I asked the earth, I asked the sea and the deeps, among the living animals, the things that creep. I asked the winds that blow, I asked the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars, and to all things that stand at the doors of my flesh…My question was the gaze I turned to them. Their answer was their beauty.
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Paying attention is an act of love
In many respects, all we have in this life is our attention. We’re shaped by what we pay attention to. Our lives are the result of what we pay attention to.
My current favorite read is Eric Booth’s book, The Everyday Work of Art. Booth writes on page 61: “If our experience of being alive is the most valuable thing, then what we pay attention to becomes a critical choice, and developing how we notice becomes the most important thing we can do.”
In Waiting for God, the philosopher Simone Weil wrote that paying attention to another was an act of love.
Makes sense to me.
A sturdy, nurturing cauldron
Years ago, when I began teaching, I had a problem with structure. I wanted to have classes that were free and spontaneous, where everyone could express themselves. I experimented with having a class that was a “loose” as possible, but I quickly discovered that completely unstructured classes wouldn’t work. There’s something to be said for having a strong container.
It’s like that in our daily lives too. When we cook soup, we need a sturdy pot. If we raise a family, we need home that’s safe and has a good foundation.
We also need a strong, supportive container if we want to create or express something new.
A container is a foundation, something that holds us and holds our projects. We have lots of them–our homes are a container of course, but also our family relationships, friendships, and neighborhood and community groups. Our work is also a container. Strong, sturdy containers can nurture and support our creative inspirations. When we don’t have a container, we have no support.
In The Everyday Work of Art, Eric Booth writes, “The work of art is any process of becoming concentric with some inherent truth and pull things into some order; it is the process of organizing truth around a personal nucleus.”
In order to “pull things into order,” we need a container.
I like to think of containers as being a nurturing and inspiring. The things that form the container for my own creative work include browsing through art and design books, cafes, art festivals, and fun clothing shops, like (Anthropologie).
For creative work, our container is not only external, it’s also internal. When I attend to and nurture my creative experience.
Creating space for Spirit to speak
I’ve always been interested in the idea of creating space. For years I had a note attached to my computer that read, “Create Space for Spirit to Speak.” If we don’t have the space for it, we can’t do anything new or creative because our life is already filled up. A simple example is writing–one has to create space (physical, mental, emotional) in order to write something new. In graduate school I was fascinated by a book titled Free Spaces: The Source of Democratic Change in America. In their book, authors Sara Evans and Harry Boyte talk about how political movements are formed by having “free spaces” (voluntary associations from churches to social clubs to civic groups) where people can congregate, connect and talk with one another.
And while I’d been interested in how the creative process happens in everyday life for a long time, the research for a metaphor course I taught last spring opened up a whole new world for me around the subject of aesthetic space in everyday life. Aesthetic Space is a parallel world of deep beauty that is already there, but except for rare moments of heightened clarity, we don’t normally tap into it. The research for this course gave me both a language and a way of thinking about what I am now calling aesthetic space. (Aesthetic space somehow seems more appropriate right now than the term creative space. I have also sometimes used the term third space, which came to me by way of Charles Johnston in his book Necessary Wisdom: Meeting the Challenge of a New Cultural Maturity.)
From this research and an intense dream I had following the completion of the course (see below), I came to the realized that aesthetic space does not involve geography or linear time. Aesthetic space is another world that exists parallel to everyday life. To experience this world, we simply need to shift our focus. And I believe this is our future as humans–beauty is what we are evolving into. Social change isn’t going to happen by way of our intellects, trying to figure out a better solution for global warming and other vexing issues. (It was Einstein who said that our problems would not be solved with the level of thinking at which they were created. Carl Jung said something similar.) Beauty brings us into the heart, which has a deeper wisdom and knowing. I believe that beauty is our way toward a higher evolution.
There may be many reasons why a course on the “psychology of metaphor” opened up this new world for me. A metaphor links two unlike things together in a way where we are able to get a new perspective or understanding about the matter. When we are in aesthetic space, we naturally see those deeper connections and relationships between diverse things. And the mystery is–this aesthetic space where rich metaphors and connections live, is always available to us. From my perspective, it’s another world we just need to tap into.
A couple of months after the Metaphor class ended, I had a powerful dream. I was in the basement of the house I grew up in, I stepped out of the basement door into our backyard, and at that moment the dream was no longer ordinary. Magnificent, pulsing, glorious energy was vibrating in everything around me–the trees, plants, animals, but also the clothesline and houses. Every single thing was alive with beautiful dancing energy. I became lucid in the dream at that moment.
After a few moments of gazing in wonder at this sight, my body was pulled forcefully away toward distant forests and mountains. As my body got closer to the forest, I saw that the forest was actually a huge piece of cardboard (like a billboard). There was nothing BUT cardboard–I could see that the forest was actually a photograph on cardboard, but there was no end to it. I freaked out, because my body was being pulled at a tremendous speed and I was heading straight toward the cardboard–I was going to crash into it. And just at the last minute before I crashed, my body was zipped into a train tunnel that was going through the cardboard forest. After recovering from my near miss, I looked out the train window–the train was traveling through a tunnel, but there were some windows in the tunnel, and out the windows I could see the beautiful dancing energy again. The beautiful, vibrating life energy was still there–BEHIND the cardboard. The profound lesson of the dream was obvious to me–it was showing me that what we humans (like me) see when we look at anything is only the photograph on the cardboard. We don’t see the pulsing beauty that lies BEHIND the tree, or the house, or the grass, or the person. Our ordinary, everyday world is like living in a world of cardboard photographs. But there IS something more to see. We just need to wake up a little more to see it.
If you’re interested in exploring aesthetic space in more depth, check out my Creative Space and Metaphor class at Book Passage in Corte Madera on Saturday December 13th, from 10 am to 4 pm. Call Book Passage to sign up.
Mind-lessness brings beauty
Have You Ever Seen the Rain just played on my car radio. It reminds me of magic moments in singing gatherings—all of us belting this song out at the top of our lungs. I’ve experienced so many magic moments when I’ve sung and played music in a circle with others. And it’s interesting magic moments are always IN the moment. Magic (or we could say beauty) is never OUTSIDE of the present moment. Beauty isn’t found in the future. It’s RIGHT HERE, right now.
Beauty happens when we’re present, not when we’re planning ahead or thinking about something with our mind in some far-off place. It’s a mind-less place.
After having spent so many years in school developing my thinking abilities, it’s a challenge to let go of all that, be present, and let my heart lead the way. It’s really about trusting in life, because my heart is connected to the pulse of life. And my mind is definitely not. (In fact, my mind often gets me into messes that I then have to clean up.)
The more present I am in the moment, the more beauty I get to experience.