Working on hobbies is not selfish activity, it's a blessing

Creative hobbies are good for your health and mental well being. Here is a list of hobbies that are wonderful for stress relief. It is important to take time out to do something just for the fun of it. We live in a society that worships accomplishment. It's okay to do something creative and enjoyable.

http://stress.about.com/od/funandgames/tp/hobby.htm

It is not selfish to engage in a hobby. It benefits the whole family when you are less stressed. I set my timer for one hour a day and work on my painting. Sometimes when my preschooler is at home from school I split it up into two thirty minute sessions. It takes me a long time to finish a large painting.....many months. But just leave the painting out on the easel, and leave your tools out in the open so you can grab a minute here and there.

Many times my three children and I paint together as a family. I sometimes pick up large pieces of plywood or doors that construction workers are discarding, and my children and I do a joint project together.

Don't feel guilty for bringing your talents to fruition. God gave them to us for a reason. My mother loved to sew. I remember how comforting it was to hear her sewing while I was working on my homework. One time she sewed outfits for an entire choir for one of my sisters performances. I was so impressed with her work. I was happy to see my mother working on her hobbies. It did not take away from the care she gave to us at all.

I was not interested in sewing at the time, but she taught my oldest sister Donna to sew, and my sister still sews today. My oldest sister made many of my clothes when I was growing up because we were a family of eight, and my father was a blue collar worker. But she was doing it for fun, and it ended up being utilitarian after all. But sewing just for the sake of sewing, painting just for the sake of painting, and gardening just for the sake of gardening is GOOD. Remember the scripture about Martha and Mary.

My mother stayed home with us even though it would be financially hard on us, and I'm happy she did. My mother also used to love to draw and we would all draw together on the dining room table. I have to hand it to my mom for all of the patting on the back she gave me when I worked on creative projects. She still tells me how proud she is of me. She is in her seventies now. She no longer sews because of her arthritis. I'm glad she did it while she could.

Appolinaire wrote the epitaph written on the painter Rousseau's tombstone.

"We salute you
Gentile Rousseau you can hear us
Delaunay his wife Monsieur Queval and myself
Let our luggage pass duty free through the gates
of heaven
We will bring you brushes paints and canvas
That you may spend your sacred leisure in the
light of truth
Painting as you once did my portrait
Facing the stars"

The election....

I am so upset that so many christians are voting pro-choice this election, ignoring the scriptures, the teaching of the church since the beginning, (it's in the Didache as well not to abort the child of your womb), and ignoring the many voices of the clergy and pastors and laity across america that are speaking out against this evil.

The baby is not your body, it is a seperate human being created by God. It exists for a purpose and God has a plan for every child. How can a christian call themselves a christian, yet destroy the Genesis of the creation of a human being in the sanctuary of the womb.

I am so distraught that christians are following the instructions of Oprah and these other celebreties instead of Jesus. It is not about ourselves and our comfort. Once a human being is conceived, that is the work of God from then on. You do not have the right in God's eyes to kill what he has created.

I am ashamed of my fellow christians who are going around telling people that Obama is pro-life despite the overwhelming evidence coming out of his own mouth, and his voting record, and his continued participation with Planned Parenthood, and organization founded by Margaret Sanger with a plan for ethnic cleansing and reduction of the numbers of minorities who she called 'human weeds'.

Any library will show you the evidence of what she has said about the 'genetically unfit' and the programs by her organization targeted at the minorities and the poor.

They make over a billion dollars profit every year from killing babies. 350 million of our tax dollars goes to support this activity despite the consciences of those who believe in the sanctity of human life. You are taking our money and turning it into blood money.

How can you vote pro-choice and then wash your hands on the ensueing activity that happens as a result of your vote. Your hands are NOT washed. The blood of the innocent is on your hands when you participate in progressing that activity, and also when you refuse to act to prevent it.

Look up information on Planned Parenthood, Eugenics, and the Negro Project. This stuff is real. How can you turn a blind eye to the targeted seduction and extermination of races and classes of human beings that God created.

Human Freedom and Artistic Creativity

I found an interesting thread of thought in a book I'm reading called "A Wounded Innocence"

In the last chapter, I sketched what the theological dimension of a work of art might look like. The theological dimension of a work of art, I proposed, encompasses both the religious and the spiritual dimensions by giving religious insight into the need and way of salvation. As such, a work of art has spiritual kinship to a sacrament. I said little, however, about the spiritual nature of the experience of a work of art. Modern aesthetics approaches such experience as either the interior subjectivy of a beholder or the inventive expressiveness of the artist. As such, the artistic experience, in modern terms, has an intrinsic dualism. Either one can speak of the experience of the beholder or the or the experience of the artistic process. There is little room to speak of both as one integrated experience. That is unless you are a Camaldolese monk.

Arthur Polin is a hermit. Rather, he is a part of a community of monks that have a hermit tradition, the Camaldolese. As such, Fr. Poulin is best described as a hermit-monk. The reader might find it strange, however, to see a work of art by a hermit-monk to extol the virtues of the communal dimension in art. Aren't hermits rugged individuals who go off by themselves in order to avoid community? The answer to this last question is "No.". At least, the answer is "No" for Camaldolese hermit-monks. For Arthur Poulin is a member of the Camaldolese Order that has its roots in the monastic reforms initiated by St. Romuald in the eleventh century.

These monastic reforms included the recogntion that the common life of a monk and the solitary life of the hermit need and sustain each other. As such, the Camaldolese hermit-monk gives an alternative vision of how one can be a "rugged" individual without forsaking community. And it is this twin dimension of individual and community that has proved fertile for Arthur Poulin's artistic creativity. This chapter explores Arthur's artistic method in the context of the Camaldolese community that has proved fertile ground for his aesthetic visions. As such, and insight into the theological dimension of art will become evident. The theological dimension of art involves the commingling of two freedoms which finds analogy in the mingling of the freedom of the individual and the demands of a community.

St. Romuald's little rule, however, allows us a view of the spiritual that will, I believe, give us another religious insight into the nature of the artistic experience. To see this, one must take a deeper look at the nature of artistic freedom and its spiritual dimension. Aesthetic nominalism, as the last chapter demonstrated, demands of the artist a certain kind of creative freedom that approaches the absolute creative freedom attributed to God. The demands of such absolute freedom, moreover, tends to alienate the artist from the wider community, and, even worse, from art itself. It is well, then, to contrast this absolute creative freedom to the freedom of the hermit as suggested in St. Romuald's little rule.

Being a hermit, after all, speaks of al powerful freedom. The Camaldolese hermit seeks freedom from illusions, his own as well as those from the world outside his cell. This freedom, however, is not freedom from the world, that is a fuga mundi. It is a more complex liberty. At stake in the little rule of St. Romuald is the possibility of self-transcendence. Self-transedence, hoever, is not the result of some absolute exercise of human freedom. Self-transcendence is sought as a gift, a meal brought to the chick by its mother. Indeed, self-transcendence is sought in the meeting of two freedoms, the hermit's human freedom of God's Divine Freedom. The poweful freedom of the hermit is found in his willingness to be shaped and formed by the gracious art of Divine Freedom.

As such, St. Romuald's little rule reveals a profound insight into the spiritual nature of artistic freedom. Human freedom emerges from and finds its fulfillment in Divine Freedom. This insight is not unique to St. Romuald. An ancient analogy exists between God as Creator and an artist's creativity that serves as a model for the relationship between human and Divine freedom. Indeed, John Paul II in his Letter to Artists calls artists the "image of God the Creator." This anology notes the difference between Creator God and creative artist. God the Creator alone has absolute freedom in creating. God the Creator "bestows being itself" while the creative artist "uses something that already exists, to which he gives form and meaning".

An artist's work ultimately becomes a sign of this relationship between God's creative freedom and the artist's human freedom. Just as the hermit struggles with his own freedom in order to receive a greater one, the artist also struggles with his own freedom in order to receive a greater one, the artist also struggles with his or her own freedom in the presence of an awesome and absolute Divine Freedom. As such, the work of art reveals much about the artist's struggle with his or her own freedom. This struggle is given vision in the artist's PERSONAL STYLE. It is for this reason that even in the 30,000-year-old paintings at Lascaux, one can sense the struggles and hopes of souls unknown to us but now expressed in the creative way those ancient artists depicted the animals that were so much a part of their way of life.

Aesthetic nominalism, on the other hand, so emphasizes the freedom of the artist to create that the ultimate expression of the artist's work is freedom itself rather than an actual work. Indeed, so emphasizing the freedom of the artist over the constraints inherent in a concrete work of art destroys the very nature of creativity. And with the demise of creativity, so goes the spiritual element in a work of art. For creativity involves both struggle and vision. The artist not only struggles creatively with the constraints of the medium of his and her art in order to give expression to the vision. The artist must also struggle with the constraints of his and her own personality. As such, the struggle is not simply one of solving a technical puzzle, for example which colors do I mix in order to get this shade of green? But, rather, it is also a struggle for a vision that is enextricably, intrinsically spiritual. This can be clearly seen in Poulin's Christmas Night at the Hermitage.

Taken from pages 46-47 on the artistic theology of Poulin:

....all monks, recognize in the natural beauty of the surroundings the originas of their own spiritual journey. Contemplation of natural beauty leads the monk ever deeper into the depths of the human spirit. It is as if in the beauty of nature, the monk finds something of himself, a beauty that belongs to the depths of his humanity. For Fr. Poulin such contemplation strikes up the fire of creativity, a creativity made possible not only in the hermit life but in participating in the common, shared memories of his community. As such Poulin has developed an artistic style that is quite UNIQUE.

...He sums up his technique as "the one that makes up the many." It is a "weaving," balancing approach to painting. His approach is different. "You know Alex, he said to me, "all of life begins with one dot." Each brushstroke to him is like the mustard seed, with the potential to explode. The "dot" is very special to him, "very powerful." It is the potentiality implied in the "dot," the potential to blossom into this unified whole like the "mustard seed," that strikes Arthur Poulin as powerful. For Poulin, his paintings begin with this HOPE implicit in the mustard seed, that is, the hope that when you plant it, it will grow.

Indeed, Poulin begins every work by painting layer after layer of black gesso until an image begins to emerge. The process reminds him of Michelangelo's own process. Michelangelo felt that his job was not the making of an image but the RELEASING of an image already there in the marble. It reminds me of the ascetic process of the hermit that intends to EMPTY the self of all desires and images so that God begins to fill the emptiness with images that transcend the resources of the hermit. Black gesso for Pulin is also symbolic of creativity. He doesn't make it easy on himself. He sees every painting as a spiritual journey and he has to respect the creative process as such and let it unfold as he journeys with it. In fact, his final work is often very different from his original intention. Art, he finds, is a revelation to the artist himself. Something from deep down inside is expressing itself. As such, art, he feels, is a burden and a responsibility. In the early stages of a painting, the faith dimension predominates where one hopes for things unseen. As such it is the burden of the prophet, the giving birth to something new. In this artistic process, he sees the embodiment of Meister Eckhart's description of the mystical experience.: If the sould wants to know something about itself, it projects itself out, and THEN ENTERS IT'S PROJECTED SELF.

Here is some of Poulin's work I found online....it's very soothing and peaceful !

www.themonthly.com/previous/2006/03-06.html