AncienTrails

Samain and the Summer’s End Moon

Friday gratefuls: Alan and Joan. Rabbi Jamie. Ginny. Nancy. Bright, bright Great Sol, a blue Colorado Sky, and Snow capped Lodgepole Branches. No myeloma. Yeah! All those gobulins in the green. Mary. A together gal. Sarah. Annie. A brain bleed. Jerry with foot surgery. BJ and Schecky. In their own personal Idaho. The Minnesota gang. The Ancient Brothers. Community. Burning away everything but love.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Mary

One brief shining: Mary said, yeah I’ll chase a little white ball in the grass for three or four holes then I start throwing it.

Back to the humanities for a second. See yesterday’s post. Even if the humanities get pushed out of higher education or so cut back they’re unrecognizable, they will never die. Ars longa, vita brevis. Art is long, life is short. Museums will hold the rich deposit of artists long dead and maintain their curatorial and conversatorial roles. Operas will be sung. Classic music will be played. Libraries will remain. Books will get written and read. Poetry, too. Jazz clubs will buzz with food and improvisation. Movies will get made.

There are even now artists painting. Sculptors sculpting. Writers writing. Composers composing. Off in some elementary school somewhere some boy has become enchanted with the cello, a girl with drumming. An old man hits the keyboard writing books. An old woman takes up her paint brush and begins. That video camera for Hanukah inspires a Cannes winner.

Art expresses the soul and cannot be banished or diminished. Sure, the Bonfire of the Vanities in Florence. The Nazis and their Fahrenheit 451 moments. Those dimwits banning books from public schools. Of course. But the great flood of human imagination and creativity runs over them, through them, in spite of them. When I feel moved to write or read, I do it. I’m a drop in that flood. Perhaps you are, too.

Art will out. To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park: Art will find a way.

Here’s a related subject. Or, perhaps the same subject. Revelation. Talked with Marilyn and Irv yesterday about revelation. Marilyn said she touched the Western Wall in Jerusalem and felt a shock, a moment of dissolution (my word). In that moment she realized this was her history, her place in the world.

What is the source of revelation? Is it the sacred? Whatever that is. Is it something beyond our ordinary perceptions momentarily revealed? Where is its locus? Out there? Or, in here? In the rock of the Western Wall or in Marilyn? In the great Bull Elk I saw in the rain or in me? Or is revelation like the Christian Orthodox icons? The Orthodox pray through the icon, not to it. Are these revelatory moments iconic, that is, a moment we can see through, or, maybe better, that sees through us?

The book God is Here by Toba Spitzer pushes us to find God or the divine or the sacred by employing different metaphors: water, voice, rock, fire, clouds. She roots her exploration first in the Jewish tradition. The pillar of fire and the pillar of smoke. Rock of ages. Let justice roll down like an ever flowing stream. Suggesting as she does that water or rock or fire as metaphor can help us experience different facets of God, that we’re not stuck with God as judge, God as patriarch, God as angry old man. Though those metaphors can be useful, too. Her point lies in broadening our palette of metaphors.

I think she’s provided us with tools for experiencing revelation. For opening ourselves to the world around us as a conduit for the sacred. Not about God. No, it’s about what God is about. We could say God is an artistic rendering of the power and the beauty and the mysterium tremendum that we too often, all too often lose in our pursuit of wealth or fame or in the dulling grind of daily life. God is a poetic expression of the jolt from the Western Wall, the strangeness and awe of seeing a Bull Elk watching me in the rain, the wonder revealed in the James Webb images, in the fantastic realms of quantum mechanics, of the love in a young girl’s heart. Or that jazz riff that grabbed your soul. Mary Oliver asking you, what will you do with your one wild and precious life?

Don’t you want to embrace the wonder?