" I felt filled up with love."
"I want to make a panel!"
"The porcelain piece is an interesting addition. I had to hear how it sounds so I used my program to move it!"
"I came out of the walk a better person than when I entered it."
"Love the copper work."
"Great lighting!"
Over and over again visitors to the installation found me and raved over their experience in the spiral and all the people who made this happen. They were touched, amazed, in awe. Awe was a frequently used word. One woman decided that Awe is the word form of the fullness of love, something she experienced as she stood in the center of the spiral! I have to say it is gratifying when complete strangers to this work and anyone involved are profoundly moved. It validates the premise that art made while holding the feeling of love has the ability to impact the lives of those who experience it. It also validates the premise that my own personal experiences that led to this work are but one way in which love can be understood. Others who did not have my experience added their own deeply held and personal understanding and it all worked together.
The Sacred Threads show is arranged in general categories: spirituality, joy, inspiration, peace/brotherhood, grief and healing. Our installation was placed in between grief and joy. I overheard one woman say that to walk through the quilts depicting grief and then wander into the white room was relief. In my own personal life I know that the death of my mother, a woman who was my best friend, mentor, heroine, might have been intolerable had it not been balanced by the sure feeling of her transformation into that peaceful energetically riveting crystalline light. I have not been a person who sought visions. It took me some time to have the courage to share this experience with others. At this particular show the people who found me wanted to know more. There is a hunger I think we experience as humans to understand something about what comes after this physical existence. I am by no means an expert on this. But I do know that when each of us has the courage to share those encounters with the mystical aspects of life we enrich everyone. Our culture, even the culture of our most sacred religious institutions, often disallow or downplay the more intangible aspects of touching the spiritual. I have found that the head knowledge aspect of learning with regard to spirituality is quite common. And yet we are so much more than only our brains. There are other cultures which view the heart as the seat of the 'brain'. I feel that the intangible is known intuitively through the heart, not the head.
The spiral work will grow. Several people asked how they can get involved. Lisa Ellis and Christine Adams set up a station outside the exhibition hall where guests were invited to write their prayers, hopes, dreams onto strips of white silk which were then tied to a potted palm tree. Lisa had the idea that these white strips could be a panel, the Sacred Threads panel. I say a big "YES!" to this. How wonderful to take these heartfelt thoughts/prayers/feelings and add them to the ever expanding Walking In Love Spiral.
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