist teachings aligns the 17 moments of Consciousness to brain pattens on scans looking at perception. This shows a temporal sequence of brain activity for thermal painful stimuli determined in relation to anticipated peak for the stimulus (vertical line at 10 seconds from stimulus start) and actual reported peak of pain perception (vertical line at 17 seconds). The Abhidharma framework posits that every instance of perception is fundamentally composed of three elements including the sense organ, the sense object, and the resulting sense consciousness. In early Buddhist thought, the connection between this triad was understood through the principle of dependent origination. This causal explanation is challenged by the emerging theory of momentariness. Since this theory holds that the sense organ, the sense object, and the sense consciousness are all momentary entities, the fundamental philosophical question becomes: How can the causality linking these three be maintained and explained? The belief is that when that one moment of matter arises and perishes during that period 17 seconds, 17 moments of thought arise and perish together. Nothing is permanent, and nothing the nothingness is in many was a way to say, “Nothing needs to mean anything right now.”

This is not dissociation. It is suspension of interpretation. This is not erasing memory. This is declining to activate it.

I want to start by speaking to impermanence. What is impermanence? Everything changes. As I looked at what I wanted to use for my final project, what feels like extreme changes within my life was calling me. In Buddhism, impermanence is taught as this great teacher where though the changes, and losses that we flow through, rather than continuing to flow in the river, we try to cling to the slimy rock, which is our obstacle. We believe that each moment, each joy, each love, each body is meant to last forever.  

Anitya, impermanence is always present in our life from the first moment that a life is sparked within the womb. If we look more into the transcendent aspect, that which is going to create you, that ova or the central nucleus that contains the female’s genetic material that will become you was once within your grandmother as your mother was forming that will be all that she carries at her time of birth. We have already changed so much before you are even born. You cannot go back into the womb in this lifetime. In research published in Genetics, Dr. Joseph H. Nadeau, principal scientist at the Pacific Northwest Research Institute, found evidence that suggests the egg may choose which sperm to fertilize it. 

If we think of Bodhisattva, the Prajnaparamita, we are taught that it is that infinite emptiness of profound wisdom, in that gap of illuminated wisdom, in space, we start the transformation of the relationship between impermanence and suffering. This is that which allows us to make friends with our ego, as to live we have ego. It is a part of our genetic nature. However, Shantideva has said, "Without coming into contact with the inherent thing, one cannot comprehend the emptiness of that thing." It brings me back to the egg. That egg is not going to become an embodied soul without coming into contact with a sperm, of it's choosing. That emptiness, perhaps even that soul, is choosing to create an embodied life and forget for a moment how divine it truly is. 

It then becomes like a bubble that is riding on the river of life. Within it resides that galaxy, and yet it chooses to interact with the river of life, hitting rocks, and rapids, and finding itself connected to other bubbles that are created by the waves. If it is lucky enough, it lets go of the journey through the water and starts to explore within, remembering the galaxy that exists within it. Moment by moment, remembering that your true existence is not "me". In the Diamond Sutra, life is compared to a bubble floating in a stream. Maybe our true life is lived before we choose embodiment, or maybe it happens after we choose to stop accepting embodiment, or maybe it is this void where we learn to accept embodiment.  

I created a version of life that could be all of the above, this bubble floating in the stream. Created from the decomposition of animals and plant based organic surfactants into the water, called dissolved organic carbon (DOC). This DOC interacts with the moving water which causes tiny air bubbles to form. Air, vāyu, the movement and motion of creation. In my practice of shamanic teachings Air is the upper center of through, and knowing. Yet this bubble has also become solid because of the pṛthivī or earth element, and the āpas water elements. What remains is the tejas of fire, heat and warmth. Tejas comes with life, and is a masculine energy if you look at most teachings, and yet Eros, which is the great cosmic fire, Buddha expressed as being divinely feminine. Life is the union of these two, but only if we choose it. When we do, we are created by all of these aspects of the galaxy within us. Yet, we become a part of this world. Once we do at any time life can burst and move back into the stream of consciousness, and we see this through the moments of impermanence that every second bursts away, and the bubble keeps moving until it is no more. Even the bubble is not permanent. 

I am the bubble, right now. Some of the decay that I am colliding with creating bubbles around me I may not want to see, but yet it is being seen through a lens of what I experienced upstream. The salmon that was born and came back to die, the organic materials of the oceans far beyond myself. It is all there. My work is to let the galaxy from beyond my construct of time create an ability to let all of it go, and just allow the past, the current and future to flow onward. Seeking to embrace that change is the eternal flow of embodied life, and through that find the Sun/Fire that will spark the joy in my heart. Creating this painting was so therapeutic as I realized that part of the beauty of the bubble is like the painting. This emotion that I had right now painting, it too, will change. Everything changes, and so we 

(me) are always flowing with Impermanence. And until I am ready to process everything that is going on, I'm just going to rely on the 17 seconds. It's all that is, and all that "matters" for now. 

And upcoming the release: 

17 Seconds

"In a moment when the bomb hit