The Path is Perfect

It’s Tuesday so that must mean the doors of Artsyville’s Glue It Tuesday salon have been flung open and it’s time to share.  Be sure to head over there and see what folks have been creating.

And I have to say I’ve got some pasty fingers here in my glue-io studio.

I’m double linking today because as with so many things in my life there are connections, often unexpected, which weave things together.  I delight when that happens – it makes everything seem shiny with serendipity, synchronicity and sweetness.

I’ve mentioned before that one of the practices I like doing most months is Lectio Divina. I’ve written more about it here (and here).  While the original concept involves working with a religious/spiritual passage, I’ve always chosen to work with a poem or a quote that grabs me by the heart and won’t let go until I work my way through it.

This month I didn’t immediately feel the strong attraction to a poem I usually do, but I don’t worry about that because I know something always shows up.   I could feel it out there whispering in the distance.  And show up it did on the Equinox, bringing a suitcase full of inspiration to unpack and leaving me breathless with excitement of the ways this is going to unfold.

But first baby steps. First opening things up a little.  First peeks, first tastes, first touches.

The quote is a rather long one, something written by Leonard Cohen, and it’s rocking my world.

“What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.”   Leonard Cohen

It’s like my head is exploding with a billion stars of creative ideas.  I want to create icons; I see a way back into working with the Moon Matroyshkas I envisioned and sketched years ago and couldn’t quite get right; I see how important it is to see everyone in their fullness – their sainthood – especially oneself – because once you embrace that you’re rid of the majority of unhelpful self-judgment that’s so easily then projected on to others.   I see costumes; delving into masks; fairytales.  Big stuff here, all unfolding from a simple quote.  Let the autumn fun begin!

Here’s my first exploration focused on the part of the quote that says “…I think it has something to do with the energy of love.  Contact with this energy results in the exercise of balance in the chaos of existence.”

I often use this face image as an iconic self-portrait – it’s a papercut I did many years ago.  And it feels like the perfect play on words to use this icon to begin playing around creating icons, as in those Byzantine representations of saints.  A way to explore how that energy of love opens us all up to sainthood, which if we leave behind unhelpful definitions, we can just understand to mean we are reflecting our divinity.  And who doesn’t want to live their life shining that?  (And as an aside, I think I’m totally falling in love with Klimt again.  Just cutting out little bits of mosaic patterns for my icon and gluing on bits of gold paper has me hyperventilating in joy.)

But even as I was thinking about this in general terms, it also occurred to me how this very path is related to this month’s Artists in Blogland Color This Quote invitation.  Do go see how others have interpreted this quote, and if you’re inspired add your own work.

The quote is “There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.”

All month long I’ve been thinking about labyrinths in regard to this.  That slow deliberate walking meditation following a path leading to the center.  But when the Cohen quote exploded for me, I saw the labyrinth as something a bit different.

What I’ve used in the piece below is the abstract rose shape that is my logo for my work as a Divine Information Streamer as a channel of The Sacred Rose Council.  Blown up the lines in my rose look like a path, but just like my life path, it wasn’t always easy or straightforward as the architecture of a labyrinth.  And yet my path has always led me forward into my heart. With the paradoxical irony that the only way into one’s heart is by following one’s heart.  There are no shortcuts because there is no other path – this is what I believe we are here to do.  And as Leonard Cohen says “…He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart.”

So there you have it.  A peek into my brain, my heart, and my glued art. 

Now tag, your it.  What’s rocking your world?  Have you glued anything lately?  Willing to entertain the possibility that we’re all saints in the making?   Happy with your path?  Looking for shortcuts?  Love Klimt?  Want to gild something? Do tell – you know I love to hear.