Yep! Two of my very favorite words… and another related one which seems pretty important, just now. Conditioning. As in, air!
Here’s an example… I am enormously conscious that our context is chaotic, and the ailing air conditioner doesn’t help with logical thought!!!
I’ll spare you the heat wave bit. Except for the part where, as part of the context, it may make certain things feel more important. Like climate change, perhaps!
Here’s another way to think about it… borrowed from Stephen Covey, who designed a schema for decision making which looks like this:
The way I learned it, any one issue or option meets two of these four criteria… Important/Not important and Urgent/Not urgent. And, often, people with different agendas have trouble agreeing on which two!!!
To stick with our current example of air conditioning, on a day when the high in Atlanta is 99 degrees F, and it’s still pollen season, it feels both important and urgent, to me.
A climatologist might have a different opinion… more big picture. (That’s why we’re going with the new system that “decides” how much energy it needs at the moment, which isn’t a good technical explanation but makes more sense than moving to Nova Scotia where – by the way – it’s recently been that hot, too.)
And, if you’ve been reading along for more than a week or two, you’ve already figured out that my frequent communing with MSNBC is part of the context that helps me make choices about the urgent/important questions.
Painting also helps me make some of those choices! Several of the journeys I’m on in this moment have to do with notions of Divinity and the stories that were true before the stories we learned were true were true. (No typos… all intentional!)
Here’s an example… when I was in Middle School, a person who truly meant to be helpful told a group of young women that we’d go to hell if we read the horoscope column in the newspaper.
Now, I’m still a really long way from an expert, but I’ve learned that star constellations can be really helpful! (Though I’ll admit to being thankful for the compass onboard when I was helping to sail a boat through the Bermuda triangle at midnight, during a huge lightning storm!)
And I love constellations as visual symbols in my art. Like the one in the photo we began with, which I learned from reading a legendary conversation between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien! Pegasus, in the biblical book of Revelation. Winged horses… not well trained regular horses, but whole new creatures!
Did that conversation really happen? Who knows! Is it helpful? I’m going with yes!!!
All of which seems to suggest that, in this world, at this moment, consciousness in context matters. A lot! As does intention!
Then, this bee, who appeared on my current #Animystica painting, reminded me of a story I think is hugely important in these days. It has to do with honey.
Stay tuned!
ps… one of the books which insisted that books are vessels, too, and showed up in last year’s #Apothecary painting, goes with this conversation about consciousness and context! Alice Hoffman’s The Dovekeepers. Now might be a really good time for this particular story! And the Hebrew word in the palm of the handprint means Here I am! (Actually, now could be a really good time for any of them!!!)
