Contemplative Corner with Julia Zay | October 2024

Watch This Space! Julia Zay offers practices that fall under the “contemplative” umbrella for your use in the classroom or other campus gathering.

2 + 2

I start each class session with a ritual. I love the way repetition provides a familiar place to land, ground, and greet ourselves before we venture into the widely varied activities in a class. 

The title comes from the time it takes to do it: 2 minutes of silence and 2 minutes of drawing.

Tools: 

Timer (for facilitator)

Pencil/pen + one index card (for each person)

Process:

1. 2 minutes of silence: I say, “This is an opportunity to do nothing much. Close your eyes, listen to the room, feel your feet on the floor, pay attention to your breathing.” I leave this open, though it is kind of a training exercise for learning to meditate, should you take things in that direction later.

2. 2 minutes of drawing with a 3-word prompt: Draw you now. 

I intentionally focus on the experience and don’t say “draw a self portrait” or anything too directive about what to draw. I’ve observed a deep well of fear arise in students when they hear a prompt to “draw.” A goal is to offer the experience of drawing as a non-ideational or non-optical experience. Extraordinary Evergreen alum and artist Lynda Barry* describes this kind of drawing practice as “…a place where the back of the mind knows it has a place come forward.”

I say, “The idea is to move a pencil with the intention of recording your current or recent state. You might draw representationally–some image you have of yourself–or make marks that depict some other aspect of your being. You might move the pencil in a way that feels like you feel without regard for how the drawing looks.  

A variation on the prompt is to draw for the first minute while looking at what you are drawing and for the second minute draw without looking. 

At the end of 2 minutes, I remind everyone to write their name and date on the back of the card and to save these cards in a dedicated place–an envelope, an index card file box, or on their wall. 

At the end of the quarter/year, you can devote a class session to hanging all of these on the wall (reserve a room with lots of wall space!) Each students can put all of theirs up in order, or you might choose a few key days of the quarter and put all of that day’s drawings up in a collection. The sheer volume of cards and the collective energy visible in their lines is a lovely surprise.

*I credit Lynda Barry, who does a similar exercise with her students and writes about it in her marvelous book about teaching, Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor