[Sangha Profile] Syma - “Life as Art, Art as Life”
Inspired by ancient artifacts and mythologies, Syma creates conceptual sculptures, vessels, and participatory installations in response to life events, wishes, and dreams. When she’s not at her studio in Red Hook, she’s often teaching art to kids, families and senior everywhere from the Metropolitan Museum to New York City senior centers. Syma lives in a tower on New York’s Lower East Side, and has been a member of the Triratna NY Sangha since 2012.
What was your spiritual life like growing up?
I grew up outside of Pittsburgh, PA. We were Jewish, which was about family, tradition, and a lot of guilt. We celebrated both Christmas and Hannukah. We hung stockings and exchanged presents, but the only Christmas tree was in my father’s dental office.
At the same time, we had a lot of rituals. We’d search for Matzoh after our Passover Seder. There was a lot of symbolism around food. And we invented our own rituals. We were building a new home, and when we’d go to check on the progress, we put the baby teeth we had lost into the foundation.
Through it all, I developed my belief in a blue fairy. My grandmother used to tell me the story of Pinocchio, how the blue fairy told him that if he acted like a real boy, he would become one. This kind of magic was my spiritual belief. That you could make wishes, but you had to do your part, had to be headed where you wanted to go, and then someone might drive up behind you to give you a ride.
Your art often seems to be about creating magical routes to transformation, using ancient myths and ceremonial objects as a jumping off point. How has this approach developed over time?
It started from not wanting to deal with reality. I studied psychology in college and learned that the first step to changing behavior is to name the issue, recognize the challenge. There’s this idea, like with the blue fairy, that if we call for help, it will arrive, even if it might not be dressed the way you expected.
I became interested in the flow of things. I had a lot of challenges, and made sense of them by not letting go of the magical thinking I had developed as a child, by aligning myself with ancient rituals, belief systems, artifacts, ritual objects.
I worked in a psychiatric hospital as an activity therapist for several years, doing art with patients. The staff would give me patients who often wouldn’t talk to their therapists, but in the process of doing art, they often were able to open up. I once asked a patient what she would wish to give to someone just being admitted to the hospital. She said “Hope”. It inspired me to create something I called a “Pocket of Hope,” a wall sculpture that could serve as an antidote to pockets of doubt or pockets of despair.
I often try to make objects that might help with a desired transformation. My way of dealing with intense emotions is by using humor and by making ritual objects. I see it as similar to the Buddha’s Middle Way, finding calm and peace as we respond to events in our life.
One of the first times I did this was when I took a big leap and moved to London to get married. I’d been single for 30 years, but I gave away my house, my art, everything. And when I got there, I couldn’t even cross the street without nearly getting killed. Transitions are a challenge for me.
In my new studio, there was an extruder, which I could use to make tubes of clay. These could have been vases, but someone once told me that the difference between art and craft is that “If it holds water, it’s craft.” So I began my 12 year series of “Bottomless Vessels to Hold Change”.
In London, I surrounded myself with bottomless vessels which had faces on them. They became my guardian angels, and when I missed my friends in New York and Boston, my daughter and my family, I turned to these clay cylinders.
What got you started IN TERMS OF meditatiON?
I first studied meditation with my yoga teacher when I was living outside Boston.
Then, after moving to London for a few years and eventually separating from my second husband, some guys came to visit my studio and stayed all day, and invited me to a meditation class at their mansion on the Thames. I found it to be transportative, taking me to a quiet place in the midst of a time where I was thinking “Good Grief! What have I done with my life.”
When I came back to New York about 12 years ago, I returned to leading tours and workshops at the Metropolitan Museum and also became an artist in residence at the Museum of Arts and Design. Brian Waldbillig, a Triratna NY sangha member who passed away about two years ago, visited the Mad Museum studio and we talked. Then our sangha’s founder Vajramati visited. I was impressed with how he seemed to be 150% present, truly listening to my answers to his questions. He mentioned that he taught meditation to beginners. When he left, I ran after him and stopped him at the elevator and told him I wanted to learn more, to find a way to make this kind of connection, to be able to learn how to be more fully present...
It took about another year before I started taking classes with Triratna, which was then the FWBO. But it totally changed my life.
What’s your day-to-day practice, and how HAS YOUR LIFE BEEN Impacted by this?
When I was raising my daughter solo, things would sometimes get really difficult, and I would turn to drawing. For me, it was a form of active meditation. When I started truly meditating, I began noticing things I hadn’t seen before. It was very similar to how I felt during a good day in my art studio, where everything else disappears and I can totally focus on a line and which way it wants to go.
Meditation does something similar for me. Getting quiet allows my eyes and ears and soul to be more open to what’s going on around me, and inside me.
When I first started, I would meditate every day without fail. It was quite uplifting. But honestly my practice right now is not quite there. I try to do 20 minutes of meditation, 20 minutes of exercise, and 20 minutes of journaling each day.
At its best, meditation can help me respond differently to challenges. It’s taught me to say “That sucks… but what might be possible?” and to find ways of dealing with things that I might not have otherwise.
Growing up, there was not a lot of quiet space in my world. There was quite a bit of yelling and fighting. I think I must have missed all the lessons on self-care. I never learned how to restore, how to rest. Meditation has become my quieting space.
You’re probably the oldest member of our Sangha. Has your practice helped you deal with issues related to aging?
The wolves at the door for me today include physical aches and pains, and for a long time I tried to push this away, to deny it. Meditation has helped me to sit with it, to look at it, to invite it in. When I can come to a state of peacefulness, something happens. Instead of fighting the current of the river, I can flow with it, even savor it.
The Sangha has also taught me to accept myself exactly where I’m at, because I trust my fellow Sangha members to do precisely this, even if I’m feeling sick, or can’t walk up stairs, or whatever.
So if I can’t climb stairs to take the elevated train to go teach at a senior center way out in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn, I’ll say to myself “How can I do that, what would make it possible.” And often, thanks to many seen and unseen helping hands, a way is revealed. Now, after a year of cutting through red tape, I just started using access-a-ride to get around, and I have just started teaching again at that Brooklyn senior center.
