The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon
Musings on Being and Becoming Human
ISSUE 23
REALIZING OUR DREAMS
Welcome to our first issue of The Grapevine in which individual pieces will continue to be released over time instead of collected and published all at once. We hope you have seen our invitation below and that you may be engaged already in writing something for us and our readers. The collection coming out now includes what we have assembled since we sent the invitation a couple of months back. Delight is a word that is difficult to use nowadays, but we believe you may find delight in some of these pieces, as well as deeper meanings that always come with soulstuff, especially when contained in art.
I am presently enchanted with Thomas Moore's book The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, an absolute treasure to hold in your hands and your heart and mind as these days go by. Enforced solitude may hold far more creative potential than we imagine. I have seen signs of that in my own reveries and have heard others speak with surprise at what's happening inside, in their personal perspectives, while so much of what we know of environment, whether in nature or made through human effort, is breaking down. In the picture above, you have a glimpse of my coffee table museum display of seashells and stones (with a squirrel perched on one of them). Let's entertain the idea that the breakdown may be the doorway to new, vital adventuring.
Our Presentations column includes a new piece by Jonathan Knott, as well as one of my poems, written in 2011 during a similar dreadful environmental atmosphere. It features Anne Fields, in Finding and Fulfilling a Dream, taking a look back at her experience among the Lakota Sioux Indians at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Dianne Seaman brings us once again into nature and ancient rhythms. Then we have new contributions by poets Bam Dev Sharma, Collins Emeghara, Asiimwe Simon, Collins Hillz and Saviour Onyewuchi. We intend to add new pieces to this column as they come in.
Views and Reviews begins with Charles Knott's introduction to James Hillman's The Force of Character and the Lasting Life. It's good when everyone's life expectancy suddenly comes into question, to find someone speaking eloquently about "lasting." In Reflections, Charles continues to work with Hillman's book and links it to a previous discussion of his experience as an actor in which he learned how the characters he played in theater became a part of his own character. I walk, talk, feel, think ... in short, live ... differently from having welcomed these lively fictional characters into my body. You may notice that some of what he writes in Issue 23's Reflections sounds a lot like Captain Shotover from G. B. Shaw's Heartbreak House (see photo).
Jonathan Knott, in Tracking History, brings back one of his earlier pieces on a naval museum in Columbus, Georgia, and will soon be telling us about a tv history show he has come to love. Ravi Kumar, who is still in India, offers in his World Voices column a look back at Ananda K. Coomaraswamy's The Dance of Siva: Essays on Indian Art and Culture.
Nancy Law's account in Around Town with Nancy Rose of her recent birthday celebration is sure to bring some delight, an emotion that she carries over into her review of an Eagles concert in Why We Love Atlanta. Laurie Ann leaves us with a lovely metaphor that shows how the world and the people in it are amazing. In the Museum column, quotations about the importance of creating your own museum at home for times like these, or anytime you want to cultivate this kind of enchantment.
Praise Poems features a salon gathering of poets and their contributions. We will be building the Praise Poems column constantly as we receive submissions. We look forward to your reading and submitting pieces yourselves.
Don't forget to visit my author page to see some new awards and the Dublin Diary column if you haven't been there in awhile.
Photo of table museum pieces by Jonathan Michael Knott
We are all looking for relief from the messy murky muddle and meanness of a public world saturated in politics even as we try to eliminate one of the worst plagues in recent memory. We invite you to 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 still offer abundant metaphors and images for exploring what it means to be human. Join with us in filling Issue 23 with writing and art related to realizing who and what we are, what we can do, what we have done, what remains to be fulfilled in our journey of individuation: in short, to focus on lived and unlived life for whatever value comes of self reflection.
We invite all our readers, and all who have contributed articles, poems, stories, photos, reviews, interviews and reflections, 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.
Let your piece be the seeding of a lengthier life review or a pause in whatever you may be doing already to depict your life story. It might be a simple glance inward to where your soul 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, we recommend that you savor it.
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.
Copyright 2020, Barbara Knott. All Rights Reserved