The Artist's Rule

Today I start a 12 week journey of contemplation and creation. I am using Christine Valters Paintner's book "The Artist's Rule: Nurturing your creative soul with monastic wisdom" as my guide. My intention over the next few weeks is to continue to foster the creativity that has welled up inside me over the past year and align it with my deeper, truer self who is intimately intertwined with the divine....and by doing so explore even more what that means to me...to be intertwined with the divine and to create from that place.

This morning's period of contemplation has me rolling two phrases over in my being:

"revealing new"
​and
"behold I make all things new"

Obviously the "new" is the piece that connects the two. But there is the "revealing" versus "making." Creating a distinction between the two seems important to me as I very much live in a period of deep transformation in which it feels important to distinguish how much is being revealed - the veils falling away - and how much is being created - being shaped like clay at the potter's wheel.

The way that I feel this distinction in my life is by feeling into how engaged I may be co-creatively in the process. When things are revealed, I feel like a more passive participant who just needs to hold on to dear life when the mechanizations of reality are revealed. When there is a "making new" process happening it feels more like my deeper self's response to what has been revealed and this feels more co-creative. Yes, I may be clay being shaped by "defter hands than mine", but as the clay, I am still charged with the task of keeping some structure and form during the shaping process.

And what becomes my focus during this reshaping is critical. If I stay focused on wonder, awe, love, compassion it feels like my clay is more firm (yet pliable) in a way that can allow me to become a beautiful vase. But if I go into fear, confusion, anxiety I become a clumpy mess on the potter's wheel (sometimes this is necessary and even okay...we all have periods where we need to return to the beginning to be reshaped again).

This week I am also exploring the earth element through a contemplative art class and because I tend to shy away from structure and tend to be more attracted to flow, change, more mutable elements, I am playing with the mutability of form. Change is the only constant and so how we respond to, foster, actively participate in that change is central to our spiritual practice (and very relevant to "life in transition" which, well, hate to break it to you, but we never get out of...). My practice is how to love form and how to love the changes in form that take place on a daily basis in my life. How do I respond to these changes - to what is revealed by these changes or what is "made new" by these changes?

I look forward to sharing with you my explorations as I travel deeper into this spiritual and creative process/practice.