Shaped Works
The Word
The need, the impulse, the emotions that guided the first hands over a work of art is unchanged over all of human history. My mind and shaping history are difference from every artist that has ever lived and created, making my viewpoint unique. Never the less, the force that drives me into this precarious world of creation, joy, tumult and pain is the same force that has driven every artist since the dawn of time. It is the same as that which drove humanity to defining his existence through the word. The reverence for life and the acknowledgement of the spirit within is the same for me as for the soul that held and shaped pebbles into the first sculpture. Our bond with the spirit path is our defining essential and our value to humanity.
Changing Woman
They say that behind every good man stands a good woman but behind every human is another woman, an older woman, who has been there since the beginning of time. She is our earth; she is the ground, the water, the cosmos and the spirit that imbues all of creation. She is the passion, pain and cycle of life. She is God, Goddess, Mother, Nurturer, Whore and Crone. She attends us at our birth and waits at our death. She is the voice of wisdom and truth. She resides within all of us, both male and female. She is the female spirit, joined with and indissoluble from the male. She unifies our disparate parts, heals us and makes us whole.
The ancient Hebrew's called her Wisdom and acknowledged her presence in the beginning. Now, our culture, society and taught religion deny her presence and value. For that we all suffer. Only when we truly accept this aspect of ourselves, acknowledge it and give it equal standing in the laws of the land and the eyes of the world will we achieve both equality and serenity.
Wisdom
The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of old.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth;
before he had made the earth with its fields,
or the first of the dust of the world.
When he established the heavens,
I was there,
When he drew a circle of the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his commands,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master workman;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the sons of men.
Guardian
For those who express themselves through our self-named “primitive” culture, art and religion, all animals and all aspects of nature possessed the spirit. Every time they created an image it became an object of devotion. It embodied the spirit of nature and beyond that the unifying force that is the common thread of all life. They did not worship the beaver but the force embodied within the beaver. They acknowledged and honored what we are too blind to see.
Think how differently we would shape our acts towards nature if we truly honored the spirit implicit within the denizens of our natural world. Would we rape the hills with a strip mine or plunder the wealth of our seas? Wouldn’t we rather truly be good stewards who tend nurture and replenish the wealth of our world?
Crux Venetrix
We can not divorce ourselves from the forces and culture that shaped our human past. Only by accepting a union between the pagan within and our daily faith can we ever hope for internal and external peace. The rich symbols of our past provide structure and substance for the new images that we have forged from our fertile imaginations. When Christianity spread over the world, it could not vanquish the old ones. Instead, the robe of Christianity was donned over the body of the old ones.
The image of the cross was a potent symbol for eons before Christ made his ultimate sacrifice there. He suffered and died on an image that represented the cycle of life and death to uncountable generations of humanity spread across a globe, who spoke in a thousand different tongues and worship in a thousand different ways. For some the cross represented the unity of male and female, for others it represented the balance between the physical and spiritual worlds. Whatever meaning was linked with the symbol, Christ’s death would alter the image. Forever onward, Christ’s Word would be superimposed over the Old One’s Image.
Through his death, he exchanged the Bull of Mithras for the Lamb of God. The Old Ones who embodied the forces of nature, birth and death and the eternal rhythm were absorbed and altered. Humanity began to look, not outward at the cycles of nature to define themselves but rather inward to compassion, love and sacrifice for meaning.
Labor Anni Tempus: Auctumnus and Ver
We are linked with the land. The soil and air, the wind and water are vital to our physical existence. For the earliest Christians, who daily toiled in their fields it was simpler to remind themselves of the age-old cycles and rhythms that moved through all life and respect their link with the land. They forged an easy accord between the acknowledgement of the pulse of nature and the Christianity. The hours of the day and seasons of the year were marked by their labors in the fields and honored by the rituals of the church.
For us, it becomes more and more difficult to connect to physical nature and the spirit embodied within it. Our techno-driven lives have divorced us from the pulse of life. We wash away the dirt that sustains us. We resent and over burden the air that fills us. We poison the food that provides our nourishment. The animals that balance our world are hounded into extinction. The tress that breath and clean our air for us are laid waste. We bite the hands that feed us and resent their very existence. We no longer possess the ability to live in harmony with nature.
Lumen Angelorum
Even worse than our abandonment of nature is our inability to connect to the spirit and light within each other and ourselves. We can not seem to find time in our frantic rat paths to hear the voice within and the feel the light shine through our souls. We deny the existence and mock those who listen and feel. If we go to church, we are more likely to mistake ritual for religion. The shape of the service provides comfort and familiarity. We reject the need for the tumult and pain of spiritual self-assessment. We ignore the voice when we can, mock those who truly listen and fail to acknowledge the light and the one great truth.
If we truly lived by Christ's Word, we would turn and compromise rather than stand in self-righteous combat. We would be servants rather than act as rooster puffed leaders. We would heal with our words and our touch; not slur, rebuke and strike. We would act towards our earth as good stewards rather than plunder her wealth. We would tend the sparrows as our own children. Our voices would be raised in songs of joy rather than shouts of anger. We would dance our steps of praise instead of marching to war. We would paint visions of illumination rather than brutality. We would embellish instead of deface.
When we tend our souls, we would learn from the Old Ones rather than banish them from our lives. We would acknowledge the Word and the Light within all of us and respect the diversity of its’ outward form. Most importantly, we would lead people to the Light through loving example and earnest desire rather than through rigid external enforcement. I pray that we could all be the Light that shines.
