I Choose To Believe…..

As a teenager I would lie awake at night, trying to conjure up the mental imagination to invite my guardian-angel to appear. I was enchanted with the idea of having my own exquisite, celestial being, whose primary job it was to take care of me. I felt no fear, just a sense that this was my birth-right.  

I had too much of a wild imagination and with it, a family label of being a day-dreamer, and in those days that was something you kept quiet about.

William Blake said, “The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself” 

Angels still fascinate me. Just the thought of them gives me a comforting feeling. As I walk to my studio each day and stop to lift the barn-latch right by the entrance, I’m greeted with a beautiful charcoal picture of an angel, made by the Oxford based artist Tim Steward. It was a gift from him in 2012 and I will treasure it forever.

My time of self-reflection today has brought me to a place where I can see my need (a heart-bursting, eye-prickling, soul-longing need), to know that LOVE (or the angels) are with us always. That we are not alone in all the confusion and anxiety-inducing madness that we will see and possibly experience this year.

T.S.Elliot, in his poem The Four Quartets, urges us to ‘be still’ and ‘wait’, not for angels, not for governments to do the right thing, not for the perfect relationship, or a more prosperous life-style, but for our own inner wisdom to find us and for a belief in a death and re-birth in all things.

And what does that mean for me as an artist?

Ha-ha, yes, I thought you might ask! So, let’s bring all this back to the thing that I feel most passionately about. Creativity…. and our ability to heal ourselves through the process of making things that are uniquely US SHAPED.

I choose to believe in our ability to make and create remarkable things, just because we can.

I believe in the power of imagination, intuition and serendipitous happenings (that sometimes feels of the Divine), to excite and thrill our souls and make life meaningful.

And, I believe in our ability to make and maintain deep and beautiful connections with each other, that gives us the wings to change our bit of the world.  

Shalom

J x