Reconciliation
The cause of our problems is that we lost the connection face to face, faith to faith. Technology and modern life pulls our faces down and away from each other. Let's reconcile with ourselves, let's lift up our loving head and connect with the faces around us and with the faith of a "more beautiful world our hearts know is possible" (to quote the title of Charles Einsentein's book).
Contemplation
We are all the artists of this more beautiful world! Julia Cameron, in "Walking in This World: The Practical Art of Creativity", writes:
"In centuries past, art was made for the honor and glory of God. Viewed in this light, a career in the arts was a career of service, not egotism. There is a cue there for us.
The dedication of our work to a higher cause than our own self-promotion frees the work from preciousness. It becomes not about how good we are but about how good we can be in selfless service to something larger than ourselves. Sometimes we can dedicate a book to a person whom we wish to reach. Rilke’s classic letters to a young poet tapped his own inner reservoirs of wisdom and generosity.
Contemplating a piece of work, we do better to think Whom is this work for? Whom will it serve? rather than How will it serve me? Once we find a path for our work to be of service . . . then our work goes smoothly forward. It is not about “us” anymore. . .
We used to routinely call God “the creator.” We had a consciousness that our own creativity was a divine gift, an opening for God to work through us. When we enshrined ourselves and our individuality rather than our shared humanity at the center of our consciousness . . . we lost our proper understanding of art as service. We disenfranchised ourselves from our birthright as creators and we lost the understanding that art was an act of the soul and not of the ego. Whenever we take art back to the realm of the sacred, whenever we make it an act of service in any form . . . we again experience the ease of creative flow and the lessening of our creative doubts. When we ask to “listen,” we create works worthy of being heard and we ourselves hear the heartbeat of our common humanity, which is grounded in divinity. . . .
When we make our art in a spirit of service, it lightens the burden of our ego. It makes for clarity of focus, purity of intent, and follows a spiritual law that might be simply stated as “Form follows function.” When the “form” of our work is open to higher consciousness, its function is raised as well.
Art moves through us. . . . A piece of art may originate with us, but we originate somewhere larger ourselves. We are, each of us, more than we seem, more than the sum of our merely human components. There is a divine spark animating each of us, and that divine spark also animates our art."
Citation française
"L'art n'est pas une imitation mais une conquête."
André Suarès
