Time flows on and blogging sort of got away from me. Yet here I am again, trying to pick it back
up. My writing hasn't expressed spiritual things recently, but I did try art again. I started small and worked up to this more complicated star, combining traditional wychinanki with religious art. I like the feel of cutting paper, the way the scissors move, the quick little sli
ces through the paper, the sound it makes. There's a meditative quality to it.
The soul here in this picture is a flower, held by Jesus and his other, with the Holy Spirit looking down it. Or that's as much iconography as I intended while making it. I wouldn't mind being able to find a bit more in it, or perhaps have the next one dig a bit deeper.
I'd like to slowly find my way back into expressing this dimension of myself in both writing and art. I have some ideas, I'd like to finish Icon, as well as write a couple of new stories I've thought of, but so far it remains hard work to bring it out. But like Teresa's garden, I must first haul water before it flows.
I've been reading a book about Teresa of Avila and the first sections of it are going over her metaphor of the soul as a garden and water as prayer. Our soul is a garden and we tend it with the water of prayer. The first stage of prayer is hauling a bucket, the next a water wheel, then diverting a river through the garden, finally rain.
Perhaps it's not only prayer, but also writing, especially if the writing is meant in prayer, to reflect my thoughts, feelings, and relationship with God. I like the image for the inspiration there behind the writing, that it too is a gift and sometimes it's work to find it, and sometimes it flows to us. If we keep tending the garden of the imagination, our novel flowers will grow and bloom.
