Spring Waxing Bee Hiving Moon
Two tours today, 2nd graders at 10:00 am and a group of seniors from Minnetonka at 1:30. I took the kids through a mysteries of the ancient world tour. I love 2nd graders. They’re eager, uncensored, fun and often bright. We learned how sculptures lose things that stick out, why the chinese used copper and tin for weapons, that folks have been fighting in Iraq for a really long time and that an artist 20,000 years ago made a small stone sculpture we could recognize today.
With the seniors we toured Titian, going over, once again, the splendid century, filled with wealth and spices and great artists. We wandered among these great stories, the Christ child, the Three Kings, the bella donna’s, the courtesan count, the transformation of actaeon into a stag and callisto into a bear. The museum literally brings the world to us and allows those of who guide there to travel over it ever time we visit. Today, for example, we went to China, Greece, Iraq, France, Mexico and Venice. Plus Mexico and, by extension, Italy, Israel and Cyprus. Not bad for a day’s work.
This work is such a gift, a license to steal glances at objects made by some of the world’s great geniuses: Goya, Rembrandt, Titian, El Greco, Bassano, Renoir, Gaugin, Monet, Van Gogh, Rodin. The list goes on. I visit Lucretia now as an ancestor who died tragically. Germanicus, that brave general dying betrayed. The sick Goya, nurtured by his doctor. The Sufi crowd working themselves into ecstasy in Delacroix’s painting. That wonderful brook by Thomas Moran. Calypso mourning for her lost Ulysses. So many, so wonderful. Sometimes it takes my breath right away.
Is it spiritual? If, as I am beginning to take it, the spiritual moments are those moments that nurture our Self, that best and richest person we could be, want to be, then, yes, every visit to the museum affords a chance for the Self to grow further into its most creative and full expression, goaded on by others who tapped into the depths of their own Self and who gave us a choice to join them on their journey.