March 2022: Keeping alive my soul’s desires
”Sacred space is … transparent to transcendence and everything within such a space furnishes a base for meditation… When you enter through the door, everything within that space is symbolic, the whole world is mythologized.
To live in a sacred space is to live in a symbolic environment where spiritual life is possible, where everything around you speaks of the exaltation of the spirit.
This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you might find that nothing happens there, but, if you have a sacred space and use it, something eventually will happen. Your sacred space is where you will find yourself again and again.” - Joseph Campbell, from The Temple in the House by Anthony Lawlor, AIA
To date I’ve had four sacred spaces; my yoga mat, Paris, and my two allotments. Now I’d like to prioritize the building of my first safe and healing haven out of cob. This feels like less of an impossibility now that the chronic pain I’ve been experiencing for well over a year in my shoulders, arms and elbows is easing off and I can construct little experiments like a mini sod roof on my allotment fox den with homemade compost and wild flower seed. It was as if I was meant to hear Bill Plotkin’s book, Soulcraft - Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche on Audible, which is supporting me on this scary but exciting journey.
March 31st marked the successful joyous completion of two yearlong goals; to do an artwork a day and to get my online mixed media art shop off the ground. The main thing I discovered was not to open a new business until it’s completely ready ~ The below pair of designs I created called Pills / Bombs comprise of nine separate intuitive black and white digital images I drew on Procreate, which I then combined and manipulated on Instagram Collage ~ I adored the sight of blossom falling like snow from my giant damson tree ~ Cutting out circles of cardboard for my popular St. Patrick’s Day piece, Urban Shamrock, surprisingly helped me to release a lot of pent up grief ~ Soul, spirit and nature are intimately connected ~ Two people had my 3D mixed media collage on cardboard, Amazon, in their Etsy baskets (I’m getting closer to making my first ‘stranger’ sale) ~ I created Mudra of a Thousand Petals by photocopying a music composition of mine and another piece of art I’d done onto a pencilled geometric flower ~ I owe my life to my creativity.
Above: A cob cottage
I haven’t been so uplifted by a film as I was by Blinded By The Light: of course I loved the music and saw a lot of myself in Javid as a budding artist attending school in a multicultural working class English town in the 1980s; a fantastic time to grow up.