Sometimes the freedom comes from expressing what is in that dark place in a way that can only be understood by the heart and soul...... ART......
ART is EXPRESSION of your deepest self. It is not limited to drawing finely sketched portraits, perfectly blended water colours on canvas....it is your soul....BARED and OPEN and it will surface how it sees fit....weather that be through photography...music....paint....crayons....dance.....laughter or walking barefoot on the bare earth.....LET IT OUT! ...and always be open to trying new ways to do so....
Being a writer I express by scrawling words across hand bound books, being a musician I pluck my guitar and hum to the sunshine, being a dancer I let music sway my body...I leap...I reach and I crumble.....but I always limited myself to my comfort zone of self expression, until I met the wondrous and open soul'd Luke Be......
He ran a free creative expression workshop for his blessed group 'Creative Expressionismsesmmmms' in it he opened the doorway for me to experience myself in the world of visual art. Partnered perfectly with laughter yoga exercises to release endorphins and a small group of beautifully open people we went on a journey to self through colours and pictures....how we saw ourselves, what we would change, how to accept what was within, how to manifest our dreams and most of all how to express who we were inside the skin we wear, however thick or thin that skin is...he showed me that we all have a pallet of colours within that just wants to create beauty.
As children we create without question, we draw pictures in the sand and decorate it with shells and seaweed...we stamp on it and start again.....we create love in everything that we do 'JUST BECAUSE' and as life moves on, we grow older, we grow 'wiser' and we stop creating that love....WHY?! It doesn't have to be this way.....
In 'Women Who Run With The Wolves' Clarissa speaks of how people have adopted a jaded view of wildness...the word 'wild' itself has changed from its original form of 'that which is in touch with nature and its surroundings' to something that is 'out of control and problematic' ...... with the change of perception that our wild self is only going to cause trouble for us...we bottle it up...and suffocate the self that creates....the self that leaps and reaches and crumbles....the self that finger paints water onto hot pavement.....the self that craves colour and movement.....the wild self....
Luke and his creative expression workshops opened up a world of colour for me. He guided me into the part of myself that sees my art as MY ART.....that just because my picture may not be 'legible' it does not mean it is not ART....it is an expression of what I hold within...its an expression of my wild self......and that in itself is beauty. He shared with me his world of self expression and the journey he had been through to find the candle he holds to his art...and why he wants so beautifully to light the candles of others with the flame he holds within.
With my candle lit he sent us out into the trees to find one we could draw.....and from my picture I saw so much more than just a picture of a tree...... From the base of this tree with its roots firmly planted deep into the earth it split into two branches that reached for the sky....and those two branches split into 4 branches...and those 4 branches split into 12 branches.....and as my vision took me up to the sky there were hundreds of leaves and branches swaying calmly in the breeze, playing with the suns rays.....Like us as humans, the tree is grounded on this earth, and as time goes on we grow, life experience creates more to us, each branch a new part of our self that grows with the ages, all adding to who we are. And in the end sometimes all we can do is stand connected to the earth and sway calmly in the breeze, play with the suns rays...breathe and create beauty from what we see through the art we hold within.
EarthyFae
xxx
