Art

Paintings, photographs, sketches,

drawings shake your soul with their

colors, shapes, images, imaginings.

They take you to an unworldly place,

disrupting your everydayness.

Feelings erupt – joy, mournfulness,

rage, quiet peace, love – leaving you

stripped of apathy, quivering, off center.

Music ignites passion and memories,

tears and rapture, playfulness and

terror.  It can take you from the highest

heights to the lowest depths.  Music

grabs you with its power and sucks your

essence into its rhythms. Your body 

cannot help but tap, sway, clap, dance.

Books, stories, poetry, sonnets, treatises, 

speeches, eulogies, sermons inspire, excite,

motivate, transport.  Characters become

your friends as you weep and laugh

with them.  Passages and lines are etched

into your psyche to be repeated over

a lifetime.  Words shape you, carving out

the useless, molding what is left, leaving

you different, changed.

Dance is the Divine telling a story through

movement.  A powerful force overtakes

the body, mind, heart, and soul and the 

dancer becomes an instrument of grace. 

Ecstasy radiates from the performer 

lighting the observer from within.  All

are left limp from the expenditure of energy.

Knitting, sewing, quilting, weaving stitch 

together cloth and yarn as needles click,

looms thud, and machines whir.

Simple and complex patterns produce 

breath-taking beauty reflective of

nature itself.  Colors leap and twirl 

causing the eye to not know where to

look first.  Time is needed to take it all in.

Something profound, larger than life,

surges through the artist.  This unseen

gift cannot be hid.  It must be thrown on

a canvas, inked on a page, leapt across

a stage, stitched into cloth, seeking a

life of its own apart from its owner.  Its

existence does not depend on an 

audience.  It emerges into time and space

to stand on its own and to shine 

within the universe.