Becoming what I am ...

What the....
Originally uploaded by pyjama

It is one of the mysterious happinesses of the creative life that when we become willing to listen, the "still, small voice" seems to grow louder. The web of life is interconnected and an artist's prayer in Omaha is as clearly heard as the same prayer uttered in Manhattan. "Help me become what I am," we pray - and we do ...

Not all dreams will come "true," but there will be truth present in all our dreaming. The Great Creator made us. We are ourselves works of art, and as we work to bring forward the art within us, we express our inner divinity. Perhaps this is why so many artists' stories abound with miraculous coincidence and "inspired" hunches. Art may be the finest form of prayer. Making art is quite literally a path "to our Maker." In the act of creation, the creator reveals himself or itself to us and we, too, are revealed to ourselves as something of the divine spark from which we ourselves are made. It is this primal fact of connection, artist to artist, Great Creator to us as creator, that the truest sense of our own identity is born. We make art not merely to make our way in the world but also to make something of ourselves, and often the something that we make is a person with an inviolable sense of inner dignity. We have answered yes when our true name was called.

Julia Cameron, Walking in this World

But not only medicine, engineering, and painting are arts; living itself is an art.

Erich Fromm

Love alone of all things is sufficient unto itself. It is its own end, its own merit, and its own satisfaction. It seeks no cause beyond itself and needs no fruit outside of itself. Its fruit is its use. I love simply because I am love. That is my deepest identity, what I am created in and for.

For me to love others "in God" is to love them for their own sake and not for what they do for me.

Richard Rohr

++++++++++++++++++++++++

All three of these quotes resonate so strongly for me, and they all swell from the same place, the place where art and love and life all live together. None of those three things are separate to me. They are all strands of the same Creator and whenever I walk once again in that space, what I do or what I create becomes secondary to the spacious beauty of being. It's a beautiful thang.