The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon

Musings on Being and Becoming Human

COMING UP!

THE GRAPEVINE: Issue 23

Looking for relief from the messy murky muddle and meanness of a public world saturated in politics?

Browse The Grapevine for alternative ways of paying attention to self and others and world: thoughtful reflections, praise poems, selected reviews of vibrant reading resources, tracking history stories, listening to world voices, exploring art work, entertaining ideas, travel, and appreciation of the city of Atlanta's cultural ambiance.

Nature and its seasons offer abundant metaphors and images for exploring what it means to be human.

Join with us in framing and filling Issue 23 as A Time of Harvest. We invite all our readers, and especially those who have contributed articles, poems, stories, photos, interviews, reflections, and reviews to begin now to review, reflect, and interview yourselves for the next several weeks and to submit your thoughts about your own lives to our meeting of minds and hearts in this soulmaking salon setting. As you can imagine, that includes a lot of creative people who have continued toward their own maturity over a period of 15 years as The Grapevine worked and played its way toward Issue 23.

Let your piece begin with the seeding of a lengthier life review, or a pause in whatever you may be doing already to depict your life story, or a simple glance inward to where your garden grows and a conversation with yourself for our art and soul salon, where your presence will be met with welcome and appreciation.

Here are some potentially useful and inspirational comments and questions to stimulate your reflections:

From John O'Donohue, Walking in Wonder (New York: Convergent, 2015), pp. 145-6:

One of the amazing recognitions of Celtic spirituality and wisdom is the sisterhood of nature and the soul. The body is made out of clay. It has the memory of the earth in it, and not just the memory of the earth, but also in some strange, subtle, almost silent way, it has the rhythms of the seasons in it too. G. B. Shaw said that youth is wasted on the young, so springtime is always a season that somehow resembles the energy of youth. Autumntime seems to mirror the gathering and the harvest of old age .... I feel that old age and aging is a time of great gathering a time of sifting and a time of reaping the rewards of forgotten and neglected experience.

O'Donohue goes on (pp. 175-6):

If my own death were to occur tomorrow, what would be the peaks of my existence? The faces of my beloved, and of others I love and those who love me. The dark valleys of devastation; mountains; the ocean; the numinous music of words; the endless festival of the senses; the excitement and beauty of woman; the joy of music; memories of hard but satisfying days of work on the bog, in the meadows, building walls; conversations that still sing in the mind; the harp cello of the Irish language; the Eucharist; and the celebration of the body in love; being listened to when words were frail and suffering was sore; the return of the swallows to the shed; my uncle's companionship; my father's mystical sense; and my mother's love and trust in my being.

He precedes that summary with this observation:

One of the loneliest places in the world to be is at a deathbed where the one who is departing is haunted by regret for their unlived life. One of the greatest sins is the unlived life.

We challenge you to speak out, to yourself first and then to others, about the highlights of your accomplishments and what you may consider to be aspects of your unlived or yet to be lived life.

Considering that O'Donohue himself died at the young age of 52, his writing about the eternal things seems remarkably youthful and wise, the words of a man who understood things we need to know, like how we humans are always living in the presence of our own death and would do well to cultivate, instead of material things we can't take with us, the eternal things of mind and heart that form our essential being. Quoted in the book (p. 149) is an old saying in Moycullen, in County Galway, Ireland, that "You'd never see a trailer after a hearse!"

If you have not yet read this wonderful book about wonder, composed by John Quinn "in conversation with" John O'Donohue, I recommend it more than I can say.

Quinn writes (p. 184): One of the questions that John loved to pose was: "When was your last great conversation with someone?" They go on to extol the value of conversation. Hence our suggestion that you think of this writing invitation as an opportunity to have a conversation with yourself and then send it into the salon where it will join others to create more wonder.

We will be calling your attention to other stimulating ways of thinking about these things throughout the waiting time. For instance, David Whyte's The House of Belonging, reviewed in Issue 22, is an excellent source of creative thought about life review.

Questions and comments are welcome at bknott11@yahoo.com. When ready, also send document, saved as rich text format, to the same email address.

We look forward to hearing from you anytime between now and March 2020. We will publish pieces as they come in, and by March, we hope to have many conversational pieces mingling and mirroring and making much of each other in our salon setting.