Basho’s Pond: Setting rocks and Zen amour

Art Gallery

Siddhena remembers the building of the swimming pool at the Resort.

poona-landscape-self
pool2
pool

The huge rock is hanging by a cable in the morning air, slowly turning – as if weightless and outside time.

In its lazy spin it slowly reveals its different aspects, facets, colors, markings that could influence its final bearing and position for the waterfall.

We lower it into place. I walk around looking from every angle to see how it sits, how the water will move on it, how the light will play on its exposed surfaces.
The crane lowers it into place.
I squat and wait…
Mmm, not quite…
“Take it up again!” I shout.

My first experiences of setting rocks for waterfalls were mind-stopping.

Each time a teaching.
The apparently simple synergy of rocks and the flow of water is set in motion always in unique circumstances, the constraints meet the moment in a creative response to now.

Each time a paradox.
How does effortless effort appear – in the dance between gravity and flow? The slowly turning rock appears to float… temporarily freed from its gravity and mass, now carried by Wu Wei.
Slowly turning Siddhena is now seeded with Zen.

Master rock
Still as a Rock
Issa

Designing the layout of the Resort and Park was something I can never forget. I first saw the site for the swimming pool when we stepped through the fence between Vrindavan and what was to become Basho. As always the project had an ‘impossible’ time frame, particularly ‘enhanced’ by the local available resources! And the laying out of the shape and design of the pool followed Osho’s vision as closely as possible. ‘A natural organic shape set among trees and waterfalls’… ‘A deep black bottom to suggest the void’… ‘Diving into infinity’…

‘Floating in the void’ was to manifest in Koregaon Park!

As in so many projects around him the sublime merged with the practical. Bottomless black pool tiles? Nowhere in India for sure! In Osho’s vision of a celebratory Zen, the utter stillness of Basho’s pond was to become a place of joy where ‘Floating in the void’ was our everyday ‘let go’, and many frogs jumping every day.

And so my love of Zen, in Zen, has taken me to Japan and has been my underlying muse since. In some design projects but more prolifically in my painting exploration. The selection of images comes both from that project and from the stream that has grown out of that spring.

Dapple print
From the garden series
Untitled
Moon water
Canvas relief
Sumie mono
Window writing
Spring rain

Zen amour…

Siddhena

Siddhena (Sidd Murray-Clark) works, exhibits and teaches in Japan. siddart.com – facebook.com/ArtistEastWest

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