The fields are fallow and soon will be frozen.
And that is how Winter feels and that is how winter is. Especially if your ancient furnace that your mother installed in 1972 falters and fails.
The house inside temp drops rapidly to 40 degrees and we are left to sit and shiver and drink lots of hot tea while wrapped in blankets and wearing jackets and knitted caps inside the house.
Can you get your mind around that?? It happened during the PATRIOTS game last Sunday and was finally over today on the Feast of Saint Andrew.
A miraculous event unfolds when we throw the lead of our personal story into the transformative flames of creativity.
Our hardship is transmuted into something golden. With that gold we heal ourselves and redeem the world. As with any spiritual practice, this creative alchemy requires a leap of faith.
When we show up to make art--
we need to first get still enough to hear what wants to be expressed through us, and then we need to step out of the way and let it. We must be willing to abide in a space of not knowing before we can settle into knowing.
Such a space is sacred. It is liminal, and it’s numinous. It is frightening and enlivening. It demands no less than everything, and it gives back tenfold.
And that is how Winter feels and that is how winter is. Especially if your ancient furnace that your mother installed in 1972 falters and fails.
The house inside temp drops rapidly to 40 degrees and we are left to sit and shiver and drink lots of hot tea while wrapped in blankets and wearing jackets and knitted caps inside the house.
Can you get your mind around that?? It happened during the PATRIOTS game last Sunday and was finally over today on the Feast of Saint Andrew.
A miraculous event unfolds when we throw the lead of our personal story into the transformative flames of creativity.
Our hardship is transmuted into something golden. With that gold we heal ourselves and redeem the world. As with any spiritual practice, this creative alchemy requires a leap of faith.
When we show up to make art--
we need to first get still enough to hear what wants to be expressed through us, and then we need to step out of the way and let it. We must be willing to abide in a space of not knowing before we can settle into knowing.
Such a space is sacred. It is liminal, and it’s numinous. It is frightening and enlivening. It demands no less than everything, and it gives back tenfold.
The muse rarely behaves the way we would like her to, and yet every artist knows she cannot be controlled. Artistic self-expression necessitates periods of quietude in which it appears that nothing is happening.
Like a tree in winter whose roots are doing important work deep inside the dark earth, the creative process needs fallow time.
We have to incubate inspiration. We need empty spaces for musing and preparing, experimenting and reflecting. Society does not value its artists, partly because of the apparent lack of productivity that comes with the creative life.
Art begins with receptivity.
Every artist, in a way, is a mystic and a political creature. Making art can be a subversive act, an act of resistance against the deadening lure of consumption, an act of unbridled peacemaking disguised as a poem or a song or an abstract rendering of an aspen leaf swirling in a stream.
Like a tree in winter whose roots are doing important work deep inside the dark earth, the creative process needs fallow time.
We have to incubate inspiration. We need empty spaces for musing and preparing, experimenting and reflecting. Society does not value its artists, partly because of the apparent lack of productivity that comes with the creative life.
Art begins with receptivity.
Every artist, in a way, is a mystic and a political creature. Making art can be a subversive act, an act of resistance against the deadening lure of consumption, an act of unbridled peacemaking disguised as a poem or a song or an abstract rendering of an aspen leaf swirling in a stream.
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