Month: August 2015

Destruction

art, Creativity, Healing, Historic neighborhood, Lost Cause, Painting, Reflection, renewal, Uncategorized, vision

 The old Majestic Hotel, a historic property in Hot Springs, Arkansas, burned and was deemed irreparable. The city became the official owner after several years of attempting to convince the true owner to clean up the wreckage.

After demolition, the site will likely become a park or amphitheater. The good wrought from this debacle is our people are organized better than ever to encourage renovation and repairs before other historic properties get in such dilapidated condition.

Perhaps we could take a hint from this event: when our life or health is on the downward slide, we might want to take care of our unmet “repairs” so we can have our best life for the most number of years forward.

1 Corinthians 3:17–“If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.”

Hercules & the Hydra: the beast that wouldn’t die. 

Uncategorized

imageIf you lopped off a head, another grew back. Hercules seared the wounds to prevent regrowth, and finished his second labor. We all have monsters in our lives–addictions, bad habits, old memories, worries, fears, stresses, control needs, hopelessness, and more. We try to chop one off, but another rears its ugly head in its place. Only a greater power, a searing heat to our souls, can purge these from returning.

We can’t defeat the Hydras for another person. Everyone must accept the searing power into their own lives. We aren’t Hercules for another, just as we aren’t Christ for someone else. We can bring someone to Christ, but each person must accept the searing of Christ’s power in his or her own life. Only then will they be a victor, a hero of their own story.

Victory comes from surrendering to a greater power. After all, the idea of fire didn’t originate with Hercules. Iolaos, his nephew, helped him by applying the burning brands.

Under Construction 

art, Creativity, Fear, Health, Imagination, Ministry, ministry, Painting, purpose, purpose, Reflection, renewal, Retirement, salvation, shame, Spirituality, Strength, Uncategorized, vision, vision, Work

  
I walk on Thursday evenings in the historic downtown district of Hot Springs, Arkansas. Most of our buildings are from our salad days of the Victorian period and early 20th century. We are building new construction, such as this new Regions Bank Tower, which will replace the one directly behind my back. I often leave my car under this overpass while I huff and hustle my way up to the cold spring at the entry to the mountain route to the observation tower. From there I walk past historic hotels, small and large, until I get to the site of the old Majestic Hotel, which burned to the ground in 2014. If I turn around for the start again, I can put in nearly 2 miles on a good evening. Even if I’m the last to finish, I’m still faster than the ones who never started. 

Our creative and spiritual lives are like my walking discipline in my downtown, which is both dying and being renewed. I notice some shops have closed, but new ones have taken their place. These aren’t all tourist shops, but some are tradesmen serving the needs of downtown dwellers. Each of us needs to take care of our long term needs, not just our whim wants. 

For our spirit, paying attention to our relationship with God through silence, contemplative study of scripture, and service with the poor will help ground our identity in God rather than in our own self. In our creative work, keeping the disciplines of our trade can be important. By this I mean, remembering to draw, to use color, value, to work a series, or to explore a subject fully. If we write, we pay attention to the skills of this craft, or if we are musicians, we never neglect our scales or any other skill sharpener in our toolbox. 

Sometimes we get to the place in our lives when everything burns down to the ground. Like the storied Majestic Hotel, once a home to professional baseball players during spring training and mobsters down for the gambling, our life as it is won’t stand up to the elements or to the vissitudes of fate. A stray cigarette or a frayed wire takes the whole building down, along with all its memories and its derbis inside. 

Sometimes we too have to start from scratch by making a fresh start. Yes, saving a historic treasure would be nice, but sometimes not very cost effective because the structure isn’t sound. Then it’s best to turn our back on that old life, grieve for it, and find a new hope and a new vision for the future. “If only we had done something with it 30 years ago!” Yet the will wasn’t there, was it? We can’t turn back the hands of time. 

In 1992, I answered God’s call to ministry. I spent twenty-two years away from my original calling, art. When my health took me out of parish ministry, I took up painting again in 2009. Five years in my studio relearning color, value, shape, composition, and emotion has felt like burning down a great old edifice and building a new one in its place. To date I’ve stayed close to the subject, except for the color. Lately I’ve felt constrained by those boundaries, and I’ve moved to s freer brushstroke. Will it stick? I’m enjoying it, but I feel emotionally exhausted afterward. I’m tearing down a boundary and am about to climb over a barricade. I’m excited about this adventure, even if it tastes of danger. 

Coming Up for Air

art, butterflies, Creativity, Faith, Family, Healing

imageWhen I was a child, we would test ourselves at the neighborhood swimming pool. Holding our breaths, we would submerge our bodies with our eyes open. The first one of us to give out of air burst up through the surface of the shallow end of the pool. The few of us remaining below paid no attention to the giant whale crashing a few inches away. We were in another world and our friend was in another ocean.

The agony of holding our breath was only outweighed by the ignominy of losing this contest of wills. I would hyperventilate before going under to extra oxygenate my blood  those of us who led active, outdoor lives had an advantage over the “greenhouse lilies,” as my mother so quaintly referred to my less active, housebound friends.

In the art studio, as in life, there are moments of tension in which people can’t decide whether to keep holding their breath or burst out of the water with a mighty crash. Holding involves tensions and distress, but letting go means giving up. Most of us want to win easy and have losing be inconsequential. This is another world and a different ocean

I’ve been restless over the summer because my family has lost contact with my adult daughter who lives on the street in San Francisco. Mental illness is a part of many lives, so much so that the only way to explain families like ours is another world and a different ocean  I live in one world and my daughter swims in a different ocean of her illness. Yet her life’s crashing and thrashing tides still affect my world.

Once I have done what I can to remedy the situation, all I can do is wait.  It’s good  I learned to breathe deeply, to hold my breath and wait, for giant whales of crashing emotions fall from day to day. I couldn’t settle down to paint calmly, so I took a layout app photo of an opal stone as my preliminary sketch, and made an abstract painting from it.

Once I got the basic shapes and colors laid in, I left the photo and worked the painting. As the shapes materialized, I discovered both a landscape and a butterfly within it  this was painted at the end of July, which had a blue moon. “Once  in a blue moon” means rarely or not often, I don’t know if I’m moving into a new direction with my work or if this is just a one off event. I think I’m being called in a new direction, one of purer color and less structured images.

Perhaps the promise of this text will one day ring true for all of us, whatever world we walk upon and wherever we swim in an ocean:
“On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.”  (Isaiah 25:6)