Enso

For the last the 10 years or so it has been my habit to often draw an ensō (円相 - Japanese for "circle"). This is a kind of meditation oft practised by Zen Buddhists. In Zen there is “stillness in motion” (dōchū no sei), a freedom that is accomplished through practice of meditations like zazen or the simple act of drawing a circle. We look at this image, and we know that it is composed of circles, each a complete gesture, even though the end result does not draw a line of points equidistant from a centre, the perfect slice of a sphere in Western geometry.

While the historical practice of drawing an ensō involves grinding pigment and applying this ink with a brush to rice paper in a single stroke, my spinal cord injury has led me to often use a digitising tablet instead. This double ensō drawing is something of an accident - I forgot to delete one stroke before painting another. I think that this was a happy accident, of a kind often stumbled across in Zen practice.