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Culture
An Artful Life
by Jesse Wolf Hardin
Art is surely among humanity’s most redeeming graces, moving beyond paintings on canvas to include the wondrous patterns of the natural world around us.
It’s far too easy to relegate art to those visible outer forms, to finished and salable products, rather than recognizing it as an ongoing process in which we play an essential role. What nearly all of us forget is the degree to which we can and should be participants in the artistry we’re immersed in. While we may consider ourselves spectators, we inevitably contribute awareness, experience and emotion to what is principally an exchange with a painting, the architecture that surrounds us, or the heavy-breathing clouds above our heads. We are said to be the only species capable of creating art, and yet we may also be the only life form ever to imagine itself outside the state-of-art.
But it was not always so. Not for the pale villagers of ancient Europe who left us the sculpted body of the archetypal Earth Mother, the bearer of all of life. And not for the first hominid inhabitants of New Mexico either. The ancient pueblo people left behind shards of painted pottery that continue to evoke the Great Mystery. These fired clay fragments of a life of honoring still vibrate with the energy of years of reverent touch. Carved out of their collective and individual souls, the people spoke their fealty for the land in rock paintings of lightning bolts and the seed-carrier Kokopelli on the sides of the caves. Here, too, are the forms of the artists’ fingers and palms: their signatures, the marks of their selves, in graphic hands reaching out to their descendants across the chasm of time. They left enduring images of their priorities and loves, their deities and dreams. It was their holiest expression of wonder and communion, the evidence of a marriage with place consecrated in timeless art.
The lover in us is a child that likes to draw, handle a sharp pencil, splash water colors or inhale the aroma of the turpentine and linseed oil that thins and binds the pigments to canvas. Vision can be as immediate as touch—direct and with no need of explanation. Like altar boys, we ready the vacant sheets of tree-flesh, then release our anima—our insistent healing life force—in a fountain of hue and variance, freed of all preconceptions about design and the takeover of meaning. One never really manufactures either adventure or art. We are confronted by it, consumed by it—and remade within it. It always has a purpose, one beyond the range of the artist’s intentions, and it is willingly given away. Here today and gone tomorrow, like golden cottonwood leaves. Like Tibetan sand paintings intricately crafted in this ever-shifting medium, definitive colors sure to blow across one another, mixing and blending until they are undistinguishable from the landscape from which they came. But then it’s not in the completion of some project that we become fulfilled; rather, it is in the making of our art and in the living of our lives that we’re made whole.
“The purpose of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but their inner significance,” Aristotle proclaimed. This is true for aesthetic forms that evolve without human influence, as much as for our “own” creations; for rivers and twisted cedar limbs, as well as the sculpture forming beneath the attentive motion of our tools.
Each glinting rock, each flex of river muscle is an inspiration to the heart and food for the soul. When allowed to express itself, art is what comes of the relationship between self and other. It is a complex and evolving structure to relate, exist and act within. With or without the artist’s brush, we reach out to make our mark from the center of our experience of art, of life, and of our mated land.
In the artist’s vernacular, our attention to form is called “style.” Once we’ve made art into a way of being, an action, a verb, we see the ways in which it corresponds to the word “grace,” which can mean a “seemingly effortless beauty or charm of movement,” “an excellence bestowed by God,” and “a prayer of thanksgiving.” In this sense of beauty, beneficence and gratitude, we impart grace to our acts, and in turn, are graced by the inspirited world we act upon and within.
Repetitive chores turn into art whenever they’re executed with style. They then become ritual concurrent with our conscious acknowledgment of their meaning and importance. The same acts completed without our mindful attention are simply habits. We don’t need to take time away from living to engage in ritual, so much as we need to ritualize our daily existence. Sitting up in bed each morning to face the first sun becomes a ritual, as soon as we’re conscious of it as an act of interpenetration and gratitude. The sharing of food moves from a quick refueling to a slow and artful unfolding, and then into ritual. As each serving is consecrated, every bite is undertaken as communion with the life forms that feed us, with the sun, rain and soil that made the salad possible, and with the spiritual/evolutionary power moving through both consumer and consumed.
The result is reconnection, as our art and practice weaves us back into the material of our experience. Together with the ritual efforts of others, we co-create the living fabric of culture, jointly painting on that fabric the story of our struggles, our miracles, and our beautiful hope.
Jesse Wolf Hardin is a teacher and founder of Animá nature-informed practice, which offers empowering online Herbal Tradition, Shaman Path and Path of Heart correspondence courses, as well as online counsel and healing consultations. You’re invited to the Animá Lifeways & Herbal School, an ancient place of power, for wilderness retreats, vision quests and events including the Shaman Intensive and 2010 Traditions in Herbalism Conference: Box 688, Reserve, NM 87830. For more information, visit animacenter.org, traditionsinwesternherbalism.org, or animacenter.org/blog.