Light Leaking From Behind The Veil

It is dark and quiet.  I seem to always be up way before light.  I think about my neighborhood and think of the miracle that my neighbors are all unconscious together.  I look out toward the woods and see nothing even though there are trees within a few feet of me and I am thankful for light and I wonder at His first thought of light and did He smile?  Classes begin today and I think of all those empty neurons in my student’s brains and wonder at what I might say or do to fill them up and what an empty and full neuron might look like.  I imagine it unbuckling its belt and stretching out to relax after a full meal of art class.  I love sitting alone with God, experiencing life in a way that my senses are wholly inadequate for.  Our senses will prove to us there is a God (Romans 1:20) but Someone else is needed to know Him—the Holy Spirit.  I like that name Holy Spirit, makes me marvel with imagination.  It is dark and quiet and my imagination is filled with light leaking from behind The Veil. 

Someone Knows Your Absorption Rate

There is a slow rain on this morning.  I need a slow rain.  My University officially starts today; meetings, classes begin Tuesday.  I always find it difficult to sleep before school starts; angsts of knowing I had better get it right.  Professor means someone who professes the truth, a serious mandate.  One truth I always start with is not allowing the seriousness of the mandate to result in taking myself too seriously.  “All truth is…” not mine but because of Unfathomable Kindness, it is shared with me and that sharing process always reminds me of the kindness of a slow rain—getting what I need in amounts I can absorb. 

    

In, Out, And Back In the Group

There is no doubt that young people today are devoted to popular culture and to devices that proclaim and spread it.  Their character is modeled by not being out of character with culture.  The driving force of this culture is the creative urge, to be creatively unique in your assimilations.  This is a very difficult thing, uniqueness in the act of integrating absorption.  But it is a powerful force for creative expression, expressing one's uniqueness while desperately seeking to fit in requires a sophisticated level of creativity.  As an art teacher, it is important to realize the truths of all this because the ability to make art is dependent upon the courage to be you, to live, think and be only and completely you.  Being you always places you outside the model of the group, and eventually outside the group, you the individual doesn’t fit the template.  But only you the individual is capable of conceiving and making art that only you can make, and that art is work that no other human can make or even conceive of.  Practiced long enough this allows, with maturity, true art to be made.  I have found one great truth in all of this; the call of Christ into the arts is the sincerest path through the group to the studio—and then back into the group as His ambassador. 

Altar and land art building in Colorado years ago. 

How To Get Self

A body and mind is a gift of unfathomable generosity.  By them, we are allowed the full measure of access to the experiences of life.  No one ever gives his or her self, selfhood, it is the ultimate gift given to us.  I have found that the only true way to experience being a human being is to constantly challenge your body and mind to live at their fullest, for it is not the body or mind that is you but those are only wonderful tools to being fully you.  You, that self, are a free entity, trapped seemingly in a body, but not the body.  It is that self that God yearns to guide, to commune with, to instruct, to be in relationship with and it is the body and mind that gives animation to that relationship which in turn sets you free from the enslavement to the body that we are currently, but not eternally, trapped in.  The body has access to the mind and continually tries to sway it to get its way.  However, the body is incapable of being lord over you or even it. The body is desperately self-serving and often seeks pleasure as its ultimate goal.  Often the self is given over to the body and lives out the lordship of the body.  However, the self is truly still in charge and must accept that abdication to the body as self-induced.  It is the ultimate slavery, slavery to the body that houses the ultimate gift, selfhood.  I have found nothing nor no one that can fully cast off the power of the body to sway the mind and enslave the self than Actually God Himself.  In that is salvation of the lower course that is part of The Salvation of the eternal course.  

Time Heals All Wounds.  A self-portrait
1000 pounds of raw clay.

  

  

The Champs Manager Is My Father

There was a great storm last night, pouring rain, lightning and thunder, an angry river falling from the sky.  My thoughts on storms are rarely allowed to enjoy the storm and the massive power it displays.  Mainly I am concerned about my little corner of Countrywood and Moorewood, our trees and the little structure we call home.  It is not that this little corner is any different than any other small square of the great earth and the greater cosmos but only that it is home.  Twenty-two years we have cultivated it, worked on it, and tried to improve it.  We lived and laughed, experienced death and sorrow, raised children, rocked grandchildren, grown old—grown tired.  When a storm hits I feel like we are up against it, that it is us verse it, and I am the one called from the corner of “us” to center ring with “it.”  We have survived one flood and two tornados here, one coming so close that it destroyed my studio and took out several large trees in our yard so I know a little about going a few rounds with a storm.  All this comes to mind because yesterday we had a new roof put on our home and last night we were high and dry.  That round went to me but I know I am always fighting the champ.  The good news, the champs Manager is my Father—I like my odds!!!   

Images from Ireland.