Selene Hoover shares a story and art as expressions of gratitude for this practice, for our Teacher and our lineage, and for her ancestors.
By Selene Hoover on
I did not set out to illustrate a story about my life and the time I spent practicing and working at Deer Park Monastery. For seven years, three or more days a week,
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Selene Hoover shares a story and art as expressions of gratitude for this practice, for our Teacher and our lineage, and for her ancestors.
By Selene Hoover on
I did not set out to illustrate a story about my life and the time I spent practicing and working at Deer Park Monastery. For seven years, three or more days a week, I was steeped in the deep peace generated by the Sangha there. You can feel it in your bones, in your very cells, like the vibration of a bell. I did commit to paying forward that good fortune for the rest of my life. I just didn’t expect it to take this form. I followed a sense of a calling. I got lost in distracting myself from pain for a while. And then, this beautiful practice helped me find my way home.
When Thích Nhất Hạnh (Thầy) passed in January 2022, I had the inspiration to digitally paint his portrait as a meditation on gratitude for his life and teachings. I’d spent years copying photographs and characters in actual paper sketchbooks as a kid, and over the years I’d experiment with digital art, but it never seemed to click for me. Then, in the process of working on Thầy’s portrait, I found a digital painting style that felt natural and expressive. I had the thought that a graphic novel about the loving practice Thầy brought to the world would be amazing, but it seemed pretty far out of reach for my skills. So I let it go—the aspiration spinning like a prayer wheel.
A month later, a dear friend of mine was visiting from out of town when she got a call that her teen daughter was being admitted to the hospital because of a mental health crisis. It was a sudden suicide attempt that she thankfully survived. I took my friend to the airport, sending her into circumstances of tremendous difficulty, and my heart wanted so much to collect the most helpful things I’d learned about mindfulness and put them into a package I could send with her.
Within a few days, my morning writing took on a new focus as a story started to emerge about a family struggling with teen suicidality. When sixteen-year-old MJ Masters attends Teen Camp at Deer Park, she shares what she learns about mindfulness with her family, helping them to show up for themselves and each other, and connect with the resources needed to address family conflicts in healthy ways. The story became a novel, MJ Masters the Universe. After getting positive feedback on the first draft, I got somewhat stuck as I tried to develop it. I decided to try storyboarding the main action in what I’d written—and then the process of creating each piece of art took on a life of its own. It feels like this art has always been inside me. The causes and conditions have manifested for it to emerge. It continues to be a road of healing and opening to Love.
As I draw and paint on my digital canvas, I practice bringing my mind to my breath, feeling it flow into my shoulder and down to my hand in how I hold my pencil. I can feel my body learning to relax the pattern of tension I’ve tended to hold there. I’m connecting with many parts of my past that have brought me to this time. The teen in me, spending summers sitting for hours every day on my grandmother’s couch sketching animated characters. Being with her was a respite from family dynamics that provided a lot of mud, yielding many lotuses… enough for me to understand the suffering of a teen struggling with not wanting to live in such a confusing world. I required hospitalization as a kid, too. I made myself sick enough to be hospitalized extensively because I hoped that getting my family in front of doctors would somehow lead us to the help we needed. I know this art and this healing are gifts from and for my ancestors, including those in my bloodline and those that have held and transmitted the true resonance of these transformative teachings, most especially as expressed by Thầy.
It feels like chaos becoming music. As these different aspects of self and lifetimes connect, it’s like the fragmented aspects of myself finding their way into alignment again. Peace with a sense of my relative identity. Myself as a wave. Enough, just as she is. In balance with the sense of myself as the water. It’s making friends with emptiness, like MJ in the story I’m working on. It’s not that I’m enough now that I’ve made the art; the art is the blossom of the process of its emergence. Knowing for myself that I am enough and feeling love flow through and fill me, extending from there freely to others—the art is an expression of that awareness and feeling it alive in me. Like a flame. It is infusing my yoga practice with a sustaining energy. A welcome change after decades of chronic health troubles including extreme fatigue and chronic pain, all from holding so much trauma in my body for so long.
I am writing this from a place of tremendous privilege. During more challenging chapters of my life, when circumstances felt barely bearable, when my suffering nearly fully engulfed me, it was the gifts of friendship and community that sustained me through those times. Enough for circumstances to change. For my practice to deepen. For space and time to heal. I’ve been very hard on myself for not healing faster, but a lot started to change when I eased up on that. I was able to focus more on small ways of taking care of myself, instead of worrying about things I couldn’t do, and distracting myself from (and with) the anxiety that created. I still do that. Just much less. It’s a practice: appreciating things just as they are, abiding, with gratitude and compassion.
I am so deeply grateful for Thầy’s heartfelt teachings, and to the Plum Village community that continues his legacy so beautifully in embodying the living Dharma. The energy of mindfulness is like a flame. Happiness is the walk. Happiness is the stroke of my digital pencil. There is nowhere to run to and nothing to run from. And in feeling that, there is a sense of wholeness that illuminates the Deer Park inside of me.
I tend the flame. And, I am home.
