Elder Muse/Day 8: Art Is….

Sunrise, Western N. Carolina/Photography by Gaye Abbott

‘Art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows beauty, that has music in its soul and the color of sunsets in its handkerchief, that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance too.”

W.E.B. Du Bois

Everything in life is art. That is what I have come to having gratefully reached into my 70’s. Confining art to a canvas, photograph or sculpture…or even a dance performance can be looking from the backstage of our own on going life – admiring, yet not fully participating in the artistry of life unfolding. Our very existence.

The dance of life is felt, not seen. Listen with your whole body. Touch with your eyes closed to know better what you are feeling. Smell with every single pore wide open. Feel all of it….and then share.

You’ll see a lot but none of that matters if you don’t have what you want/need/dream… the difference between seeing and looking. We don’t see with our eyes. We live in darkness when we don’t see what is real within ourselves, about others…. and about life.

Why do we so often feel that being an artist takes particular skills when in actuality it is diving into the very heart of living moment to moment. The challenges we face and the darkness of humanity at its worst is part of that.

How we navigate and choreograph from moment to moment without a doubt either gives us depth, soul and a richness of being….or drops us into an abyss of what feels like no way out.

Beauty can draw us into a dance of our own making….and so can the shadow. It is all art.

Someone once said, “the way you alchemize a soulless world into a sacred world is by treating everyone as if they are sacred, until the sacred in them remembers”. This transmutation happens in the moment as we touch each others lives.

Recognizing that life is not a performance, but instead a work of art unfolding as we let go of prejudices and patterns of not trusting what is emerging from within us right now, or a week, or a year from now.

We could end up being an elder version of this 4-year-old that has been painting since he was 10 months old because his mother let him scribble on the walls.

What would happen if you allowed yourself to “scribble on the walls”?

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31 days of Daily Elder Muse blog posts accessed from the unfolding of the day – not planned or scheduled. Yes, the Muse is back again during this powerful and challenging shift time on our planet. May these words, stories and images assist you to remember who you are….and how you can be of service.

I have no idea what will arise…..but then do we really know ahead of time what our moment to moment daily experience will be? We are only asked to pay attention and attend with artistry. ~Gaye Abbott

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Gaye Abbott, Wildly Free Elder, 07/22/24