New direction...

I feel like I'm starting off in a new direction - both with my life and my art.  I've been reading about the connection of art with beauty.  There's a very interesting speech that Alexandr Solzhenitsyn gave in acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature in 1970 - in which he quotes Dostoevsky:  "Beauty will save the world."

It makes me want to try to create something as breathtakingly beautiful as I can.  I am bombarded by breathtaking beauty on this river every day.  And as Kendyl Biggons wrote in her article Primal Reverence, (UU World, Summer 2012)  in these types of encounters with the beauty of nature "Something within us unlatches and expands in that immensity, catching some hint of our finitude…the sovereign beauty of so much overwhelming space and light and sound."

I'm curious to see what happens next...

Here's the sunrise the world offered up this morning.

-later- On second thought, once you start telling yourself that you have to make something breathtakingly beautiful the pressure is on and all of the creative juices dry up!  Too high a bar to set… for me, the better approach is to start playing with the paint and seeing what happens - need to keep things fun, and then try to recognize the beauty when it happens and let it flow…it doesn't come from me, just through me...