looking up

I've been thinking a lot about the nature of the divine, about mysticism, about religion, about spirituality, and about what if anything any of that means.  I recognize that I carry my own internal definitions of these things not just based on study but also based on experience and other influences.  Maybe my understanding has some connect to what is accepted as a good understanding.  But really I think personal definitions, especially around the spiritual, carry more weight - at least in my day to day attempts and living my path.

I spent a lot of time in the fall delving into steps 1, 2 and 3 of my Twelve Step life.  For anyone reading who isn't familiar with these, they look like this:
1. We admitted we were powerless over ___________ (insert addiction, people, institutions, ideas, etc).  - that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
and
3. Made a decision to turn out will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

Of course the Christian roots here are obvious in the language of God and Him. But the key to the three in my mind is looking to a power outside of myself that is bigger than me and is of my own understanding.  That's huge.  I was told what I should think God is and what God should do by people in my life and the religious institutions I participated in growing up.  I still had my own ideas. I feared them when they seem to stray too far from what I was being told, but I still had them.  As a part of working the steps, I get a safe place to explore those ideas and work out what makes sense to me and what actually works for me spiritually.

I am lucky enough to have three sponsors, all of whom are artists.  And I have worked with all of them on these steps.  They have all given me artistic gifts, knowledge and a place of working that has helped build my art practice as essential to my spiritual life. I have been exploring the ideas in the above steps through art.

I came to better understanding of what I understand my higher power (HP) to be.  My higher power is the Divine Artist.  It is the unfettered, genderless, kind, and loving energy that connects all living beings and the universe.  It is the intensity of the creative process, the beauty of the rapid change that occurs in that process, the love and faith involved in the process, and the result of it.

But me being me, I wanted a visual I could hold onto. When I think of the divine, where do I look? What do I photograph, draw, paint, make videos of? It was an exploration that was worth the time.  In Dharma Art, the idea isn't really the object that you are creating, but the connection to it, to beauty, and to the mediatative process of making. The object bears it's own evidence and lives it's own life in order to evoke change in the world. It can be a long process or a short one. Photography, I realized for myself, is a spiritual action.

And so photography has been my companion in spiritual seeking in the last 11 years in a way that I didn't realize.  In thinking of what the Divine Artist might look like, I started looking up. The ever shifting skies, the brushstroke-like cloud formations, and feeling of connection and awe accompanying the looking just made sense as the image to capture during this study.  This series of cloud images and appreciation for the beauty that is the Arizona light and sky are the ongoing results.  This is an important and almost daily (depending on if there is enough humidity for clouds, of course) part of my life.  I wanted to share some of those images. I hope they bring joy to you has they have to me.