Whimsical musings of space

So these are the few initial spaces that help to make me feel that things are obtainable (regarding my musings below--that place we are heading...).  Living sculpture/sculpture for living from The Rural Studio Project: http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2008/ruralstudio/particulars.shtml--just a sampling of what these architects can do.  Can't you see modern monasticism for the artist alive and well within these walls?

That place we are heading...

I have been out walking. The morning clouds spilled into rains and yet the two little people and I wanted to encounter its thick fresh air, brush pass the voluptuous ferns along the roadside, and peer over the bridge on the off-chance we might see a trout napping in the shadows. The rains died down, and so the air gathered more a mist, gifting a subtle incubus of space and time, fragrant earth, and sweet sleep for the riders in the stroller.

And my mind stirs to surface the many things that are speaking-- This notion of community, and current lack thereof; the love of God synonymous with love of neighbor; the way that I, as a mother, can make a difference in my children’s lives while pointing the way to a semblance of heaven on earth; collective acts of creativity pooled out to overflowing in waters of collaborative space. The why, the grief, the longing--all beautiful arrows that once and still point to that greater dream and propel me to ask how to form the door that can open to this place. Is it foolish to hope? I know I am not alone—but how to take action and make change. What does it look like? How can it serve? How to form the forgotten dust of Eden to build such a dream? 

What is it this severing? Spliced lives in heavy balance of all the needs of the day. The unity of simplicity lost. The intimacy of spirit, the intimacy of love, the intimacy of simply breaking bread broken down and sitting shelved and mostly forgotten. The ways of this culture wheeling along but broken: from the minimal glories of success to the monumental loss of time to trivial pursuits that keep us from each other and from true intimacy, growth of being, and gifting of self. I question myself and why this longing runs so deep. Not simply a monastic desire, but here in this desired place of New Jerusalem there are families, children, single people committed to another way of day-to-day sustainability and life. Feed my spirit, feed my body, feed my mind and creativity—feed each other. Is this not also where we find God? And true love? And I am one of the blessed few who share deep love and commitment with my spouse. But that too didn’t come without loss, pain, and a severing of a previous attempt at marital love that failed. So what is it? Where is it? How to find it if it has not been discovered, and how to create it if it is yet unknown? 

I want to know.

I know now that I feel like a traveler without home. But the fact that my being yearns, like an older deeper instinct, makes me think it exists, if only yet formless. Perhaps one needs to learn more about the communities that St. Basil set forth—but for artists? Sometimes I am only too acutely aware of all the ways that it is unattainable. To love God is to go further, to take the narrow road that has not even been forged through the wood. But to have enough vision to see it illumined through the darkness, and hear the sound of song from its heart echoing back: to trust, to hope, to follow.

May we be brave enough to try. 

So along with the daily needs of the day we pray for the quickening of the reality of the Abbey. For heaven on earth, for Love that sustains and never fails, for beauty that illumines the Creator, for a place to call home in this passing, dying world.

The photos above are from The Rural Studio Project--innovative architects concerned about the nature of community and the beauty of form. I should have been an architect. They get me excited and thinking.