Crack yourself open!
What use is it to continue to hide
behind your facades and roles?
Why waste your energy playing games?
Isn’t it time to cry your tears;
to shout your passion;
to dance like Zorba;
and to let your soul touch
the Soul of the world?
The new work of art does not consist of
making a living or producing an objet d'art or in self-therapy, but in finding a new soul.
The new era of spiritual creativity...and soul-making.
In embracing creativity as a spiritual practice, we commend ourselves into the Creator's
hands, knowing that our goal is to disappear. And when we do, we become one with
all creation. The divine spirit dances us, it plays its music through us. We become the
instrument through which the divine flows like a river. When your Creative Self calls,
go with it. It is God speaking. Listen to your Creative Conscience, the voice of the
divine guiding you each day. It resides in your heart: your true temple.
~ Lucia Capacchione in THE SOUL OF CREATIVITY, ed. by Tona P. Myers
The Great Creator lives within each of us. All of us contain a divine, expressive spark,
a creative candle intended to light our path and that of others. We are shiny, not
tarnished; large, not small; beautiful, not damaged– although we may be ignorant of
our grace, power, and dignity. The human being, by definition, is a creative being.
Practicing our creativity is healing. The more we ground it and regularly access it, the
better off we are. The "healthier" we are. Creative change begins in the heart. When
we start within ourselves and move outward, expressing what we love and what we
value, life gets better, we feel better, and the world gets healthier too.
When imagination is allowed to move to deep places, the sacred is revealed. The more
different kinds of thoughts we experience around a thing and the deeper our reflections
go as we are arrested by its artfulness, the more fully its sacredness can emerge.
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. The mind that
responds to the intellectual and spiritual values that lie hidden in a poem, a painting, or
a piece of music, discovers a spiritual vitality that lifts it above itself, takes it out of
itself, and makes it present to itself on a level of being that it did not know it could ever
achieve.
~ Thomas Merton in A THOMAS MERTON READER ed. by Thomas P. McDonnell
Any work of art is ultimately an entry-point into the transcendent, revelatory of not
only subtle, but celestial beauty and power; and if the given work is not so, it cannot
properly be called art at all...All works of art, in other words, are religious, sacred, or
nothing.
A work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without an answer,
provokes a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself.
~ Michel Foucault, as quoted in ART AS A WAY OF LIFE ed. by Roderick MacIver
A contemplative practice is any act, habitually entered into with your whole heart, as a way of awakening, deepening, and sustaining a contemplative experience of the inherent holiness of the present moment. The critical factor is not so much what the practice is in its externals as the extent to which the practice incarnates an utterly sincere stance of awakening and surrendering to the Godly nature of the present moment.
In what sense can individual strands be torn from the one fabric of reality and be considered complete? My well-being will come only in relationship to our well-being and the well-being of all things. We are being invited to seek a new salvation. It will come through and with one another, not in separation from one another.
