Nuzzling Up Against Life

I have always been interested in the nuances that distinguish sexuality from sensuality and recently ran into a lovely description written by MargauxMeade at her blog, Love in the Time of Addiction:

"My sexuality used to be such a big part of who I was. I could feel it pulsating beneath my skin and surrounding me like a force field. It undulated when I moved and clung to my clothes like perfume.....I'd say it was less sexuality than sensuality--a desire to nuzzle up against life."

This is a highly effective description of sensuality that embraces the spirit of loving life, being engaged, making meaning, savouring experiences, being enchanted by concepts, colors, shapes, scents, texture. Sensuality surfaces or fails to surface in every little thing a person does or with which he surrounds himself and fills his heart and mind.  Sensuality exhibits passion about everything, not just love objects.   

Sex is fairly mechanical or manipulative unless infused with honest sensuality.  This is why blantantly sexual public expressions are crude and unattractive to me.  But the alchemy of sex and sensuality produces a force that shimmers.

Outrageous Love

Phillip Yancy, in his book by the same title, asks what's so amazing about grace and uses Jesus' parable of the prodigal son as an example. The son had shown great contempt for the father but eventually, and unexpectantly, came home. The son was full of remorse,but that is not the focus of the story; instead the parable focuses on the joy of the finder (the father, the bestower of grace). Yancy says:

".....the central focus of the story is the father's outrageous love: 'But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.' When the son tries to repent, the father interrupts his prepared speech in order to get the celebration under way.

A missionary in Lebanon once read this parable to a group of villagers who lived in a culture very similar to the one Jesus described and who had never heard the story. 'What do you notice?' he asked.

Two details of the story stood out to the villagers. First, by claiming his inheritance early, the son was saying to the father 'I wish you were dead!' The villagers could not imagine a patriarch taking such an insult or agreeing to the son's demand. Second, they noticed that the father ran to greet his long-lost son. In the Middle East, a man of stature walks with slow and stately dignity; never does he run. In Jesus' story the father runs, and Jesus' audience no doubt gasped at this detail."

I am interested in Yancy's term outrageous love. Is this grace? Have I found a definition that makes sense to me? I think so.

You don't see much outrageous love these days. It is not in the fabric of today's culture; it is viewed through squinted eyes as a horrible form of weakness. As an example, ex's are expected to hate each other, questioned when they do not and judged stupid or weak by "good Christian people" who do not witness the animosity they expect to see between sinners who hurt each other. Each is expected to play the blame game andgrasp and weld whatever power he or she has to collect a pound of flesh. While jabbering about grace, elbowing each other out of the way to gather the crumbs of love, we do not know outrageous love when we see it. It still makes us gasp.

Oddly Katharine Hepburn and Jesus might have seen love eye to eye. Hepburn's insight makes me wonder if love is love at all if it is not outrageous. She said:

"Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get - only what you are expecting to give - which is everything. What you will receive in return varies. But it really has no connection with what you give. You give because you love and cannot help giving." 

If, in fact, God has no hands but ours, are we not, as a result of the incarnation, the bearers of grace, one to another?  Going into Advent, I want to ponder how more than just amazing grace is.  I want to meditate upon its outrageousness and celebrate it wherever I am privileged to bear witness.  Why celebrate?  Because according to Yancy "Trace the roots of grace, or charis in Greek, and you will find a verb that means 'I rejoice, I am glad.'"

Therefore, let us keep the feast.

Winter Solstice

I recently did a study of art work made of spirals.  The spiral is an ancient symbol of energy flowing in spirals and life's rhythm. The spiral symbolizes immortality for Polynesians and the winter solstice for Mayans. This image is my idea of the energy of the winter solstice - the light of the world dispersing nuances of color. 

Curiosities Big and Small

I can so identify with a concept described by Chris Middleton and Luke Herriott in Instant Graphics:

"Many designers and illustrators are explorers and archivists of their immediate environments, scouring the city streets, parks, river banks, gardens, markets, and even their own studios, for objects, textures, and source material that they can sacn in and use in their palettes, or incorporate into freehand collages and assemblies of objects.

Whether or not they use digital techniques to manipulate such raw materials and create their final designs, many designers inevitably find themselves becoming collectors and/or curators of certain types of imagery or objects - insects, sports cards, magazine clippings, old catalogs, engravings, or prints. Some develop a fascination with a specific type of image or object - perhaps from an accidental find - and set about actively researching and building collections of them, which, in turn, begin to influence their subsequent work."

It seems that most of my artist friends collect curious objects.  Not just graphic artists and illustrators, and I would be surprised by a painter who didn't keep a camera nearby to snap an inspiration.  It reminds me of a time my brother-in-law came to my house at Christmas and asked where I find all the unusual things he saw there.  All over the place, I responded.  Nothing looked unusual to me, but I know what he meant.  Compared to the traditional decoration my sister favors, I suppose my artist's abode does look unusual to him.

Which leads me to the best excuse I have for not getting my "stuff" under control.  Creative inspiration.  A sunburst garden ornament lies on the rug in the sunroom awaiting painting; antique books for reference lie on the floor next to my computer; rocks, leaves and bird feathers are scattered about the house; sexy, inspirational cards sit on my table; a scarf hangs from a wall light; a dried rose given to me by a lover long ago resides in a pen case; turquise sunglasses, my Scottish rock, my nephew's favorite rock and an armillary adorn a table in my office.  During the season of Pentecost rose petals danced across my porch, and last summer little blue pellets - lacecap hydrangea droppings - filled little bowls around the house.  A piece of wood that looked like a gun or something of that nature hung out in the sunroom all last year, and robin egg shells are housed with music boxes, old letters and other curiosities in a curio cabinet.  I could go on, but you get the picture.

If I had given in to my mother's influence, I would have a neurotically organized, if not bland, house.  I would scrub and control it and all that enter therein.  Honoring cleanliness and order over flair, I would look for ways to express myself through controlling my environment.  I would paint dull brown paintings.

I make no more excuses.  While the eye delights in color, shape and texture, collections of curious objects are more than visual delights.  They often serve as objects to study in order to produce.  Most people don't know this, but the production of art is frequently a highly intellectual process.  A subject is studied, turned inside and out, pondered until the "problem" is solved.  Chu-chink.  It comes together.  The work is produced; the idea is conveyed.  I believe that this is the main reason I prefer to produce graphic art.  It is more intensely symbolic, bearing more than technique, conveying an idea.  

With all these objects around, I used to think my life was a souvenir.  It isn't.  It's a work in progress filled with things done and left undone, curiosities big and small - just another artistic habitat for creative inspiration and a statement of rebellion against the dull brown painting. 

Turning New Leaves

Illumination

Texting

 

The Glitter in Omnivalence

         

May the Light of the World continue to overlay the rust of my life and once more transform ruin into vibrant glitter.

I recently explored a word:  Omnivalence.  In doing so I came across a writer, John Briggs, of Western Connecticut State University, whose writing made me feel like I had found a pool of water after a tremendous thirst.  His article entitled "Nuance and Omnivalence in the Creative Mind" has me thinking about creativity, curiosity, persistence and the search for truth.  It is the stuff of brilliant glitter. 

The concept of omnivalence is hard to define.  Rather than actually define the term, Briggs seems to compare the term to ambivalence to thrash out its meaning and significance to the creative process.  It is something like the mandorla where light and dark overlap: 

"Evidently, contradictory feelings which we might be inclined to identify as conflictual ambivalence, are, on closer examination, something else. Such feelings seem to be experienced by creators not as ambivalent conflict, but as possibilities, potentials, mystery, openness. Omnivalence might be a better term, from the Latin omni, meaning 'affects all things,' and related to ops 'wealth,' plus valence or 'strength.' (Briggs & McCluskey, 1989). When omnivalence occurs there is an emotion-perception-cognition of a powerful, global wealth in the moment, a wealth in which there may be many different, even contrary, elements, each equally strong but all fundamentally indistinguishable from each other so that even the contrary elements are really a single effect eliciting an impression that somehow 'all of it,'(omni) 'the whole world,' is in this moment. We might associate the creator's experience of omnivalence both with a feeling of multi-valence and omni-presence. It is similar in some ways to ambivalence but quite unlike it as well because in ambivalence the psyche is divided between two states of mind competing for dominance. In omnivalence there is only one encompassing state containing somehow many states overlapped and not in competition....."

Briggs says of perhaps the greatest creative genius in modern history:

"In 1953, Albert Einstein, the quintessential genius, declared that 'I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent' beyond 'curiosity, obsession, and dogged endurance...' (Greenberg, 1979, p. 216).  Einstein's assertion challenges a central myth about creative genius - that it is inborn talent.  Taken together with a story Einstein told on this 74th birthday, it also offers a window into an alternative explanation for the activity of high-level creative work."

Curiosity, obsession, and dogged endurance.  Wow.  I like that.  Finally I have found someone with whom I agree, and, lo, it is Einstein himself!  He argues against the myth - which I think is born of snobbery and limitation -  that creativity is inborn or a product of madness, replacing the myth with a practical explanation that the creative endeavour is one born of curiosity, obsession, and dogged endurance.  I have long known that any creativity I exhibit is born of a great deal of hard work that I cannot help but perform when the impulse hits.  The impulse, the muse, the curiosity that must be satisfied, the spirit that will not be quinched, a determination that can be pretty irritating.  I could go on.

Einstein told a story of a curiosity he experience when he was five years old and sick in bed.  His father brought him a magnetic compass.  He was bewitched by the needle that turned north no matter what.  This curiosity surrounding the compass "stimulated the young Einstein to the realization that 'something deeply hidden had to be behind things' (Clark, 1971, p. 29), and was a factor that led Einstein "to work on relativity involving paradoxes connected with the electromagnetic waves of light traveling through a putative invisible ether..."  Who would ever suspect that a compass given as a toy combined with a child's curiosity would lead to the exploration of "hidden variables" operating behind quantum theory. 

Creative persons know that hidden variables operate behind everything, to include the human heart and mind.  Only when we are willing to quit "knowing" and explore those hidden variables are we willing to step up to a creative exchange of fantasy for the brilliant glitter of truth.  To me this is illumination.  We ask for illumination, but I'm not sure we really want it because it can hurt so bad while it hurts so good.  Whichever way it hurts, it does thrill.  But this craving curiosity has to be great enough to overpower fear or we will stay in the fantasy of darkness through lies, laziness and psychological defenses that numb and destroy us bit by bit over time.

Instead...may the Light of the World continue to overlay the rust of my life and once more transform ruin into vibrant glitter.

Lux Mundi

Light transforms so that even rust glitters when overlayed with light. My wish expressed as prayer and made visible in image is that the Light of the World will continue to overlay the rust of my life and once more transform ruin into vibrant glitter.

The "candle" in this image is a mirror image of the word Lux Mundi.

Shiver