Conversation I Gave at Carmel Valley Community Chapel, Sunday, September 27, 2009

WE ARE HERE TO CREATE AND LOVE

Iris Brewster

Good Morning.

I think I was last up here about 6 years ago or maybe less, but it has been awhile. Rick has asked me to do this a couple of times and I was able to dissuade his charm, This time he had a cancellation, I felt sorry for him, what can I say. That and George Wilson taunting and challenging me with, “You are resisting.”

So, if I am boring or meandering you now know who to blame.

The theme of my conversation with you today is, ‘We are here to create and love’.

Clay and dance have been an integral part of creation and of love. This came to mind by the recent death of Patrick Swayze.

When I heard the news of his death I went back in time to two of my favorite film experiences; Dirty Dancing and Ghost.

I love the way my mind went from Patrick Swayze’s death, to reliving the experiences of seeing each film for the first time and revisiting two very poignant scenes and messages each film had conveyed to not only me but I suspect to many of you as well. There are distinct quotes from each film that made an impression on me.

From, Dirty Dancing there was the famous line, when Johnny says, “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.” In the closing minutes of "Dirty Dancing," after Swayze's character, Johnny Castle, had been fired from his dance instructor job for daring to have a relationship with a debutante member of the club where he worked, he came back during the club's end-of-the-season annual event to give his final performance. He walks up to Baby's family, seated around a table and utters those powerful words to her father before taking her up on the stage to show his true passion and respect for her in the form of dance, as her mother holds daddy back and keeps him quiet.

From, Ghost, there was a strong moment in the film just at the end when Swayze’s character Sam, was describing to his living fiance what it was like to be on the other side, just before moving on. He looks at Molly and says, “It's amazing, Molly. The love inside, you take it with you."

In the film Ghost, Molly as an artist and Sam as a Wall street Yuppie meld into each other when they sat together at her potter’s wheel and got lost in the clay creating something from their love.

Synchronicity happens when the universe conveys its approval of an action or a decision you make, it affirms it by bringing a person that leads you to pertinent

information or an article that reminds you of a pivotal book that revolutionized your way of thinking.

Funny how that works.

From Patrick Swayze, to two films with important lines, to a friend sharing her notes from a workshop she is taking with Angeles Arrien, emphasizing creativity and love, to an article about the 25^th anniversary of Matthew Fox’s, Original Blessing, whose theme on co-creatorship, lead me to the theme of this conversation with you.

Mathew Fox writes, “Like God, we need to create.” Hildegard of Bingen, (1098-1179), a remarkable visionary and learned wombman of her time and a personal shero of mine, explained that God holds a passion for us, and how this passion is meant to “serve all the world” through our creative work. She had visions. She wrote, ” With my mouth,” God says, “I kiss my own chosen creation, I uniquely, lovingly, embrace every image I have made out of the earth’s clay. With a fiery spirit I transform it into a body to serve all the world.” p/184

You and I have a purpose, a purpose that has the potential to create nurturing, enriching and constructive communities from the most painful and

fear filled times we live by infusing it with the spirit of love.

We are here to create and love.

No matter what life has to offer us, we have the potential to take what Matthew Fox named Via Negativa, (the negative, the shadow side) and transform it through Via Creativa, ( creating and birthing) into Via Positiva, (the positive, light) and What Angeles Arrien in her book. The Second Half of Life, calls, “the need to bless those who challenge us to love more fully, for they are great teachers who show us when we are open-hearted and close-hearted, full-hearted or half-hearted, and strong hearted or weak hearted in our relationships. The shadow side of the open heart is closed heartedness.” P.7

We are here to create and love.

In his book, The Invincible Embrace Beauty, by John O’Donohue (on my top 5 list of inspirational books- 1. The Phenomena of Man, Teilhard De Chardin; 2. Matthew Fox, Original Blessing; 3. Eva Piarrakos, The Pathwork of Self Transformation; 4. John O’Donohue, The Invisible Embrace Beauty; 5. Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open), he writes,” The two longings deepest in your heart-the longing to love and to be loved-are not merely psychological needs; at a more profound level,

they are the stirring of God within you. Your capacity to care is God; it is your beauty.” P. 225

We are here to create and love.

Creativity has a source in a holy place. As O’Donohue tells us, “Creativity is holiness”. What we have dreamt, have left unfinished, transforms itself into experience, because we are constantly transforming. Every human experience we have that has as its only outcome, love, is a creative experience.

Even when you think you are set in your ways, change happens, and as the saying goes, “This too shall pass.” The individual imagination becomes part of a community of spirit. We as individuals create family, a circle of friends, a network of business contacts, a spiritual community and an outreach to those with similar interests. Thus the holy becomes active in our lives because we are not our own source of imagination. The source of our imagination is elsewhere. It resides with Spirit.

We are here to create and love:

When we experience tragedy, loss and betrayal, our beings bend over from the pain that hits our solar plexis. In my own life, I know that once I created the space for the pain to be present and that I was willing to

be an instrument of love rather than live in a haze of bitterness and resentment, the pain became

transformative and a never ending gift of love and compassion for another’s pain, another’s sorrow.

We are here to create and Love.

I am an artist, a poet, a writer, and a scholar. I am so in love with my partnership with the source of creation that it has led me to a place of peace and fearlessness. BUT I also know you do not have to be an artist, a poet, a writer to create. The very breath you are taking now is a partnership with the Holy and if each breath carries love and compassion you are an artist upon the world canvas of humanity.

We are here to create and Love

Living in this Paradise, near the sea we have access to

being a witness to the original primal conversation. A primal conversation that John O’Donohue describes, “the meeting of ocean and shoreline must be one of the places where earth almost breaks through to word.” P.116

What a delicious phrase to digest!

Words and the expression of words creates a picture between the reception of the word and the image it will convey to and within you can also be a powerful tool of

connecting the divine spark within us to the infinite possibilities of divine design.

And so I would like to conclude this conversation by leading us in a very lovely and useful exercise, introduced by the practice of Buddhism, and Eckhart Tolle’s teachings, which brings the co-creator out in you and places love at its original source, you:

Amidst the media frenzy focusing on all that causes a sense of universal melancholy, fear, panic and even apathy there is a space you and I can create and counter point with. I would like to ask you to take a moment, right now, to close your eyes, and take a slow deep breath counting to 5 and slowly exhale counting to 5. Allow your awareness to go to the center of your body and with your awareness create a space outside and directly in front of you; in that space put the bill you can’t pay, the sorrow that pulls at your heart, the heart break a child, parent is experiencing or you are experiencing your self, the fear that is keeping you from living life fully. Let your awareness acknowledge whatever is in that space, surround it with light and surrender it, acknowledging with gratitude that the highest outcome is already in place. Embrace the space you created with your goodness and feel the difference in the center of your being.

Open your eyes. Blessed Be.

Create and Let Go

As a little girl I was drawn to the canvas of blue above me, a painter's palette of whites, watching the divine sky walk artist create and let go. As a little girl I only had a small seed of recognition of a divine artist. I loved lying on my back and watching the myriads of shapes and expressions that drifted across my mind's eye. I also loved how it all changed in a blink of my eye.

As I grew older, looking up into the blue sky allowed me to escape, to muse, to ultimately allow my growing imagination to embrace the divine artist and co-create mind upon ether. The process taught me to go deep within and surrender the images unto paper and canvas.

Matthew Fox, in his Original Blessing , which is celebrating its 25th anniversary, introduced me to the concept of co-creatorship, that I am a living vibrant prayer of divine energy! What a revolutionary concept that was to embrace and contemplate. It also offered me an affirmation of the incredible joy I would feel getting lost in the creation of a poem or art.

Now, as I enter the second half of my life, sharing the day this picture was taken with a girlhood friend, I looked at this sky, with the deft slices of cloud strokes and my inner being responded to the clarity and simplicity of the sky above me. I became one with the clean, zen like, upward movement of slices of cloud and suddenly I understood. The motion between the divine creator within and the beauty of the present moment were one and the same. And it is goodness embraced by a lifetime of experience.