Creating Beauty in a Broken World

Resurrection: 2015, 20x24" Acrylic & Jewels
“Resurrection” ©Amy Livingstone, Sacred Art Studio

“Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find.” -Terry Tempest Williams
From my January Newsletter:

This from Williams’ 2008 powerful and heart-opening book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World. She details her journey from Ravenna, Italy, to the American SW, and to Rwanda where she helps build a genocide memorial with the survivors of the war. She follows the thread of a calling to follow one wild word–mosaic. She writes: “Mosaic celebrates brokenness and the beauty of being brought together.”

I was reminded of her book again after finishing the painting shown here, “Resurrection.” Although most would associate the word or concept with the resurrection of Christ, I am using the word in context with the necessary and emerging return of the ancient paradigm associated with our indigenous ancestors and the Divine Feminine of the Goddess tradition, prior to the rise of patriarchy. Although I would also suggest that Christ is likewise an embodiment of the feminine with his original message of inclusivity and love for the neighbor and stranger.

Holy mother earth with the ‘seed of life’ nestled in the heart of  the web of life is cracking and we desperately need the return of the divine feminine even more so given the recent rhetoric coming forward during the GOP presidential campaign against women, people of color, those of the Islamic tradition, and the earth herself. Fear breeding more separation. And yet, I know also that there are so many of us, you and me, making a difference every day in our world through our creativity and in our communities. Shining your light bright as I wrote about in last month’s newsletter!

From Amazon: “In her compassionate meditation on how nature and humans both collide and connect, Williams affirms a reverence for all life, and constructs a narrative of hopeful acts, taking that which is broken and creating something whole.”

Butterflies = transformation. Life. Death. Beauty. Preciousness of life. Bowie. Rickman. Frey. Levine. Icons and teachers. So breathing into the complexities of life  and in my heart, and piecing together a mosaic of beauty in a broken world.

As always, I welcome your thoughts.

A blessed and wildly creative new year to you,

Amy

Holy Threshold

SheWhoWatches_web
 “She Who Watches” ©2016 Amy Livingstone

A blessed, healthy, and wildly creative New Year to all! We are in that threshold time with the new year, a time of birthing new intentions and resolutions. I’m taking time to contemplate what is asking to be born through me this year and look forward to sharing more as I become clear around that. Always there is beauty. What is calling you?

Beauty is the Messenger

Beauty is the messenger
Calling love out from forgotten places
Hidden by worry and fear,
And misplaced under the illusion of scarcity.

War, pain and conflict are all too evident
Between border towns, strangers and commuters.
But Love grows exponentially faster.
It IS the speed of light.

So, kindness reaches its destination
Infinitely faster than the time it takes
For the heaviness of cruelty
To chafe across toughened skin.

Beauty is the messenger
Waking up the sense of wonder,
Rounding up our wholeness into connection beyond ourselves
And increasing our capacity for limitless love.

Beauty is the messenger
Proving the incompatibility
Of splendor and malice;
Showing simply by example…
What is possible.

-Deb Rodney