Phenomenology of Spirit

 

This is It and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience

 

Walking for Peace (2026)

“Peace is every step.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

I begin with this sentence because it names what this painting asks of me. Not admiration. Not agreement. Practice. Debbie Taylor-Kerman’s recently completed image of monks walking for peace does not feel illustrative or explanatory. It feels instructional. Like the sentence itself, it does not point beyond the moment it depicts. It insists on the step that is already happening.

The monks in the painting are moving, but nothing about them suggests urgency. Their pace is deliberate, almost restrained. Their bodies overlap and soften at the edges, as if repetition has worn down the need for sharp distinction. They do not look toward the viewer. They are not headed toward a visible goal. The walk is the work. I find myself slowing as I look, drawn into the rhythm implied by their stride.

I stay with the image the way I stay with a practice. I notice how little narrative it offers. There are no signs, no slogans, no climax toward which the figures advance. Instead, there is posture. Weight. Balance. The painting seems to say what the Tao Te Ching says without ornament: “The Tao does nothing, yet nothing is left undone” (ch. 37). The monks do not appear to be doing peace. They are keeping it.

When I look at this painting devotionally, I see walking meditation rendered visible. Each figure appears absorbed in the mechanics of movement: foot lifting, foot landing, breath coordinating with step. This is not symbolic walking; it is practiced walking. In Buddhist tradition, walking meditation is not secondary to sitting. It is sitting translated into space. The body becomes the text. The ground becomes the teacher. The Dhammapada describes wisdom not as brilliance, but as steadiness: “Just as a solid rock is not shaken by the storm…” (v. 81). These monks look like rocks in motion—unmoved, yet progressing.

The painting keeps drawing me back to the bodies themselves. Their partial translucence feels important. They are present, but not dense. It is as if the discipline of attention has thinned the boundary between inner and outer life. I read this as devotion rather than protest. Or perhaps more precisely, devotion expressed as protest. The monks do not confront the world with force. They offer themselves to it, step by step.

My own experience of zazen shapes how I remain with this image. Zazen has taught me that stillness is not passive. It is exacting. One sits upright, attentive, unfinished. Nothing is resolved, but nothing is avoided. When I look again at Taylor-Kerman’s monks, I see that same posture translated into movement. Walking meditation becomes zazen under pressure—carried into streets, into visibility, into risk. The painting does not let me separate inner discipline from outward presence. The two are fused in the figures’ stride.

What continues to hold me is how private the act remains, even in public. Each monk walks among others, yet each appears inwardly alone. Breath is not shared. Attention cannot be delegated. The street becomes a zendo not because it is quiet, but because the practitioners refuse to abandon the practice when quiet is unavailable. The psalmist’s command to “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalms, 46:10) feels unexpectedly aligned with this image. Stillness here is not immobility. It is coherence.

The painting also carries a lineage within it. I cannot look at these walking bodies without thinking of Mahatma Gandhi’s Salt March, another moment when walking became moral speech. Gandhi understood that the body itself could tell the truth when words were insufficient. Yet Taylor-Kerman’s work does not historicize that insight. It refuses distance. This is not a memory of walking. It is walking now.

That contemporaneity matters devotionally. The monks are not safely finished. Their walk has no caption announcing success or failure. Like the teaching in the Bhagavad Gita “You have a right to action, but not to the fruits of action” (2.47) the painting releases outcome. It binds attention to fidelity. The monks walk because walking keeps them aligned, not because it guarantees peace.

As I continue to look, the painting turns the question back toward me. How do I move through the world? Do I carry the stillness I practice into the spaces where it is most tested? Or do I reserve devotion for private moments and surrender the rest to urgency? The monks’ anonymity makes this question unavoidable. They could be anyone. They could be me. They are defined not by identity, but by posture.

I notice again how the figures repeat. Step follows step. There is no crescendo. This repetition feels liturgical. It mirrors the repetition of breath in zazen, the repetition of prayer, the repetition of attention returned again and again. The painting does not ask me to believe anything. It asks me to remain.

I return, finally, to the sentence that hovers over the image like a quiet rubric: “Peace is every step.” Taylor-Kerman’s painting does not illustrate this line; it enacts it. Peace is not promised beyond the frame. It is contained within it. It is contained within each footfall, each aligned body, each refusal to rush.

I leave the image without resolution, but not without instruction.

The monks are still walking.

The step is still available.

This, for me, is devotion.

Wonder Man

Banned (2013)

What continues to hold me in Nicola Verlato’s Banned (2013) is not simply its virtuosity or its shock, but the way it stages a conversation between two of humanity’s most enduring narrative forms: mythology and science fiction. These modes of storytelling are often framed as oppositional, the one ancient and symbolic, the other modern and speculative, but Verlato’s painting insists that they are deeply related. The work suggests that science fiction is not a rupture from myth but its contemporary transformation, reshaped to meet a world governed less by gods than by systems.

Mythology arises from humanity’s earliest attempts to orient itself within a vast and incomprehensible cosmos. As Mircea Eliade argues, myth does not merely recount events but establishes “models for human behavior” by placing human experience within a sacred, meaningful order. Mythic figures—satyrs, gods, heroes—externalize human impulses and fears, giving them narrative form. The satyr in Banned belongs unmistakably to this tradition. His hybrid body signals instinct, sexuality, and nature uncontained by reason. He is excessive and vulnerable, but also legible. We recognize him. He belongs to a world where meaning is embodied and struggle is personal.

Science fiction, by contrast, emerges from a desacralized universe shaped by Enlightenment rationality, industrialization, and technological acceleration. Where myth explains origins, science fiction interrogates trajectories. As Darko Suvin famously defines it, science fiction operates through “cognitive estrangement,” presenting worlds that are different enough to unsettle us, yet rational enough to feel plausible. The hovering craft in Banned exemplifies this estrangement. It is not mystical but technological, not capricious but procedural. Its concentric rings evoke scientific diagrams, wave theory, and signal transmission. This is power rendered abstract: no face, no voice, no negotiable will.

Yet Verlato makes clear that this technological presence functions much like a god. It occupies the sky, dominates the composition, and exercises absolute authority over the human (or mythic) body below. In this way, Banned echoes Arthur C. Clarke’s observation that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The difference, however, is ethical rather than aesthetic. Mythic gods, however cruel, are relational. They can be angered, appeased, loved, or deceived. The technological force in Banned is indifferent. Its power is not exercised against the satyr so much as without regard for him.

This indifference marks a crucial shift between mythological and science-fictional worldviews. In myth, humanity is small but significant; in much science fiction, humanity is small and increasingly irrelevant. The satyr’s nakedness intensifies this point. In classical art, nudity often signifies ideal form and moral truth. Here, it signifies exposure without protection. He has nothing to hide, yet visibility offers no salvation. Hannah Arendt’s reflections on modern power feel relevant here, particularly her concern that contemporary systems can “render human beings superfluous” not through overt cruelty, but through bureaucratic and technological abstraction.

The title Banned sharpens this reading. To be banned is not to be punished within a shared moral framework; it is to be excluded from the framework altogether. Mythological transgression typically results in exile, suffering, or transformation but always within a story that still acknowledges the subject’s role. In contrast, banning is administrative. It erases participation rather than condemns behavior. Verlato’s figure is not being judged for excess; he is being removed from relevance. This feels distinctly contemporary, resonating with experiences of algorithmic governance, digital silencing, and institutional exclusion.

And yet, despite this bleakness, Banned ultimately affirms the enduring power of story itself. Both mythology and science fiction arise from the same human impulse: the need to narrate what overwhelms us. As Ursula K. Le Guin writes, “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive." It describes the present by exaggerating its forces, just as myth once did. Verlato’s painting participates in this descriptive function, using visual language to translate diffuse modern anxieties into a single, legible moment of confrontation.

What I find most compelling is that the painting itself becomes an act of resistance to erasure. Even as it depicts the classical body’s loss of authority, it insists on rendering that body with reverence and care. The story is not told from the perspective of the machine, but from the ground, from the flesh. In doing so, Verlato reminds me that while the forms of power change, storytelling remains a fundamentally human act. It is how we reclaim agency in the face of forces that feel inhuman.

In the end, mythology and science fiction are not competing narratives but complementary ones. Myth tells us who we have been; science fiction asks who we might become or cease to be. Both are attempts to wrest meaning from uncertainty. Banned stands at their intersection, insisting that even in a world governed by systems rather than gods, the human need to tell stories endures. Story is how we remember ourselves when the world threatens to forget us.