Artmaking is a spiritual path through which we are most able to explore Divinity by participating in the act of creating images. In the broadest sense I have discovered three aspects of artmaking that we are invited to explore, which seem to grow out of the very delight of the Creative Source with Itself:
Inquiry: Art is a place to raise any question about any subject.
Engagement: Art is a means to enter, to play with, to dance with, to wrestle with anything that intrigues, delights, disturbs, or terrifies us.
Celebration: Art is a path to meaning, which includes all forms of honoring, sharing, memorializing, and giving thanks.
This book will describe how inquiry, engagement, and celebration through acts of art and writing constitute a spiritual path.
There is an intelligence, the Soul of the World, calling forth new ideas at all times. The call is urgent in this time of great change throughout human cultures and the earth itself. I have seen these ideas arrive in my images and the images of many others. All of us are being called to midwife a great transition of consciousness, and artmaking is one of the best ways to receive new understanding in this process. We are living in a time when old ideas are wearing out and new ones are needed. Institutional forms of all kinds are crumbling and we have the opportunity to envision new ways to make meaning in how we live, treat one another, express reverence and awe, solve conflicts, and steward the planetary resources with which we have been entrusted. Artmaking, especially in small groups, can serve as sanctuary, asylum, ashram, therapy group, think tank, and village square. Art is a vehicle that allows us to transcend linear time, to travel backward and forward into personal and transpersonal history, into possibilities that weren’t realized and those that might be.
When we take a concern or a problem into the “place of all possibility” through image making, we reduce the tendency to act reflexively, doing what we have always done. We can fully experience all the paradoxical aspects inherent in every knotty problem but, owing to the unique qualities of artmaking, we are able to refrain from simply acting to reduce the tension we feel in paradox. Instead, the action of making art reduces the tension sufficiently that we can allow new information to arise.
When we work in the discipline of artmaking, we gradually become vessels for new wisdom. Slowly our long-held beliefs are loosened and our minds and spirits and even our bodies become more flexible. We develop a tolerance for ambiguity and a resilience that comes from reclaiming play as the primary means to learn. O. Fred Donaldson, in Playing by Heart, says that “it is play’s underlying emptiness or absence of cultural categories and boundaries that enables it to encompass the fullness of life” (1993, 14). We can work at whatever pace suits us and we will be gently urged toward more. We learn in depth what our cherished beliefs really are and we practice letting them go and trying on new ones.
I have struggled for many years to find my way to a spiritual home through many paths: first Catholicism, into which I was born; sporadically in Eastern religions and yoga; later on in Goddess worship and the women’s spirituality movement; and especially and most satisfyingly, in the Torah, among my adoptive tribe, the Jews. I love parts and places of all these worlds and traditions and have been formed and nourished by each. Finally, however, I realize that art is my spiritual path. I am a transdenominational soul and art is my prayer, my ritual, my remembrance of the Divine. Art is the way I knit together the beliefs and practices that guide my life. Art is not a religion but a practice and a path. As a practice it has its own demands and discipline. As a path it can take us more deeply into whatever place it is that our soul calls home whether that place is a church, a shul (synagogue), a mosque, a dance studio, a soup kitchen, or a deep forest. Through receiving and giving form to new images, we breathe life into ancient scriptures and eternal teachings. Art also leads us to new places in ourselves, our work, our relationships, and our communities.
For the last thirty years I have been experimenting, studying, and sharing with others means of using art and writing to tap into the creative energy that is the essence of what we share with the Divine and is our core as human beings. It might be more true to say I have felt the presence of the Divine in my life as a force that guides, challenges, and pulls me along a path to question how I see the world and think about it. A series of practices have developed that prove to be a reliable guide for walking the spiritual path of art. These practices are simple and humble; they do not demand special skills in art or writing, special places or materials. They are accessible to anyone from any walk of life or age or background.
My journey on this path using these practices has led me into imagery and insights about the feminine and about Judaism, to a deeper understanding of my family and friends, my place in the order of nature, and my purpose on earth. I have come to know that each person I encounter is my teacher, none more so than those with whom I make art. I have seen art lead each seeker to his or her own personal wisdom teachings. These personal teachings strengthen and elaborate that which we know most deeply and will lead us to new understandings of teachings we may have grown up with that no longer seem to fit. Our images lead us to and support us in the work we are meant to initiate or complete in this lifetime. What we receive depends upon our diligent use of two simple but central methods that bracket the artmaking experience: our intention, in which we state our inquiry as an active desire to receive something, which then guides our artmaking; and our witness, a writing practice through which we engage with and integrate what has appeared in our artwork.
In this book I will share how a personal practice of artmaking has developed into a spiritual path and is being shared with others. Through my story and theirs, our images and writings, it is my fervent hope that you, too, will take up paintbrush and crayon, revision scraps of daily life into the poetry of everydayness, retell the old stories so that we can call upon the Divine in new ways of joy and peace and help create new maps for where we might as people go. The next step, already being taken by many, including some who are featured in this book, is addressing the question of how to take right action. Any valid spiritual path must lead both inward to the personal and outward to the Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World. How do we take action in the world with clarity and discernment, with compassion and justice? We do so by facing our personal challenges, listening to our unique sensitivities, and letting them lead us to the knowledge locked within their challenges. Everyone has pieces to offer to clarify and rewrite old stories, reclaim pages of lost stories, and celebrate new ones. Through art may you find your piece and your peace.