Story behind Mind as Spacious as the Sky (fourth row, center)
I was looking for things to distract me when Covid began as I was quarantined in my senior community apartment building. So, I started taking an online zoom meditation class that one of my fellow residents told me about. It is a wonderful sangha with the fantastic teacher, Mark Coleman, of Sausalito, California. Mark is a great meditation teacher and offers workshops on meditation. His site is https://markcoleman.org. People from all over the world zoom in at 7:30 am California time Mondays through Fridays. Mark likes to recite beautiful poetry, sometimes his own, as we meditate, and he also recites calming, graphic phrases. One day, one of the phrases that he recited was “mind as spacious as the sky.” An image popped into my head: clouds floating in Mark’s forehead. Hence, the picture. I wanted to present the painting to him in a striking way. Somehow, I managed to load the picture into the virtual background of the zoom room during one of our sessions. And it happened to be on his birthday so it became a birthday present to him. I have since sent him the original.