Reliquaries and shrines

                                                                    
                                            

It has taken me a long time but I have finally come to the place where I view all art as spiritual.  Pretty art, frightening art.  Naive and sophisticated. Art that I just can't understand and want to walk away from and art that grabs me and sucks me in.  The stuff that gives me a headache and the other stuff that causes me to feel an ecstatic jolt of lightening through my chest. Art that makes me smile and art that makes me cry.  I don't like it all but I respect it all and what it took to make it.

All manner of people make art, happy, sad, bad and good people, creepy and cool people. Centered and broken people. Those full of unjust pain (and it's all unjust) that they just can't shake and those that say - I did.  People who boast of their skill and the others who are afraid that it's no good and the, thank God, lot that just do it.

It's all made by human beings (the elephant and monkey stuff doesn't count here) and human beings are what it's all about, becoming a full dualitied (i just made that up) human being.  Being it all...being. I don't want to rise above it and I don't want to escape it, I want to BE it, human, fully. Otherwise, what the fuck are we doing here?

I'm just, Liv. And that's just what I've figured out for myself.

I'm realizing now that a lot of the art I make often has an edge of "religiosity". You couldn't drag me into a religion.  But the smell of benediction, the whole divine mother thing and all the pretty stuff associated with it, yeah, I really like that stuff. I go to it a lot and it makes me feel good and it has meaning to me.  I think that mostly it brings the feeling of comforting, because it was the place that I could go to and get a little bit of that and escape the shitty, scary other stuff.  I had somewhere to run to.

I was looking at some of the art that I make the other day, especially the ones with the little place for prayers,  the Mary stuff and the Quan Yin things  (what more could you ask for, the goddess of mercy and compassion - I need a lot of that!) and the shrine/reliquary that I keep in my house and it made me ponder what it all means for me.

The Reliquary  The Shrine

Repositories and reminders and places of remembrance

reality checks, places of reverence and
spots at which to pay respect's and rest stops

places at which to take responsibility
and places to repent

places that inspire and respond to ritual

They hold the vast and deep darkness and the light
requested or received
our fears, our pain and the hope of relief
and the beloved

Reliquaries and Shrines help us to bring forth 
all that sleeps within us. 
  
©
                                                                        

                                         in my home with a drawer beneath for prayers



geez, still with the big and little - I can not figure this out....