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The Artist as Healer


Previously in Series:The Artist as MysticThe Artist as StorytellerThis is the third post in a series addressing the need I believe our species and this planet has for creative people to return the spirit of sacred service to the arts. In the previous post, The Artist as Storyteller, I submitted that if a mythos is a story we are telling ourselves, consider the artists, scientists, and innovators of all types to be the storytellers, regardless of the medium of expression.What story do we want to tell ourselves as a species? Are we telling that story now? What is our mythos prognosis?Joseph Campbell often referred to the mythological state of our current times as being surrounded by a

Comments (2)
wildbank's picture
Posted by Charles Wildbank
In digesting this as well as many of the posts of Intent, I am feeling more that all Life is paradox, a fable for the sake of continuing into Time. Another paradox is when I say I am an artist, have I implied that there are others who are NOT? We are all creators! I am also feeling that the body has a similar correspondent as a thought, assuming just like the mind, it has to fight or flee to remain integral and infection free?! This is alot of cellular warfare and drama! An artist can romanticize all that. I am already feeling that the grand enlightenment would only result in all matter dissolving back into where War and Peace meet and Light and Dark are One. Come to feel that trend! All of you have been most generous of yourselves. Thank you! Charles
Rod's picture
Posted by Rod Wunsch
I see all to often in Art a self expression that is devoid of Health, Wealth, and Progeny. Without stepping on the toes of Campbell's genius, it seems to me that when Art is in alignment with Health, Wealth, and Progeny it is beautiful and tells an integral story that repeats generation after generation as in a Mona Lisa, the Pieta, or Starry Night - which speaks truthfully to one's inner mystery. I find a great deal of art today telling stories that are mental, self-absorbed, and dislodged from the heart displaying sickness, poverty, making the artwork itself a rather feeble progeny. Isn't the higher purpose an alignment with Well Being, Abundance, and Creation and the opposites of those qualities as they will surely appear too. One must say, " Yes to Life as it is," as Campbell said. I'm no doubt missing the context of praying to the lesser or false gods of Health, Wealth, and Progeny but unless artists and the culture at large aligns with the qualities, the essences, the highest means of those values then all we are left with is the moraine of dysfunction, scarcity, and, perhaps, extinction. It is after all a certain identification with the power, the glacial force and not the moraine that is healing. The moraine is a by-product and beautiful in it's own right from the glacial perspective...There is not one without the other. When the moraine (so to speak) is conscious enough to allow the glacial force to act upon it without resistance then it is ground into fertile soil capable of life bearing fruit.