Surface Tension

"Surface Tension" - Lily Pads from the Atlanta Botanical Gardens 2011

In today's digital art : Surface Tension, I notice how the lily pads are clearly the subject. They are on the surface, after all. But they would be uninteresting without the royal blue of the sky and opalescent clouds floating behind them. Yet even these are actually indirect clues to a mysterious depth that lies beneath. It can be very hard to even recognize that there is something OTHER than the surface.

This week echoed the subject of the last post, that of trying to hear and heed the spirit within when so much good sense is shouting even from within your own head. In early 2011 I took on newsletter duties for our local artist group. They needed the service and I had the skill set to deliver it. It offered the opportunity to learn a new piece of software, InDesign, and much to my surprise it invigorated the membership to a shocking degree. Not a meeting goes by that several people don't rave about how good the newsletter is, how they look forward to receiving it each month. I loved doing it, though it was a frightful amount of work, 12-15 hours on each monthly issue.

I accepted the duties for 2012 of course, but this week I announced to the board that I would be trimming back on the content. By the end of the year the membership would be accustomed to a simpler document that most anyone could replicate in Word or Front Page or whatever they wanted to use. I would not be continuing these duties in 2013, nor did I want to be on the nominating committee for next year's officers.

Why? Was it something they said? No. It's just that club concerns (there have been others) have filled so much of my thoughts, even the little bits between tasks, that I have not spared enough thought for painting or any creative endeavor. I have nothing at all to present at the member show-and-tell, nothing for the fall show. I am sorely missing the creative challenge and personal development. Why did I allow myself to take this side road? Because I was being useful, and that felt good. It fed the lizard, the one who worries constantly that if one is not delivering quantifiable value to an audience then you do not deserve your living. Being useful here justified myself as a citizen of the community. This 'useful' tank has been hanging on empty for a long time. What I learned, finally, is that the creative tank needs to be refilled even more than the useful tank. I used to be able to fill both from my job. For a while now it's been neither. For a while I chose to fill 'useful'. It fed the ego, but it didn't feed the spirit. Now I know the importance of creative activity for my vitality.

You can see in this week's decision the influence of the previous two posts: The perennially human quest for the Grail and Joel Osteen's reminder: You cannot please everyone. Keep your focus on pleasing God.

On the Trail of the Holy Grail

Today this post from Joel Osteen:

Life is too short to spend it trying to keep others happy. You cannot please everyone. Keep your focus on pleasing God.

This seems obvious, but it’s much harder to do than it sounds. In fact, it’s always been hard to do.  Joseph Campbell found that most cultures have a myth concerning the search for something holy and nearly impossible to attain.  That ‘thing’ is self-realization, or in biblical terms, atonement with God. The King Arthur legends called this the Holy Grail.

The subtle knife edge that we all tread in our Grail quest, divides what society tells us we should do, and our sense of what is right or good.  As in the Grail legends, we fail to attain our ‘wholeness’ or 'atonement' when we fail to heed the quiet call of the spirit. In fact, the legends include a period of wandering in a vast wasteland. This is akin to our decades of life spent doing what is expected of us in life and work.

Knights on the Grail quest were both heroic and flawed individuals engaged in a personal spiritual journey. In this way they represent any one of us who has undertaken a lifetime of spiritual questing. The call of peer pressure, societal norms, expected behavior...it’s all much louder than the spirit within. This is due to the lizard brain, that small program in charge of fight or flight. The Lizard perceives that blending into society is the surest way to survive, so it directs all choices along those lines. Any deviation from the 'safe' course, triggers the fear response. Quite a bit of Lizard control is required to be a 'rugged individualist' or 'to march to your own drummer.' It's lonely out there, dangerous, exposed, but on that cold, damp wind, is the scent of the Holy Grail.