#REVERB (Day 7): What is one thing you are taking with you into 2013?

ETERNITY SEEKS TO GIVE BIRTH TO ITSELF. (Art by Hallelujah Truth, Words by Karen Phillips)

#REVERB12:Day 7 Prompt: What's the one thing you want to take with you into 2013?

One thing I will most certainly TAKE WITH ME into 2013 is gathering with the SPIRITUAL ART PILGRIMS every three weeks to "EXPERIENCE" our ART through dramatics, movement, voice, art making, and play.

The  SPIRITUAL ART PILGRIMS is a group I founded with fellow artists Robey Tapp, Cecelia Kane, and Sally Wylde several years ago as a way to delve deeper into our SOULS, ARTMAKING, and FRIENDSHIP.

BLOGTOBERFEST12 (Day #30): SPIRITUAL ART PILGRIM INTERVIEW-- JESSE MERLE HARRIS IS WIDE AWAKE AND SEEING THE SACRED WHEN MAKING ART

JESSE MERLE HARRIS (photo by Hallelujah Truth)

At the end of the summer 2011, I interviewed Atlanta Spiritual Art Pilgrim Jesse Merle Harris in her Candler Park home seated on Mulberry Fields, a community garden that she created with the help of her neighbors. At that time, Jesse was in training for a walking pilgrimage in France with friend and fellow artist, Judi Adkins Ingram. For various reasons we only just completed this interview at the end of October 2012 so this exchange is a brief window into Jesse's art making process.

HALLELUJAH: Give me your personal definition of ART.

JESSE: For me, it is the thing that wakes me up. A way of being that allows all my senses to be awake. When that is going on, it is like I am a butterfly catcher…wide awake and paying attention.

Making art helps me see all the connectivity and the miracles and the questions--the knowing and the not knowing. It moves me out of the realm of the mundane and connects me immediately with spirituality. Art is the creation and reflection of all of that process.

HALLELUJAH: What is SPIRITUALITY to you?

JESSE: It is being wide awake. To me spirituality is walking through the world and recognizing it as the Garden of Eden in some way. Living in the present, seeing the sacred in everything around us. It is not connected to religion or dogma. I do think all the creation stories are the same and attempts to capture that mystery.

HALLELUJAH: What is the connection between the ART you make and your spirituality?

JESSE: The connection for me is some kind of deep truth telling that I feel a powerful urge to do. It is personal truth telling, very personal. When I am wide awake and something is rattling, I have the urge to throw that butterfly net out and capture it. I have that experience of stopping time. It is a profound spiritual experience when you are in the moment with what you have captured in your butterfly net. That is art making.

It is mysterious, and I will never understand why certain images stay with me. For example, I don’t know why these two images have a hold of me--the angelic cherub and screaming head, but they do, and they have a story to tell.

HALLELUJAH: Can you talk about the journeys these images go on?

JESSE: Yes. The first time I saw them, they were in this boat, but my vision has definitely been shifting. I think one thing that has driven me to make my art is story telling. For a long time, I was attached to the story, but that isn’t as true anymore.

Now, I understand that there is an underlying story in the images. When I set them off in a boat, I didn’t know they would end up at the bottom of the ocean, in a garden, on trees, parts of furniture, and then end up in an urban environment.

I am watching these images come, and there’s lots going on in them. I don’t try to relate them to what is going on with me. Clearly, this series that I am talking about shows that things are not the way they seem. They are also about change and impermanence.

JESSE MERLE HARRIS

JESSE MERLE HARRIS

JESSE MERLE HARRIS

JESSE MERLE HARRIS

JESSE MERLE HARRIS

HALLELUJAH: Can you talk to me about this image where you are underground with the potatoes?

JESSE: I can go really far into the underground where I am not feeling the world around me. It isn’t depression; it is just flatness.  Last summer when Sally Wylde was dying, I was in that place for a while.

The garden helps me. I have spent a lifetime landscaping and building gardens, and this activity keeps me awake. I was digging potatoes and had the realization that I had been “sleeping with the potatoes.” For me, this means being buried, silent, and not aware of what’s happening in my creative unconscious. So I did a series of pretty quick crepas and collage images to process what was going on with my feelings about Sally.

I will have these phrases come to me like “sleeping with the potatoes” or “l hired a douser to look for my tears.”  These phrases are jumping off points for creating art. I didn’t cry all summer when Sally was dying. But these phrases led to the art that let me know I had a lot of uncried tears about Sally. In this way, I use my art to process my life. I have never had the urge to sell it or show it.

JESSE MERLE HARRIS

JESSE MERLE HARRIS

HALLELUJAH: Could tell me something about the pink playhouse, which is one of your recurring images?

JESSE: When we were moving my parents out of their house, and my father was dying, I found a lot of childhood artifacts including pictures of the perfect pink playhouse my father had built for my sister and me. He did a very loving thing. Then his mother ruined it by plastering it with “I Like Ike” decals and Republican elephants, and I hated it.

As I was losing my father, I was doing images about relationships and loss, mining the depths of the pink playhouse story.  I love to use crepas, making lots of images and scratching things out.

JESSE MERLE HARRIS

JESSE MERLE HARRIS

HALLELUJAH: And the pink playhouse moved you into your next series about being a twin?

JESSE: I was dreaming and dreaming about houses, a lost and found of houses real or unreal. That process connected me a lot to the twin thing. As a twin, I have a lot of stories about being connected at the hip and then finding myself. Through the series of stories, I ended up being alone. The challenge of being twins is finding your own identity within this powerful connection. It is not easy.

JESSE MERLE HARRIS

JESSE MERLE HARRIS

HALLELUJAH: In what way does your ART enhance your SPIRITUALITY?

JESSE: It wakes me up and gets me out of the underworld. I do believe that there are things that are cooking in the underworld. It is working in the garden, making art, or singing that makes me present. That’s what the goodies are: joy, sorrow which is a part of life, and wonder.

HALLELUJAH: Has SPIRITUALITY always been a source of your ARTMAKING?

JESSE: When I was a kid (eleven or earlier) and had a little art space in our basement, I would go down there and lose my connection to time. I could be down there for hours and not know it. Stepping out of time. I wouldn’t have known or called it spirituality. But is was being open in the moment. Looking back that is what it was. It was all about wakefulness to whatever was present.

HALLELUJAH: Who (artists, authors, friends, etc.) do you consider influential in the way you think, act, and make ART?

JESSE: Ruth Schowlater (aka Hallelujah Truth—thanks Jesse!). Sally Wylde because she took her life experience and put it into art even when it was painful. She made books when she was depressed and a performance when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Hallelujah Truth because she stays connected with the Divine and works at it every day, and I love her images.

My closest friends have artists’ souls. So I’m always learning in certain ways.

Chagall really wakes me up. Magic and mysticism inspires me.

HALLELUJAH: What is your purpose for making ART?

JESSE: To embrace all of my experience, dreams, memories, and what my senses are taking in. To express narratives that I create in my head. To be mindful.

JESSE MERLE HARRIS

JESSE MERLE HARRIS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Thank you to Kat McNally, for hosting Blogtoberfest12, and for posting such wonderful prompts on her blog, I Saw You Dancing. Although I didn't post on the topic for today, I did post! This daily blogging has awakened me, gotten me back in the writing flow!

GETTING ROOTED IN THE BEING YOU WANT TO BE: A JOURNEY THAT TAKES A LIFE TIME

MY SPIRITUAL ART JOURNEY STARTED IN 2009.  Introducing Pilgrim Hallelujah Truth with the emergence of her new baby self which later transformed into images of Wandjina. Also present is my dear feline companion Misha, who always reminded me to create joyfully and with ease like a cat napping. (All art by Hallelujah Truth)

Hallelujah for TIME, SELF-KNOWLEDGE, and EXPANSION of the SOUL! Since I started this blog, Coffee with Hallelujah, to focus on 15 minutes of creativity every day (no matter what), I have become quite familiar with the ROOTS of my BEING. The process over time has become my JOURNEY as a SPIRITUAL ART PILGRIM. Today, I want to reflect on one aspect of this pilgrimage--the ROOTS of BEING, all the mesh of me and the environment I used to inhabit.


Back in the summer of 2009, just around this time, I surrendered to my fear, the fear that held me back and kept me stuck in the elemental ooze of doubt and worry. I recognized who I was--a burned-out workaholic English as a Second Language teacher dreaming of being an artist. I acknowledged that because I had created this way of being, I could also go to the roots, the source, and make a new way of being--based on NOTHING.


The word NOTHING has power and magic in it! From ZERO, or even the absence of ZERO, anything and EVERYTHING is possible. Using my active imagination with the assistance of my creativity coach, Lesly Fredman, I imagined the following scenario:


I see my gigantic self ROOTED in the muck of my existence--over worked, stressed out, unhappy, and fearful of striving for fulfillment as an artist. My tree-root legs are submerged in a primordial ooze, and I am surrounded by dark waters of a deep ancient lake. Lesly, a miniscule figure, appears on the lake in a tiny row boat and her human voice from far below me asks, "Do you want FREEDOM?" (pause to reflect)

HOW MUCH DOES FREEDOM COST? I was very concerned with how much it would cost to free me from my rootedness in the primordial muck of my dissatisfaction. When Lesly told me it would cost a priceless amount, I didn't want to do it. However, she emphasized that the 3 trillion dollars could be paid "whenever." Whenever? When is that! Ha ha, ho ho, the mystery of the unknown and the magic of all things alchemical!

REFLECTION on the question, "Do you want FREEDOM?"
It is of my opinion and experience that change, even change for the good, is often difficult to enact. We all want FREEDOM from pain, FREEDOM to grow, and FREEDOM to BE what we want. Yet, in some way, we are attached to the familiarity of pain and agony. We know how to function or dis-function in that mucky, icky existence. Besides, we ask, "What changes do I make? And what if the changes are worse than the current situation?" (continue to active imagination scenario)


Do I want FREEDOM? I hesitated. I knew I wanted something else but what and how? Yes, I wanted FREEDOM. Yes, I desired a new way of BEING based on nothing, but I had to deal with the ROOTS of pain and agony anchoring me in the familiar ooze! What could the remedy be?


Using active imagination along with me, Lesly calls in the MUD ROBOTS. They materialize from the river banks like huge TRANSFORMERS and dive down to cut me FREE from the old way of BEING. Surprise! The process of severing the roots tickles! Then I begin floating! Buoyant that I am no longer a giantess but am Lesly's size, I climb into her rescue boat tired but joyous! Cold and shivering, I swaddle myself in a blanket like a newborn baby. The boat moves effortlessly through the waters. (end of active imagination)

WHENEVER!

CONCLUSIONS ON THE ROOTS OF BEING


To BE and BECOME the SOUL you want to BE, you need to fully experience WHO you ARE now. Go to the ROOTS of your BEING. Who are you? What is preventing you from harvesting the ripe apples from your tree of life? 


In order for me to make significant life changes, I had to fully accept my long-lived stuckness. I relaxed into being "stuck amuck," by visualizing myself as a giantess deeply rooted and immovable. 


Once you know and accept who you ARE, revel in it because you are bidding that old self good-bye.  After farewells to the old way of being, begin the alchemical process of transformation! Use your active imagination to create scenarios that will LIBERATE you and prepare you for the SOUL WORK you want to do. 


The JOURNEY of a SPIRITUAL ART PILGRIM takes time--a LIFE TIME. I encourage and support your JOURNEY dear fellow SOJOURNER. Share your ROOTS of BEING with me by SOUL BLOGGING at Coffee with Hallelujah!


I am
FREE
FLOATING
UPROOTED and
ROOTING for HALLELUJAH TRUTH!

LIFE OF THE CREATIVE SPIRIT: PERSISTENT CHANGE LIKE THE SEASONS

TUMBLING IN THE SEASONS OF CHANGE. ( Wandjina Art and photos by Hallelujah Truth, creative mind and spirit dedicated to creativity!)

Hallelujah for the PRACTICE! Fifteen minutes of CREATIVITY every day! Hallelujah for the seasons that bring CHANGE. I believe in PERSISTENCE, REPETITION, and NONJUDGMENT—not good, not bad, just is! Right now, the persistent green leaves of a long hot summer here in Atlanta, Georgia, are transforming themselves into reds, yellows, and oranges before leaping off their trees! My daily image making possesses similar transformations. Let me speak about my ARTISTIC process at the CHANGE of seasons as temperatures here in the southeastern part of the United States soar dramatically from the high 60’s (Fahrenheit) to close to freezing temperatures at night.

WANDJINA DRAWING DAY 1,  OCTOBER 28, 2011

On this first day of November, I have completed the fifth daily drawing of a solo Wandjina, the northwestern Australian Aboriginal CREATION GOD. I explained in a previous blog that I have allowed this CREATION GOD to represent an aspect of my psyche that is associated with the masculine qualities of assertiveness, action, and logic. Generally, in my morning drawings, I draw Wandjina only after I have rendered Hallelujah Truth, representing my creative feminine self. Five days ago, after I had been drawing for 27 continuous days in black micron pens sans color, I felt an INTENSE NEED to do SOMETHING DIFFERENT, and Wandjina asked to be drawn in watercolor pencils!

DAILY MICRON DRAWINGS October 23, 2011. Hallelujah with cat companion and parts of her psyche! Wandjina stands on her shoulder on the right.

Hallelujah Truth (me the blog writer) has been PRESENT to my FEELINGS, and CHANGE is pressing against my breast and rumbling in my stomach. I don’t know what is NEXT! So dear FELLOW PILGRIMS, I repeat, repeat, and repeat. I meditate as I RECREATE the familiar. I focus on BEING and not judging. I yearn for SURPRISE. I wait, breathing in and out, conscious of my body as I draw.  Inhaling at the rate of a slow metronome, I patiently wait for DISCOVERY and am ready when it visits me!

WANDJINA DRAWING DAY 2,  OCTOBER 29, 2011

WANDJINA DRAWING DAY 3,  OCTOBER 30, 2011

WANDJINA DRAWING DAY 4,  OCTOBER 31, 2011

WANDJINA DRAWING DAY 5,  November 1, 2011

At this moment, the day after HALLOWEEN, I am struck by how much my Wandjina look like the skeletons I have seen gracing my Decatur neighbors’ doors and hanging from their trees along with other ghoulish creatures of witches, aliens, and jack-o-lanterns. How is that the image of a CREATION GOD’S head looks like the skeletal remains of a human skull? Wow! From DEATH comes LIFE and more!

THE CUTTING EDGE OF CHANGE: Decatur Halloween Skeleton 2011. Notice the similarity to Wandjina's face?

GAMBLING? What do skeletons have to lose gambling their lives away? How about you? Changing seasons give us pause to consider the transience of our lives. What do you want to do with your life before you become food for the worms? (Decatur, Georgia, Halloween 2011)

For me, HALLOWEEN seems to be a boundary day on which we the LIVING flirt with the DEAD—those who have lived. Bravely and in the name of FUN, we dress in costumes (disguises) and go out in the darkness to meet other SPIRITS! We do this at the end of the fertile summer and its HARVEST and on the verge of winter and its DEATH. Hallelujah for the CYCLES of LIFE! The green leaves cycle into brown after being a vibrant orange, yellow, or red, turning into mulch from which new things will grow. We humans die, leaving skeletons, remnants of what we once were. Wandjina creates life while emerging from rituals performed thousands of years ago in one of the oldest human cultures. What is HUMAN? What is SPIRIT? What is DEATH? What is BIRTH? What is CREATIVITY?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do know that by establishing a practice of “doing the work” of the SOUL, that I am on the JOURNEY, one which is rewarding and filled with CHANGE! That’s Coffee with Hallelujah! SOUL BLOG with me SOJOURNERS! Tell me how your SPIRIT is processing the CHANGE of seasons? What is happening in your CYCLE of LIFE right now?

THE TREASURE. My spiritual art journey provides a richness beyond measure. I am living the reflective life, which allows me to enlarge my SPIRIT! Hallelujah! (Decatur, Georgia, Halloween 2011)

HALLELUJAH EMBRACING CHANGE. The rituals practiced during Halloween invite all of us to contemplate body, mind, and SPIRIT. We are changing all the time, just like the seasons.(Decatur, Georgia, Halloween 2011, photo by Alice Teeter)

SURPRISE AWAITS US! If we look close enough at what surrounds us,  our perception opens and we see fairy wings with ferns on skeletons! Have fun thinking of REBIRTH here! (Decatur, Georgia, Halloween 2011)