Friday, March 11, 2011

Serendipity

I’ve been told I walk with my head in the clouds, and so it must be true. I am wasted by a buttercup; I hold the bus for one last look at a piece of broken glass. I listen for the poetry of rustling leaves, notice a lover’s knot in a willow tree, follow the sound of a Tibetan folk song and discover a conclave of retirees singing in a grove of bamboo. Their maestro dances the time with a white silk shawl draped over his arms like an offering to God. It seems whenever I walk out the door, strange beauty assails me.


Julia Cameron, in her book The Artist’s Way, prefers to call it “synchronicity” - a supernatural event or creative catalyst presenting to artists when they are open to see it happen. At least that’s how I interpret her idea. So I watch with intent; I listen with purpose; I look for the sublime, even if it is rusting metal buried in green, green grass.

 
In High School, I once lived in the town of Colorado Springs near a street named Carefree which dead-ended onto a circle named Serendipity. I have loved that word ever since for it is far more lilting on the tongue and in the mind than coincidence or Cameron’s synchronicity. The timing of those years in Colorado also dove-tailed with my spiritual awakening at the age of fifteen when I looked to the mountains and realized there had to be a God and only He could help me navigate this hard, strange world. I saw the morning light dawn on that snow-dusted Pike‘s Peak as I perched at the foot of the mountains in a glen of wind-hewn rocks that towered as ships and shapes and tunnels of time. And that first Easter of my new faith, as I saw the sun rise in that sacred place, watched the light paint lavender and roses and lily white on the grey morning clouds, I witnessed the God of creation, the God of resurrected life, make art that morning and I have hungrily looked for his art ever since.


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