This image is called 'Bamboo in the Snow' by Stephanie Shimerdla. I took brush painting lessons for a while but really couldn't learn it.
I'm a 竹升 - juk-sing a label given to OBCs, overseas born Chinese. If you take a section of bamboo you will find that the 2 ends are blocked by an internal divider - that is how bamboo grows; you can see the external joints quite clearly. The label refers to the empty space between the nodes and to OBCs and their communication skills especially in Chinese but perhaps also to cultural acceptance.
I came across Augustine Ichiro Okumura, a Japanese theologian and Carmelite monk, in his book Awakening to Prayer in August 2003 and he uses bamboo in a very different way.
"The part of the bamboo that stretches upward symbolizes the course of life and the points could represent the prayer that cuts ... the bamboo joints encircle it on the outside like a cord thus symbolizing that prayer too is one with life. Prayer is that divine seed whose roots draw food from earthly existence. ... The important thing in prayer is not the duration ... but to interrupt what one is doing ... Only a sharp break will allow the whole of life to become prayer because life itself is not itself a prayer! Thus the invisible power of of the bamboo joint that acts on the trunk and creates the tree so sturdy that no tempest can break it symbolizes the life of prayer. nevertheless, however important the joints, they do not constitute the whole bamboo. In human life, als, the many occupations of the day are to be found between its prayer breaks."As I have been thinking about sabbath as keeping, doing and being my own struggle has been not keeping prayer but the disciplines of rest and self-care. Okumura responds to this. "How to pray in the course of a busy modern life is an important problem. It would be highly dangerous , however, to endorse the cheap solution of thinking indiscriminately that every activity itself is a prayer ... [unlike the angels we are also physical bodies!]" Five years later I'm still working on this and perhaps for another 5 years yet.
