At the retreat space I recently stayed in, there was an intriguing, almost Gothic front door. When it was open, and I looked from the dark inner room to the hot, tinder-dry bizarre-for-September landscape outside, it seemed more like a portal than most doors. (My own personal definition for this word is a metaphorical doorway from one reality to another.) Even though most of the work I did on retreat involved simply coming to terms with, and growing to love, who I am, a lot of that was looking backwards and gathering up, with tenderness, all the threads of my life, all my skills, all my passions, all my experiences. But it appears that when I left that building, and walked over the threshold the last time, I was "going through a portal" more powerfully than I realized. As recounted yesterday, the first step was a vague sense of needing to bring music and art into my creative efforts in a new way.
Today may mark the second step. Again, these thoughts are still quite unformed, but here they are. It is not just a case of somehow bringing together the music I love and the art skills I learned over thirty years ago. It isn't about "using" these older skills in a slightly newer expression, or maintaining the focus on a certain religious tradition, or painting tradition, or simply bringing all these influences together into one opus (although that was my first thought). It's not about making music in a traditional church (or cathedral, or concert hall) venue, or using art to portray today's external world.
My new creative endeavors will involve literally turning myself (and these skills) inside out, making them completely and intrinsically mine, reflecting as best as I can the values of the divine feminine. It will somehow involve taking media apart and re-presenting their sights and sounds, trying to illustrate my inner visions of the future. I realize that this isn't completely novel! Expressionist and visionary artists, and modern composers, have long brought the inner, "out".
But until now, I couldn't do that, I guess. I still felt that the traditions I emerged out of were too powerful to break away from or to "make my own". I was shackled to how things have always been done (strange for a girl who wanted to sing with the boys!) and what people might think of me if I strayed. What has changed in recent months? These extraordinary times, for one. Turning 69. And the process I've been through of releasing most of my old belongings. I loved my grandmother and her lessons on how to oil paint. But the other week, when her painting box (which I had left in a "free" pile by the side of the road) went to a new owner, I was so excited. When my mother's sewing box went, ditto! When most of my music books and CD's went to a university music department, ditto! Liberation. Loving one's history and gently letting go of most of its physical reminders = the portal.
As I've been writing this, it started raining for the first time in weeks and weeks!
