May 10

It’s a rather funny thing to say that I do not know where this retrospective journey is leading. After all, here I am, and it’s leading me to where I am right now. Could it somehow be leading me to a different now?

2020

“Often I think I
should find You
within myself,
but it isn’t so:
only when I let
go of myself
with all my
wants and needs,
for the sake of
Your love, do I
find You, for
in Your love You
go completely
outside Yourself
to find me.
—Meister Eckhart’s Book of the Heart by Jon M. Sweeney & Mark S. Burrows, p. 52

2019

“The Shekinah is the indwelling feminine presence of the Divine. According to the ancient teachings, she resides in exile during the rest of the week, and on Shabbat [the Sabbath] she comes home. It is our task to receive her. … Shekinah is about immanence, infusing all matter and all spirit with her glory. She is the shattering of the One into the blessed pandemonium of the many. She pours and spills and overflows into All That Is. She is unbounded and uncontrollable.” —Mirabai Starr, Wild Mercy

Mirabai continues, “I’m not knocking Oneness. … I have spent my whole life engaged in a perpetual dance of longing and union, bowing down under the weight of yearning for the Beloved and rising into the formlessness of the Divine embrace… I do not perceive this love dance as a malady to be cured but rather as an opportunity to celebrate the terrible beauty of the human condition. The fire of our desire melts the boundaries that divide us from our source, and we surge back home.”

“For the raindrop, joy is entering the river.” —Ghalib

2018

I’ve been trying (without success) to find the Wendell Berry poem from one of his ‘Sabbaths’ anthologies that inspired this image.

The page was created by the five sets of hands in my class during the Grunewald Guild’s Fall Arts 2017. I love that community exercise because it offers practice in listening and responding to the creative marks of an Other.

I would love your company during my summer class, Creative & Contemplative Journaling, July 22-28, 2018.

2017

“The Risen Christ is a great big yes to everything (see 2 Corinthians 1:19), even early, incomplete stages. The Risen Christ is still and forever the wounded Jesus—and yet now so much more. Your ordinary life and temperament are not destroyed or rejected, but instead, ‘This perishable nature will put on imperishability, and this mortal body will put on immortality’ (1 Corinthians 15: 52-54)—one including the other, not one in place of the other.” ~Richard Rohr Daily Meditation

So… heaven includes earth, yes somehow includes no, and just yesterday, an artist showed me that music includes feedback.

The first image is one of my pieces in the Guild’s 2017 Traveling Art Exhibit. The second is an invitation for all of us to dance in the garden… indeed a place to get messy this time of year.

“Seven Years of Wonder” is a daily look back at my creative journaling posts since 2014. I began this journey on Feb. 11, 2021, and hope to continue through Feb. 10, 2022. What am I learning about my art and faith journey thus far? What has remained constant? Where have I been changed? How is this impacting present and future art-making?

A deep bow of gratitude to you for keeping me company on this journey.