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.
Liturgy for This and That 