Kokū Meditations began with a set of ideas that kept coming back. Some of them came from books and teachers, others from conversations or from moments of personal insight, and over time they became the things the artist returned to in her own meditations and in ordinary daily life. Most of them were perspectives on letting go, on seeing a situation differently, on catching an old pattern as it appeared and creating a little more space before responding. None of them are theories. They are the perspectives that helped her move through her life with more awareness and more intention, which is the only reason they ended up in a deck at all.
Eventually those ideas became 54 meditations. The visual world of the deck, though, came from somewhere else entirely.
Sumi-e, and painting as a form of meditation
On trips to Japan the artist came across sumi-e, a centuries-old Japanese ink painting practice rooted in Zen. What drew her in at first was how little there was to it, since the whole practice comes down to black ink, paper and a brush, and there is very little to hide behind. What made it stay with her was the experience of painting itself.
In sumi-e everything ends up visible in the finished work: how much ink the brush was carrying, how much pressure the hand applied, the texture of the paper, the way the light catches the black ink, even the exact moment the brush began to run dry. Once a stroke has been made there is no undoing it, so the tremor of a hand or the asymmetry of a mark is simply left where it is, and rather than being a mistake to correct it becomes the thing that gives each painting its character. Every painting ends up reflecting the state of mind it was made in.
Like meditation, sumi-e asks for complete attention to the present moment. Over time the artist came to see that the practice was never really about painting beautifully, and that what it was actually teaching her was how to be fully present.
54 paintings, all of them made by hand
Every artwork in the deck began with ink, paper and the movement of the hand, and the 54 paintings took more than a hundred hours of work between them. Each one was painted individually, on paper, before it ever became a card.
Some of the images are recognizable and others are deliberately abstract, so a bird might emerge from three or four strokes of ink while a landscape only suggests itself, and the same shape can look like two completely different things depending on who is looking at it. That openness is deliberate. Although each painting began with an idea in the artist's mind, it was never meant simply to illustrate the meditation printed beside it, and the original idea was never intended to settle what the painting means for anyone else.
There is no correct interpretation waiting to be arrived at. The artwork is another place to pause and notice what comes up.
If you want to see the finished cards while you read, the deck is here.
The ensō
One mark runs through Kokū: the ensō, a symbol from the Japanese Zen tradition, traditionally painted in a single fluid brushstroke. Like every other artwork in the deck, each ensō begins with ink, paper and a deliberate movement of the hand.
For the artist, the beauty of the ensō lies in what is left unfinished and imperfect, which is why the Kokū ensō is drawn open rather than closed. That opening stands for space to keep growing and changing without needing to arrive at a fixed or perfect form, and it carries the idea at the center of Kokū itself, which is that emptiness does not have to mean absence and that open space can carry possibility. A life does not need to be completely filled in order to be whole, and neither does a circle.
The vermilion dot
A small vermilion dot appears in some of the paintings, and where it does, its meaning is left as open as everything else.
For the artist it stands for the higher intelligence present in all living things, a shared essence that exists beyond thought and belongs not only to us but to animals, insects, trees and the natural world around us. It is a quiet reminder that awareness is not separate from nature but part of something larger moving through everything. Like the paintings themselves, it is left open enough that another person might find something quite different in it.
Leaving room
The name Kokū (虚空) describes boundless open space, a void that contains everything while keeping nothing. That idea runs through the meditations themselves, but it also runs through the way the deck was made. The circle that stays unfinished, the unpredictable way ink moves through paper, a painting that refuses to tell you exactly what it is, a mark that cannot be erased once the brush has touched the page: again and again the process asks for something to be left open, whether that is room for imperfection, room for interpretation, or room for something unexpected to emerge.
Kokū Meditations brings those 54 original paintings together with 54 reflections, visualizations and mantras. The deck is designed to create a little more space in which to notice your own answers rather than to supply them for you.
Fifty-four paintings, 54 reflections, one deck.