I was fascinated by all of it. The sounds of the theater and the audience, their rapture when a play took over and moved them and held them quietly… When the audience was truly moved, it was absolutely quiet. They were in a communion because they were learning the truth about themselves.
This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don’t have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn’t have the specific ritual you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet.
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.
A wound in the soul, coming from the rending of the spiritual body, strange as it may seem, gradually closes like a physical wound. And once a deep wound heals over and the edges seem to have knit, a wound in the soul, like a physical wound, can be healed only by the force of life pushing up from inside.
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
We are our ancestors. The spiritual umbilicus is apparent to all. The dead look upon us with the pure love of a mother’s gaze. But the dead love us even more because of our flawed flesh and eternal confusion. The removal from form allows for total and complete unconditional love. We carry our dead with us like helium balloons. There is no breaking the umbilicus.
― Tanya Tagaq, Split Tooth
What is it about the Heavens that draws us to look up? For generations, centuries, (millennia?) it seems we are drawn to look up for answers, comfort in times of despair, with pleas for help, when we are in need of grace, and to give thanks.
―
But we modern demiurges are prolific copyists; we give few things souls of their own. Locomotives, with their close resemblance to beasts, may be the great exception; but in nearly all else with which today’s poor humans are filling the world, I see a quelling of the numinous, an ashening of the fire of life. We are making an inert world; we are building a cemetery. And on the tombs, to remind us of life, we lay wreaths of poetry and bouquets of painting. You expressed this very condition, when you said that art beautifies life. No longer integral, the numinous has become optional, a luxury – one of which you, my dear friend, are fond, however unconsciously.
―K.J. Bishop, The Etched City
Your body is away from me,
but there is a window open
from my heart to yours.
―Rumi
Aboriginal “Alien” Cave Art © Waltzing Van with CCLicense
Man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage.