What is Sacred to You?

by sacred things one must not understand simply those personal being which are called Gods or spirits; a rock, a tree, a spring, a pebble, a piece of wood, a house, in a word, anything can be sacred" (Durkheim 1915)

This begs the question What is does sacred mean to you and what do you hold as sacred?

Sacred for me is the creative process that humans, as part of nature, engage in along with the creative processes that are inherant in nature and the universe. For me ordinary acts can become sacred if imbued with meaning, that is, if they are done with intention. I see the sacred in the ordinary because of it's being, it's pressence within the universe. So I suppose I could rephrase the question to what has really significant meaning to you?

For me it is a time continum...a slipstream when I am able to experience the ordinary as sacred; like a walk on the beach can become sacred, if I am in the state of mind that has connected me to universal energy of the universe....when I am meditating. If I am digging around in the sand with my family, splashing in the waves the beach and the water are no less sacred but at that moment I am not in a state of honouring the sacred within that. So in one respect for me the sacred is a state of mind but it is also physical and emotional reality. It is just that I have not connectd to the sacred at that moment.

For me the sacred resides in nature, in the wind, the cycles of the seasons, the bush track that I walk and the particular trees that are along that track. It is the headland at a particular beach and it is seeing the ocean as hair, the moon as a Goddess and the earth containing it's own energetic rhythms. It is life. Life is sacred.

I see sacredness as connection. If you have a strong connection to something, somone or a place, if it has special significance or meaning then it is sacred to you. Places, people and things only become sacred when there is a special significane or connection to them. Something becomes sacred because it becomes imbued with your energy. The honouring becomes an act of rememberance. It reminds you of the feeling and connectedness that you had with that person, place or time. Sometimes, groups of people share their sense of the sacred and then this beomes a shared spiriituality, even a religion. Ah but I am getting ahead of myself.

Caught In The Cycle of Meeting Others Demands

This is Estelle, I'd like you to meet her. I painted Estelle about 4 years ago but I did not understand the power of her image and sombre look until quite recently. I often find that with my paintings...mostly.... they have a message within them I can only glimpse at the time of the doing. Later, with the clear vision of hindsight, I can see what it was all about. Sometimes, they are like premonitions. This is also what I mean by art as a connection to the Divine (see my previous blog).



The reason Estelle is here to meet you is because she has been caught in the endless cycle of pleasing others. She has been trapped, forced to dance for her dinner and sing for her supper. She would really like to be somewhere else. Perhaps she would like to disappear into the ether and stars of the universe that surround her. You can't see the crowd that are watching her, leering and admiring her half naked body...the ones that clutch greedily at her breasts, wanting a part of her. They want to tear away the cloth that barely covers her. She will not see you, because in her mind she is far away, conjuring all the things she would wish to do. She has performed the steps so many times now that she doesn't need to think. She can mindlessly perform her allotted role. Can you recognise a little bit of yourself in Estelle?





How often do you feel like you are meeting demands for other people in your day? How often do you think "I'll get to do what I really want to do just when I have finished helping the kids, or in the holiday or some other commitment or responsibility?



I think this is a a battle that we all play out everyday to some extent but some of us are way too far on the side of pleasing others, sticking to our commitments and responsibilities without ever stepping out of this to see if it is the best thing for you.



I am a commitment addict. If I say I am going to do something then I will do it even if it means me or my family miss out. I don't want to let people down. This has worked for me most of the time but lately I have begun to question whether or not I should hold true to my commitments or if whether this is always the best way to go about life. I am finding that fewer people do follow through regularly citing this excuse or that. I used to wonder how they could just change their mind at the last minute and think that would be OK with for those that were relying upon them.



I found a little passage written by Oriah Mountain Dreamer recently that helped me out with this. I've always struggled with the commitment responsibility thing. I really don't think it's OK to just let someone down because you just can't be bothered and you are feeling fickle. Oriah put it in such a way that made perfect sense. She talks about betrayal and honesty in her book The Invitation.

Oriah had her own revelation as with trustworthiness as she tells us

"I suddenly realized that the people in my life who are the most trustworthy - those who tell the truth, even when the truth is hard - are not those who always keep their agreements with me. Those who can be faithless- who can bear the responsibility of breaking an agreement with someone when the alternative is
to betray themselves - are trustworthy." (p.58)

The insight that I gained from this book was about being true enough to myself and strong enough with my own sense of commitment to my vitality, that I would break a promise to someone else. Seeing it from this point of view has been life changing for me. I was placing value on everyone else's needs far more than my own. I was betraying myself (and others) by not really being honest enough to say "No I cannot come to your night out because that would mean I miss out on spending time with my family, writing my book or painting my art". I was beginning to become one of those horrible resentful women that felt really put upon. I knew something had to change but I couldn't quiet get over my sense of duty to help out or listen when someone was down and out. I have spent countless hours on the phone to needy people, thinking it was absolutely necessary, and at the time it is, but there is a cost to this constant availability to others life dramas - it is your soul energy, your life force.



To be fair it is not other people's responsibility to understand or know when you are feeling overwhelmed, taken from, unappreciated or just plain tired. It is up to us to take responsibility for ourselves and this is where I had been going astray. I was quiet happy to live out other people's life dramas but I was avoiding my own. I really wasn't able to live out my life fully until I was able to say stop- enough I can't do it anymore. It is not always as simple as that either.



Sometimes the intricate webs we have weaved for ourselves hypnotise us into thinking this is the way it is and we cannot escape our own habits. Sometimes we are forced or trapped into lives we feel that we didn't choose for ourselves. Perhaps at times we are caught up in a way of doing things against our will, like working in a job as a step to getting where we want to go, or staying with a partner because it is easier than leaving to find our own strength. Sometimes it is necessary to follow through, to stay to build upon what you have, even if it seems shaky. There are no straightforward answers, but at least now, I have made the promise to myself that I will be less accommodating to everyone else's demands on my time and energy........even though I catch myself falling back into this way of being......I remind myself that I am responsible for myself first and foremost......



I am finding that I do not commit so easily now, I say no more often even to the ones I really love the most in my life.

Art as a Connection to the Divine

I was walking on the beach at a favourite place of mine on the Mid North Coast meditating as I often do in the mornings. I love Early mornings because I can just let thoughts wander in and out without being distracted from business of the rest of the day. Often, when I am in this state, I feel completely engrossed, like I am in two places at once. I am walking on the beach with my conscious body, my spirit is walking with me but also dancing around me, above me and below me. I feel connected to more that just me. When I am in this state many wonderful thoughts emerge without struggling or grasping for them. They seem to come out of the blue.

I was up at my special place because I was meant to be on a self imposed writing retreat away from family and friends. I am researching how the creative process can assist in wellbeing. I had taken up all of my previous journals in the plane, even having to pay excess baggage for this because I just had so many. In actual fact, I was so overwhelmed by this, I hardly knew where to begin. My journals are a mixture of personal reflection and insights that come after mediating. I have been journaling for some time so I felt like I had to trawl through quiet a lot of material. I suppose I am telling you this so you get the idea that although "my insight" did come "out of the blue", it also had a fertile but fallow hot bed of ideas from which it emerged and had been swirling around in my consciousness for sometime.

As happens in the dream state or semi-conscious state of meditation, I cannot now exactly remember what triggered this thought or what came before or after it. I just remember that I had to hang onto it. In fact there was a voice screaming at me to remember, remember, remember. Luckily I had bought my camera and over the years I have experienced this enough to have come up with some ingenious ways to remember and record these insightful vital thoughts. So I scratched the phrase that kept being whispered in my ear by some unseen disembodied voice "ART AS A CONNECTION TO THE DIVINE" and the phrase "ART AS REMEMBRANCE". And at the time it made absolute and perfect sense to me. My conscious mind knew that I would forget the numinous meaning surrounding this insight but it had the forethought to encourage me to write it down and document it because it is vitally important for me for some reason.

I have learnt to trust these insights. I see these as guidance in the right direction. I have learnt to listen to their wisdom. This is how the magic , the connectedness of the universe works. Then, as life does, it overtakes you and you forget how important the insight was. You go on to look after the kids, work and organise art festivals (as I do). But the magic has not gone. It still bubbles and boils away without you even being fully aware of it.

And then after a while the full impact of the magic that is occurring above, below and around us becomes completely obvious and visible at one moment that you are blown away by it. This is what happened.

1. I was wondering to myself and panicking about what I had to write for my Doctorate. I also knew that I had some serious deep personal stuff to work out
2. I tried trawling through my journals to logically figure out what I was to do. This was helpful and triggered some new ideas but there was no clarity as it seemed too overwhelming
3. I went for a walk to just chill out for a while. I had no intention of thinking about anything. I just wanted to take some photos of the beach landscape
4. The insights came and i had an overwhelming sense that I needed to write these down so I wrote the phrases "Art as a connection to the Divine" and "art as remembrance" in the sand and took a photo of this
5. I wrote the following in my journal in the next few days

"I am spilling all that I am am and all that I have been. I will pick up the pieces to create all who I am becoming.........If I could throw it all away and scatter your life like shells upon a sandy beach, which parts (shells) would you pick up and which would you leave for the ocean to claim. Which shell would you pick up that you didn't previously have in your life" (notice how part way into the sentence it changes from I to you. this is a sign to me that I have begun to channel rather than write my own words).

6. I came back home from up the coast, promptly forgot everything and began preparing for the art exhibition and festival that I was organising. Part of this meant I had to paint my own artworks to enter into this. So I painted. I painted a very large painting of the headland as a woman with another smaller human woman walking on the beach. The headland woman was scattering starfish and the human woman was picking these up in wonder. I entered this work into the exhibition and called it "Walk gently On Me" No magical connection was yet obvious to me.
7. Two months after my initial walk I read an astrology website that advised to look back to what was occurring on the 7th of July as this would influence what was occurring right now in September the 17th -18th. As I was doing this and re reading my journal, I read part of the entry (above) out to my husband. He said to me "that sounds exactly like the painting that you have just painted" And I thought YES you are right. Without my conscious awareness the image that I had painted and the words that I had written bore out the truth of the phrase "Art as a connection to the Divine"

Art and writing are powerful processes that have the capability of connecting us to more than ourselves. I suppose it depends what your own personal meaning of the divine is but for me the divine is a numinous force that connects all things.

I took this Phrase idea to my Doctoral supervisor who is a scholar in sociology of religion. When I explained what I meant by this he was very excited and encouraged me to write an academic article about "art as a connection to the Divine".

Magic happens...this is what makes life magic to me