Ahhhhh….the wisdom of not knowing, yes…perhaps the greatest gift of age. “Very little makes sense to me these days…” she says. The world is crazier and crazier than I ever could have imagined. How will we navigate these atrocities to our collective soul? The only way I know to be is curious.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse reminds me to change my inner language, to think like a child again. The Lakota language does not contain nouns. There are no words to define us, only verbs. We are all in a state of becoming. I require constant reminding of this. I do know how to live intuitively. Fifty-five years of working with the tarot has helped with that; I hate to think where I’d be without it. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Simple, not easy.
Intuition is the only thing that ever saved me. It is intregal to the creative process. I’ve said for decades that “ultimately, it is the artists who will save us.” It is. The writers, the painters, the musicians, those who live intuitively. Einstein knew it. The stoics knew it. Toni Morrison knew it: “Your life is already artful – waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.”
It’s not too late and I am not too old. Bonnie Garmus published her first novel at the age of sixty-five. After 98 rejections. She knew something and didn’t back away from what she didn’t know. Julia Cameron teaches the wisdom of not knowing in her series The Artist’s Way. It’s a system for creative recovery – not a how to on being an artist. It’s not about producing a thing, a product, a finished piece! It’s about learning to live like a child again. Vulnerable. Curious. Open-hearted. Available to intuition – to hearing the divine speaking within you.
“…forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in…” Leonard Cohen wrote in his brilliant Anthem.
“…the less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine.” – Indigo Girls
A Painterly Home 