Remembering one of my art mentors today!

In college, i lived with an amazing Jewish artist from Argentina, Julio. In addition to just enjoying learning life from Julio, I also sort of became part of his creative family. We did all sorts of creative workshops together, and arts gathering at his amazing art house he made in Virginia. I lived in this arthouse for many years. It literally had a tree growing through the center! But more importantly he taught me to see the symbolic dimension of things around me. To not settle for the surface of things-“to see through” as he used to put it.

Julio taught me to see the symbolic level of things—the collage in everything. Every person can teach you things. He used to bring a little frame to the table and lay it down, and ask me where the composition was in the grain of wood on the table. He helped me find the art dimension in things, even once, putting a glass log he made in a normal stack of wood until i noticed the anamoly. He used to say you have to hunt art like a tiger in all that is around you. I still appreciate what he imparted to me. How to see art all around us in everything!

He has huge mobile sculpture works all over the east coast (and some in Argentina), and a great abstract Noah’s Ark piece as a permanent installation at a school. Interactive glass animals, which kids can spin around and interact with the ancient story, be active interpreters in the old tales etc. That was his way of teaching.

Great artist, as I said. At the end of his life he was working mostly with collage. We would look at his collages for hours, until i could see them. Some were found objects, he simply saw and framed, and rescued from the trash, so we could see, discover for ourselves, it’s inner potential treasure, as he would put it.

Trash is always potential treasure if seen well, as we all are. His was a redemptive view. Or, a vision of life which included hope for wholeness, if we could engage enough to discover it, call it forth by seeing it well, and become more ourselves in the process. “You can only see something, to the degree you are willing to engage and make it what it is.” That’s one i wrote down. “Everything implies an inner narrative!” was another! Some meaningful things stick with you.

But all of his art, required the viewer to make the imaginative leap of associations and to create or find, or become, or at best, be transformed by the inner narrative of the art.

His art forced engagement to know. “To discover life around us, we must engage actively in resurrection!” Was one way he put it. I still like the idea of resurrecting people, places and things around me, as part of my active stewardship or repairing or reconciling things to themselves. Making things more whole.

I still like collage and abstract art for that reason—it forces the viewer to engage their imagination in order to know and encounter the art. At it’s best, abstract art or collage like Miro’s, or Julio’s, teach us to find treasure all around us, even in the grain of a table, to find and form the narrative in collaboration with the art, and every day life. It engages our imagination as we encounter the art. We become collaborators in seeing! That’s one thing Julio taught me.

God set up the world to be collaborated with, into fruition. Part of stewardship is a active creative stance towards what’s or who is around us! To dance with things in order to bring them forth! To deeply encounter other in order to activate us both!

And, I still hear Julio’s voice offering me life advice: “You have too much balloon and not enough potato.” Although, i think I’ve come to balance the two better at this stage of my life. Thankful for older folks who took the time to invest in my heart and imagination over the years, and helped me see the loving layers of things.

When i did his funeral, i felt his mantel settle on my shoulders! Thanks for being generous with sight and heart..

He died of a brain tumor. Just weeks beforehand, he was making abstract sketches based on the X-rays of the tumor. That’s someone who can see the art in things! Thanks for teaching me that Julio. I still see art everywhere! Julio was one of my art parents. Just honoring him today, with no agenda but Love.

Honor your art parents, so that the creative flow may go well with you!

A mutually encouraging couple is powerful!

Encouragement between partners brings and bridges in, Love’s rain and reign.
Choose to encourage each other as a spiritual practice, or practical practice!

Try to see and name the best of one another daily, until it is amplified into being! See the other as their best poem, and try to pronounce that! Help co-borth it into existence! Use your words and attitude like that-to birth the best of one another into shining! That’s what we can give one another! And a couple which does that, will keep glowing over time!

Edification of others, is often for our own good, but it makes a better representation of God in the end-which may be one of the main points of marriage, collaborations, alliances, or life in general. In our marriage and collaboration of becoming, my wife and I try to practice encouraging each other—not always easy—as we know one another’s shadows well, and can easily articulate them.

But when we do instead, choose to name His opinion of one another, or at least seek to name it from the heart of Love, something bigger than us shines! A better art, steps forth! A better representation of us both!

I also think, actively encouraging one another is more creative and courageous than pointing out flaws! Take more courage to be, to en-courage another! And it brings us all towards our real names. Let’s build one another up, rather than tear one another down! For the sake of at least being good art!

God is my drug!

God, you are my qualude, my cocaine, Your Love’s my drug of choice-
my way to get high…
and when we do,
i just want to love those next to You
i want to feed the poor and help those in need
to learn true need; i want to name each creature in love
and help them get high in You!
You are my drug Lord.
You are the thing i want pulsing through me at night.
You are the one I’ve chosen to be possessed by.
And when i do, i just want to love those next to You.
And love all the difficult things you do, like me.
Pump yourself through me until you are my very blood.
Then shoot me up until i am all the way in your Arm God.
When I’m high with You
all i want to do
is be just like Thee! Shoot me up Lord until it’s true-
until i run blue in your forever Blood, my Love!
So keep me high in You Lord. So we can fly!
Lord I’m High on you again each evening!
Let’s go low in Love again friend
Pump yourself into all the veins of our hearts Lord!
Until we are renewed in the needle of You, my God!
Pump us through Your Veins until we know our true names!
We too, want to be Your drug of choice!

What are the symbols of your life?

My new lead question in counseling: what would you say were the four major symbols of your life. If you were a novel, what would be the themes and recurring symbolic images?

This tends to lead to thinking about your whole narrative and what images are associated with your core identity! Reconciling and integrating identity is my passion!

So far, this question has led to great conversations! Thinking of the major symbols of our lives helps us piece together our stories!

Sometimes, i ask people to paint the images, or just sketch them; others times to journal them, or write a poem. Regardless it’s about gathering our symbols into one story—it’s about integrating our tales! What symbols have repeated throughout your life since childhood? Good way to find our true stories! Each of us, such great stories worth gathering and editing forever!

Finding The Day:
When I was a kid, my mom would often wake me up with this verse: “This is the day which the Lord has made, I will rejoice and be glad in it.”

But it didn’t always feel like the day of the Lord to me. I never loved early mornings which school required, I was an artist, and even then, stayed up late at night. It took me many years, to realize that we actually had to find and faith our way into “the day of the Lord.” To actively position ourselves towards the Day of The Lord.

It’s certainly there, but takes a little work on our part to find it, and live in and from it daily. Yet, it is still my practice to find “that Day, each day, in my days.”

Finding the Lord’s Day within our days is a spiritual practice. Everyday. This is the Day that the Lord has made, i will first find it, and enter into it, and then find myself rejoicing in it! It is a spiritual discipline to find the Lord’s Day everyday.

To pray our way into The Day, to turn towards it, makes ours meaningful! And the Day is always in our midst, but sometimes we must discipline ourselves to find its already dawning.

Spirituality is not passive, and we can choose to accept our own version of each day, but there is another Day just behind the curtain, which helps our’s shine. Try to find the backdrop which puts our own days in spiritual relief, that’s the practice. So that our daily lives become an active part of our spiritualities.

I think we wake up near the Day, or even in the midst of The Day, but have a part in actively placing ourselves in an orientation to enter into that Day experientially or existentially. When we do, our own hours and activities are contextualized in a long stream of meaningful days.

I’m still thankful for my mom telling me The Day was indeed there; but have had to learn how to find it each day.

Hope that you are finding The Day, within your days, today friends! And then, rejoicing in it!

Here’s a Celtic woman, Rosalia Castro, encounter of european bells, near the turn of the century. I love the Spanish mystics! Not unlike my own heart’s! I love bells, i love europe, and echoes teach still even back into where they first rang!

I recorded bells for over a year from our single window in Antwerp, it’s an ongoing project to record bells at all times of day in europe. Let you know when it rings forth! Or when the bell tolls on that project!

Bells fascinate me! She seems to understand them well! And what they meant! Born in Santiago de Compostela she had that celtic mystical “porous vision”, as some have described it. Interesting when she turns it to what the sound of old bells (a more relatively modern metaphor) carry!

Here’s a nice line from her turn of the century poem:

Of Europe, she wrote…

“Should her bells become forever mute
what sadness in the air and sky!
what silence in the churches!!
what wonder among the dead.”

In Spanish it reads:

Si por siempre enmudecieran,
que tristeza en el aire y en el cielo!
que silencio en las iglesias!!
que extraneza entre los muertos.

The sadness of bells no longer ringing! So glad they still chime from time to time! Let’s keep listening to the bells in the old world friends. They haven’t stopped ringing yet! I’ll do a reading from some of this lovely poet’s works soon! I’m glad someone beheld the bells! If they stop chiming, we may all be in trouble!

The Snow, in the end
fell from a Hand.
And we were satisfied
like kids again, by it’s sheer wonder.
We looked up
and manna like honey
filled our open mouths.
Each flake, like words we
could never speak.
Like baby birds wait, meekly
for worms at night…
trusting their parents in dark’s rustle
to feed them until they too
can fly, gliding gracefully into the glistening wonder of snow.

Came across a woman celtic (Galician) mystic who meditated on the bells of europe!

I recorded bells for over a year from our single window in Antwerp, it’s an ongoing project to record bells at all times of day in europe. Let you know when it rings forth! Or when the bell tolls!

Bells fascinate me! She seems to understand them well! And what they meant! Born in Santiago de Compostela she had that celtic mystical “porous vision”, as some have described it. Interesting when she turns it to what the sound of old bells (a more modern metaphor) carry!
Here’s a nice line from her turn of the century poem:

Of Europe, she wrote…

“Should her bells become forever mute
what sadness in the air and sky!
what silence in the churches!!
what wonder among the dead.”

In Spanish it reads:

Si por siempre enmudecieran,
que tristeza en el aire y en el cielo!
que silencio en las iglesias!!
que extraneza entre los muertos.

The sadness of bells no longer ringing! So glad they still chime from time to time! Let’s keep listening to the bells in the old world friends. They haven’t stopped ringing yet! I’ll do a reading from some of this lovely poet’s works soon! I’m glad someone beheld the bells! If they stop chiming, we may be in trouble!

The bible as mystery novel:

I love how St Paul called things “mysteries”—there is the mystery of marriage (which indeed is a mystery!), the mystery of the gospel itself, and to Timothy, the “mystery of Godliness”, or living well, which is based on Jesus having actually incarnated, and wanting to inside of us, which produces the mystery of godliness in us.

I like life being a series of unpacking or incarnationally solving or embodying mysteries. Then the bible becomes more a mystery novel.

It is like Paul invites us to know or enter the mysteries as well, and sometimes explains them, as he did in Timothy—pursue righteousness, flee the ways of death which include….Nice of him to break it down for us, while inviting us into the mysteries. Some people don’t like mystery novels. I think they are more honest to how life actually is.

The concept of the power of words in Hebrew versus Greek thought. To reclaim the power of the word is desperately needed in our times. I’m looking for models in history of cultures which valued the power of words!

Spoken words especially had great power in native cultures as well; but specifically in Jewish culture. Words had power. Curses and blessings are based on this power. Word is life. Has charge. The potency of words has been a bit lost in our times. We use language rather than embody it. Buber conversely speaks of the two orientations towards Reality as Word phrases! Something we speak! Make sense that Martin Buber the great 20th C Jewish thinker, used language itself as his core metaphor of how to live well!

His words “did things to people”—J Knox

Thinking about the power of words today! Some cultures value them more than others—the inner power of words. Native Americans tend to, as did the Jews—the power of language to create. So it makes sense, with Buber that his two basic life orientations were how we spoke. Speaking creates things in others. Words carry the power of life and death—either curses or blessings are spoken daily to and from us.

“‘Careful with fire,’ is good advice we know,
Careful with words,’ is ten times doubly so.”, as the saying goes…

In certain cultures (lots of indigenous cultures, and the Jewish culture as well), words were seen as activators, creative life force, something which call forth either death or life in things and others. Covenants themselves are of course lodged in words. In ours at times, we often just use language to do things, or don’t consider what life is contained in its syllables and cadences, much less it’s tone.

When St John called Jesus The Word he was tying together both greek and hebrew concepts of God. But it is interesting, that He called Jesus The Living Word become flesh!

One of my spiritual mentors said: be careful, especially as you have a gift with words, not to use, but rather choose your words. Language intrinsically has a gift of life or death. Choose life, hourly with your words.

Or as William Barclay points out about the power of words in Jewish culture:

To the Jew a word was far more than a mere sound; it was something which had an independent existence and which actually did things. As Professor John Paterson has put it: “The spoken word to the Hebrew was fearfully alive…. It was a unit of energy charged with power. It flies like a bullet to its billet.” For that very reason the Hebrew was sparing of words. Hebrew speech has fewer than 10,000; Greek speech has 200,000.