Mind - Spirit
An Artful Life
By Jesse Wolf Hardin
Art and love are surely among humanity's most redeeming graces. The most meaningful of that art reflects, exalts and is informed by inspirited nature. It acknowledges and glorifies the inner essence of relationship and form. It is the marriage of symbol and context, Earth and Spirit, fostered by our own loving hands—a palette of mountain clay and earthen pigmentäof pain and joy, struggle and hope. There is a purpose and honesty to real art that makes it more than decoration, raising it to the level of ritual. The artist celebrates not only the lines and color of a particular landscape, but the character that breeds and defines its landed features, the spirits of place honored in deft strokes by one who loves all seasons. Dances to the hunted animals, chants to the rain gods, magical paintings on mats of bark and myths told and retold over the proverbial tribal fire—all are stories, and it is story that binds us to our beliefs, to the past and the future, and to the experience of place. They are the threads that weave us back into contact with the land that defines and sustains us, crucial lessons handed down through the inheritance of crafts rather than the sequencing of genes. Humans have always venerated and exalted the gods, the land, and our true loves—and it is in this place of art and ritual where we know these things and ourselves as one.
What is often missing in our unlanded culture is not only artistic form in life, but the art of life: the art of conscious, responsive, celebratory relationship. The assignment is not only to make the relationship work, but to make it beautiful as well. Not only meeting the needs of the other, but delighting them with our means for doing so. In our ecstatic coming together there is the opportunity for a further dissolving of boundaries. Boundaries between us and the land. Between the creator and the created; the artist and the art.
It is far too easy to relegate art to those visible forms seeming to exist beyond ourselves to finished and salable products rather than recognizing it as an ongoing process in which we play an essential role. Say the word ≥art≤ and many will conjure images of mummified paintings hung in sterile museums, the tastier graphics adorning the expressway billboards or the better of the year's dramatic films, or anything beautiful and informed by the human hand. Others find in the creations of Nature or God, in the luster of the sunset and the grace of beating wings an artistic perfection one can barely approximate on paper or in clay. In the end all of our art, as all people and all life forms, is of the Earth. Grounded in a wild and creative Nature, empowered by Spirit.
What we often forget is the degree to which we can and should be participants in the artistry we are immersed in. While we may consider ourselves ≥spectators≤ we inevitably contribute awareness, experience and emotion to what is principally an exchange. Exchanges with someone's painting, with the architecture that surrounds us or the heavy-breathing clouds above our heads. We are said to be the only species capable of creating art, and yet we may also be the only life form ever to exist outside the state-of-art.
But it was not always so. Not for the pale villagers of ancient Europe who left us the sculpted body of the archetypal Earth Mother, the bearer of all of life. And not for the first hominid inhabitants of this state called New Mexico either. The ancient pueblo people left behind shards of painted pottery that continue to evoke the Great Mystery, fired clay fragments of a life of honoring, picture-puzzle pieces still vibrating with the energy of years of reverent touch. They spoke their fealty for the land in rock art carved out of their collective and individual souls, lightning bolts and the seed-carrier Kokopelli painted on the sides of the caves. Here too are the forms of the artists' fingers and palms: their signatures, the marks of their selves, in graphic hands reaching out to their descendants across the chasm of time. They left enduring images of their priorities and loves, deities and dreams. They left their holiest expressions of wonder and communion, the evidence of a marriage with place consecrated in timeless art.
The lover in us is a child that likes to draw, handle a sharp pencil, splash watercolors or inhale the aroma of the turpentine and linseed oil that thins and binds the pigments to canvas. Vision can be as immediate as touch, direct and with no need of explanation. We are confronted by art, consumed by it...and remade within it. Art has a purpose beyond the range of the artist's intentions and it is willingly given away. Like those Tibetan sand paintings intricately crafted in this ever-shifting medium, definitive colors sure to blow across one another, mixing and blending until fully melded into, fully indifferentiable from the landscape from which they came. It is not in the completion of some project that we become fulfilled. Rather, it is in the making of our art, in the living of our lives that we are made whole.
≥The purpose of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but their inner significance,≤ Aristotle proclaimed. This is true for rivers and twisted cedar limbs as well as the sculpture forming beneath the attentive motion of our tools. Each glinting rock, each flex of river muscle is an inspiration to the heart and food for soul. Art was, and is, what comes of the relationship between self and other, when allowed to express itself. It is a complex and evolving structure for relating that we exist and act within. With or without the artist's brush we reach out to make our mark, from the center of our experience of art, of life, of our mated land.
In the artist's vernacular our attention to form is called ≥style.≤ Once we have made art into a way of being, an activity, a verb, we see the ways in which it corresponds to the word grace—which can mean a ≥seemingly effortless beauty or charm of movement,≤ ≥an excellence bestowed by God≤ and ≥a prayer of thanksgiving.≤ It is in this sense of motive, beauty, beneficence and gratitude that we impart grace to our acts and are in turn graced by the inspirited world we act upon and within.
Repetitive chores turn into art whenever they are executed with style, then become ritual concurrent with our conscious acknowledgment of their meaning and importance. The same acts completed without our mindful attention and conscious intent are simply habits. We do not need to take time away from living to engage in ritual so much as we need to ritualize our daily existence. Sitting up in bed each morning to face the first sun becomes a ritual as soon as we are conscious of it as an act of interpenetration and show of gratitude. The sharing of food moves from a quick refueling to a slow and artful unfolding, and then into ritual as each serving is consecrated, every bite undertaken as communion with the life forms that feed us, with the sun and rain and soil that made the salad possible, with the spiritual/evolutionary power moving through both consumer and consumed.
The result is reconnection, as our art and practice weaves us back into the material of our experience. Together with the ritual efforts of others, we co-create the living fabric of culture, jointly paint on that fabric the story of our struggles, our miracles...our beautiful, beautiful hope.
Jesse Wolf Hardin is an acclaimed author and teacher of Anim· earth-centered practice. He and his partners offer correspondence courses and host retreats, vision quests and internships in their river canyon, an ancient and authentic place of power. Events include the Wild Women's Gathering June 29-July 4, and the Shaman Path Intensive July 26-29: You can contact Hardin Anim· Wilderness Retreat Center, Box 688, Reserve, NM 87830, www.animacenter.org.