Epiphany - have you had one?

Sometimes the dreams that come true are dreams you never even realized you had.

Alice Sebold - The Lovely Bones

Epiphany

http://www.lianneschneiderart.com/Art/Digital-PaintingPhotoArt/i-KV84mZv/A

Someone asked me at one point which of my poems or artworks most conveys what my vision and my spiritual and personal life journey is like at this late stage of my life. My answer is always the same. Although most of my poetry, particularly that designed or created especially to accompany an image or vice versa, reflects who I am or where I've been, this image and poem really say it best. “Epiphany” is a very emotionally charged statement of what still drives me every day and underlines my hope and the image is a composite of those things that were part of my "awakening" if you will.

In this case, the image of course was created to go with the poem, specifically to try to say visually what I expressed in the poem and to do that in a way that would be representative of who I saw myself to be as a writer and artist at that time. The central element in the image is a symbol that is important to me from my experience with meditation – it’s a variation of and an extension of something called a Tau Cross – note that it is the intersection of what I see as my connection to the earth (the roots) and to the universal mind – the explosion of light/thought/energy from the center and all arching to form a heart – representing the LOVE I feel for all life, for that which is beautiful and inspiring. 

I do have moments when I’m alone in my “cave,” when I’m standing beside the sea or walking up a creek, or just watching a glorious sunset when I am simply overcome with emotion. I never realized until I allowed myself to open up and express it, just how deeply emotional I am. I never cried – and even when my beloved grandmother died, my father died and my husband died, I cried very little. I was the “rock” upon whom everyone leaned. Now tears come easily – as often from joy or wonder as from sadness or grief. But I’m still an impatient person in many ways – I want to KNOW everything. I want to know how to do everything so I can create more effectively.

Are you mended with gold???

When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something's suffered damage and has a history, it becomes more beautiful - Billie Mobayed

 We Are Glass

http://fineartamerica.com/featured/we-are-glass-lianne-schneider.html

I've read in countless spiritual guides, self-help books, motivational guides that we are all "broken" in some way. Throughout the course of life, events conspire to break us - we suffer losses, disappointments, heartbreak, failure and sometimes what feels like endless struggle. Someone I love dearly is having a "breakdown" - that's what they call the loss of touch with reality that comes from a steady diet of psychological pain. Even if the situation is not so dire for us, we've all experienced moments, perhaps days or weeks when we felt just shattered by circumstances. But the question for me has always been whether being broken means broken down or broken open. There's a huge difference and I've written numerous poems about that thought over the past few years. It seems to me that if we are all broken in some way, what counts is how we put ourselves back together! 

What if we could see ourselves and others as perfectly imperfect...patched with the gold of the lessons we've learned and the vulnerability we've accepted without the shame that usually haunts us because we're "not good enough" or we're "weak" or "afraid?" What if we could see ourselves as more beautiful because we're damaged and imperfect and because we've been broken open by our suffering, exposing the deeper heart and soul of who we are and finding that lovelier than we ever knew was possible? What if we could accept our wounds as important and even possibly necessary aspects of our own "soul" development? (You don't have to believe in the religious definition of soul to understand what I mean but if you prefer, use spirit or heart or just plain human). What if we could accept that as Leonard Cohen wrote in the lyrics to Anthem, "There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in"?

"Pain is the great teacher," said writer May Sarton, so what if we could study the lessons and find the gold or the light that makes us more beautiful than ever. This is how I expressed it in the poem I wrote at the same time as I created this image:

IN THE SHATTERING

Shattered -
the fragile glass of me is shattered,
crushed and broken into tiny shards
now reflecting, diamond-like,
a thousand points of light -
magnifying what had once been
but a solitary beam, diffuse, opaque -
as if in the final breaking,
the small, soft, subtle glow,
so long and well contained within
the shape that was the whole of me
is now free to sparkle all the more -
brilliantly, blindingly more -
each crystal sliver multiplying
radiance only dimly shown before.

How could I have known
when I was whole and empty
that it would be in breaking
that I would shine so brightly,
be more luminously transparent,
with a glory all out of proportion
to the pain of the shattering itself?
How could I know that I held
a million different joys inside
just waiting for release?
How could I know that I
was never meant to confine
the light of the Divine inside
but was always and eternally
envisioned in the mind of God,
as each of us is truly meant,
to be at last its sacred shine?

                     Copyright Lianne Schneider 2014

All art and poetry unless otherwise noted is the intellectual and artistic property of Lianne Schneider and may not be copied, reprinted, reblogged in its entirey without the express permission of the author.  

Spirituality or religion...

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”
Carl Sagan - The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Please note that the poem on the image below is my own, not the original Desiderata

Desiderata Redux

 http://lianne-schneider.artistwebsites.com/featured/desiderata-redux-lianne-schneider.html

There's a lot of discussion - some of it angry and defensive - about religion these days. Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians go head to head with self-professed atheists, both bringing their arguments into the "body politic." Muslim fundamentalists, too, speak of non-believers as "the great Satan" and justify jihad on the basis of the Koran. In the name of God, too many are at war with one another these days and the world wobbles on its axis as the battles rage and conversations become confrontations full of vitriol. 

I'm not here to advocate for or against any of those positions. After all, what good would it do...people hear and believe what they want to believe. Just take the recent debate between Bill Nye the "Science Guy" and Ken Ham of the Creation Museum of Kentucky. Who won? Well if  you went in believing in creationism as what should be taught in schools in place of evolution, you came out believing Ken Ham won. Those on the other side thought Nye took Ham to the mat over and over.  

Personally, in spite of my own Christian background and education, I think the solution is really very simple. Acknowledge that one does not need formal religious affiliation to share something we all have in common - that's spirituality. "Spirituality," says Dr. Brene Brown, "is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and compassion. Practicing spirituality brings a sense of perspective, meaning, and purpose to our lives." Spirituality is the force behind our sense of empathy for another, the motive for our immediate practical and sympathetic response to a natural disaster anywhere in the world, the explanation for our sadness when a particularly good person dies, even our devotion and attachment to animals. When I read this passage from Dr. Brown, I was reminded of my own attempt to write a spiritual rather than a religious guide for a good and decent life. I called it "Desiderata Redux" - a revisitation to a well-known work by Max Ehrmann but now including a recognition of that sense of spiritual connection that is so much a part of what I personally believe.

I don't think this kind of universal spirituality - this sense of universal connectedness - could be the ground for any kind of hatred, violence or discrimination. I hope and believe that when we recognize this quality in everyone, we can let go of all that divides us and embrace that which binds us - our common humanity. Perhaps that is a bit "Pollyanna" but I've always been an idealist. As my beloved teacher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once wrote: