Category Archives: Creativity/Spirituality

Musings/thoughts/questions about creativity and spirituality

November 2010 Soul and Solace

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Living in Sept. 12

Looking toward Thanksgiving has me gazing backward to our family worship time the weekend of Sept. 11. We folded paper into thirds so that it opened like the Isenheim Altarpiece (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isenheim_Altarpiece). On the outside we depicted events from history, from around the world, and from personal experience that carried elements of Sept. 11, 2001: the hatred, the terror, the violence, as well as the dignity, the valor, the mythic heroism. Inside the paper altarpiece, we depicted our choice to live in a Sept. 12 world: first acknowledging the truth of Sept. 11 (as well as other events and experiences that rock us to the core), then choosing to live the next day and the next . . . in hope.

What practices would belong to your Sept. 12 world? What, for you, is hope? How important is hope in your life?

October 2010 Soul and Solace

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Touch

The past couple of decades have placed needful emphasis on “bad touch”: touch employed to objectify, demean, abuse, or in any way other way, disrespect another. Knowing how another is not allowed to touch us empowers; it gives us permission to value ourselves enough to say “no!”

Recent references to healing and therapeutic touch, remind me that “good touch” is needful for healthy human functioning. Babies who do not receive loving touch fail to thrive. As this month’s spiritual practice, I am attending to good touch: touch that expresses affection, regard, respect, and love:

  • the weight of a dog’s head in my lap;
  • a child’s hand slipped trustingly into mine;
  • the rare Saturday when my husband and I can lie in bed and hold one another;
  • a ladybug alighting on my arm;
  • hugs from family and friends; and
  • the wind turning my hair into a whirligig.

What is the importance of good touch in your life? What kind of touch feels to you like affection…regard…respect…love?

September 2010 Soul and Solace

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Saying Goodbye

It happens when we leave a job or a relationship ends or, for any reason, our souls say “time to change.” We sort through the “stuff” of our former seasons, deciding what is detritus and what belongs to the coming season. I also keep a drawer of “in-between” things (trash or treasure?) that my internal jury’s still out on.

How do you say goodbye? How do you clear a space for what might be?

August 2010 Soul and Solace

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Messiness & Chaos

Thursday of creativity camp week is Messy Art Day—I figure after three days of creative concentration, it’s time for a break. We head outside for ice sculpting (otherwise known as hacking away at large ice blocks with butter knives, then running relays with those blocks held against the belly as some sort of endurance ritual), marble painting (otherwise known as drenching marbles in paint, plopping them onto a sheet of paper in large box and, by tilting the box this way and that, sending the marbles careening across the page, leaving tracks of clean and muddy color in their wake), and shaving-cream painting (which starts as shaving cream and powdered tempera on old cookie sheets and ends up with campers as their own foamy and colorful artworks).

Sitting in the sweltering heat, watching it all, I am reminded of the need for chaos in the creative process. Indeed, the word “process” hardly seems, in such times, to fit; there appears to be no direction at all. We are simply being one with our mess!

Messy Art Day ends with a garden hose baptism. We traipse inside, shimmering with water, dripping on the floor, shivering, and grinning from ear to ear.

—And it is good!

What are your experiences of chaos and process?

July 2010 Soul and Solace

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Aching & Art

Fireworks make me ache.

The night of July 4, we sat on a patch of grass at the corner of Lamar and Riverside, watching heaven-bound comets force their way upward, then burst in ecstasy against the night sky. The explosions, accompanied by rifle-like pops, were followed by almost involuntary “ahhhhs!” from the crowd. The high tenor of child voices played like a descant above it all.
Then, too swiftly for my hungry eyes and ears to ingest, the voices stopped and the fireworks shimmered into death. The fireworks’ smoky-gray carcasses rode the winds: lifeless remains of creatures on a celestial sea.

Such experiences—what C. S. Lewis called “joy”—feel like promises breathed just too low for me to be quite sure I heard them. Traditional wisdom like “live in the moment” or “grab for the gusto” doesn’t reach me in this place near tears. Instead, I do what I am trying to do here—I seek to make hope-born art: a thank-you gift for what has been and for promises of might yet be.

How do you respond to experiences of “joy?”

June 2010 Soul and Solace

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Adam Speak

I recently watched the film, Adam, which portrays the life of a young man with Augsberger’s Syndrome who cannot lie. Because of Adam’s attention to detail slows productivity, his boss decides to fire him.

“I have to let you go,” the boss says euphemistically. “But I don’t want to go,” responds Adam.

Similarly, I’ve heard “May I help you?” when what was meant was, “I am suspicious of you,” and “I’ll let you go” when what was meant was “I am ready to go.” As my June spiritual practice, I’ll attend more closely to when I am saying one thing and meaning another; when I employ language to make things easier on myself at the expense of another. I will try to be more like Adam.

What are your language practices?

May 2010 Soul and Solace

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Acts of God

Hurricanes . . . Earthquakes . . . Floods . . . Tornadoes: such phenomena are classified as “Acts of God,” meaning they exist outside human control. Even oil spills caused by humans drilling holes in the earth’s crust receive the moniker “Act of God.”

My mom, lover of yellow and especially of yellow roses, died early this year. Our family wrote letters in which we chronicled her expressions of love for us and in which we penned our hopes for her. We read them in the open air, then burned them, giving her and our love for her into God’s hands. I scattered the letter ashes around the roots of our back-yard rosebushes. Come spring, one rose bush boasted an opulence of blooms—yellow. An “Act of God?”

I think so.

What, for you, are acts of God? love

April 2010 Soul and Solace

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Childhood Clover

Thomas Moore, in his book, Dark Nights of the Soul, encourages readers to practice a play activity from their childhood as a way to reconnect with their creativity. The suggestion intrigued and delighted me. What would I play?

Last night I strolled by a patch of blooming clovers and found my child self sitting crossed-legged among them, plucking stem after stem from the moist soil. With my thumbnail, I cut a tiny slit in a stem, and threaded a second stem through it until the blossom caught. I made an incision in the second stem, and in the third, and . . . until I held a ring of clover blossoms wide enough to reach around my neck. Sometimes I added bracelets, too, and emerged from the clover bedecked like a woodland princess. I was magic in my clover necklace: magic and majesty.

So this month I will find myself a field of clover blossoms where I’ll sit cross-legged and craft clover necklaces: one for me and one for each of my daughters. And I will be all the ages I have been since I first made a tiny slit in a clover stalk and threaded another through it.

How might you play? We’d love to hear about your experience! Share your thoughts with us.

March 2010 Soul and Solace

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In our yard one tree, autumn weary, dumps armloads of dead leaves onto our car windshield and carport. Its cousin, confident of spring, sprouts hearty buds from every branch. These trees trouble me with questions about letting go and about taking risks, wonderings about the stark beauty of grief and the fresh beauty of birth. This season (whatever the trees may think it to be!) I hope to attend with all my senses to the questions nature asks of me.

What do you find when you open the “book of nature?” Share your thoughts with us.

January 2010 Soul and Solace

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In Relation to…

At 6 a.m. on our twenty-ninth wedding anniversary, my husband awoke with severe abdominal pain. The pain didn’t let up all day, and at 11 p.m. I motored him to the emergency room where my daughter and I tried to get ourselves out of the way of the medical personnel as they strapped on blood pressure cuffs, slapped on EKG monitors, and slipped in IV needles. Then it was up to the ward for the night, into a room for a day, surgery the next, and a couple more days of hospital recouping. David occupied the unwieldy, technological marvel of a bed next to my neat little Murphy, but he wasn’t there. David was wandering somewhere in a land of pain and pain killers and he was out there alone. In that season, I needed my daughters and they me. We wondered together at the strangeness of it all; we held each other’s hands—literally and figuratively. We smarted at the bad news and hooted at the good. The experience altered our relations with one another and our relations with our singular souls. Relationships. Their tenuousness and unpredictability invite me into risk, into change, into growth.

I imagine holding my relationships in a cupped, open hand: cupped to feel their preciousness and their intimacy against my skin, open to allow them to breathe, to alter, and, if necessary, to drift away—then to return, if they wish, of their own volition. I find the practice more than a little scary . . . but it feels like love.

Share your thoughts.