Take Your Busy Heart to the Forest

.

Take your busy heart to the art museum and the

chamber of commerce

but take it also to the forest.

The song you heard singing in the leaf when you

were a child

is singing still.

.

~ Mary Oliver

from Swan

Search, struggle, trial and error

“The best painters have arrived at their art after long search and struggle, trial and error, and considerable thought and introspection----- and, incidentally after having painted hundreds of pictures.” 

Edward Betts

I have been struggling lately to continue doing any art.  This is a familiar struggle, I revisit it at least once a year!  Usually it involves, as it currently does, a questioning of meaning.  For example, 'what is meaningful about art?, why create it?'  All important questions to ask myself I find.  I know enough to not let any of this struggle stop me from continuing to draw.  I also know that eventually I will get back to experiencing that I do art simply and totally for the love of art.....not to get love.  I do art for the happiness and discipline it brings.  For the continued heart opening that comes with persistence.

Lightly

"Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Even though you're feeling deeply, lightly let things happen, and lightly cope with them on tiptoes and with no luggage, completely unencumbered". - Aldous Huxley

I found this poem to be very inspiring today.

Wishing you all a peaceful and light filled New Year

We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden.

"Now I was suddenly made aware of another world of beauty and mystery such as I had never imagined to exist, except in poetry...I experienced an overwhelming emotion in the presence of nature, especially at evening. It began to wear a kind of sacramental character for me. I approached it with a sense of almost religious awe, and in the hush which comes before sunset, I felt again the presence of an unfathomable mystery. The song of the birds, the shapes of the trees, the colors of the sunset, were so many signs of this presence, which seemed to be drawing me to itself. " - Bede Griffiths

What moves the Heart?

I have been deeply moved by a number of stories in the news.  Stories of people being heart moved to action.  There was the story of Jessie a teen girl who used the money she had saved up to buy a car to help a badly hurt dog.    Another amazing story about a maintenance worker who while emptying the trash found Patrick, a starved and barely alive dog and found help.  A story about a wolf with neurological damage and people who helped her.
One of the questions I get asked a lot is what makes art...art?  The answer for me, is Love.  Whenever any of us truly Love then whatever we are doing becomes Art.  And this is art that heals....heals who see it, touch it, hear it.  Each of us have a sacred art and when we perform that art the heart of all is moved.  What is your sacred art?