The Embodied Vessel Podcast
Podcast hosted by artist Loren Lewis Cole exploring themes around the vital necessity of artistic practice throughout the stages of our lives.
From the conversation on depression and the 'meaning crisis', to our desire to dance a dance that only we can dance, the importance of creativity, curiosity and play are more important than they've been for some time. As we approach an age of increasing technological enmeshment and disembodied information hoarding, craft and the dexterous skillsets allow us to glimpse an ancient kinaesthetic intelligence that can completely revitalise our lives.
Art is medicine. We create art to heal, we heal to create Art.
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Gorgeous cover image by @raynjermain , Ben Rayner
The Embodied Vessel Podcast
29 - Life itself is the sharing circle
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'To love anything, at any cost, is a bargain.' Wendell Berry
Some recent reflections on my own confusion around spirituality and the artistic path. Because Art is not seen as a path in many circles, I didn't trust my own gifts when I was young, and in an unconscious attempt to overcomplicate my life and do something more meaningful, I tried to do all manner of things, all of which left me depleted and uninspired.
Being on an artistic path, which includes of course anything we're bringing from our heart into the world- in craft of not, requires a level of rawness and vulnerability that leaves us feeling defeated on a daily basis.
This sense of being defeated I have come to realise, is in itself a spiritual experience, because what we're trying to do feels so immense, we grapple with vast currents of energy, and always fall short, and that is how it should be.
We transcend the limited individualist trauma culture of our times by stretching out into a vaster cosmology that includes wild beings not human not animal- whispers we feel but cannot truly see because when we focus on them they vanish. The slippery nature of the creative inspiration is in itself a frustrating and soulful experience.
In this way, the creative path brings us to our knees as well as to exalted states of wonder and connection, and a sense of feeling raw pervades. A full human being, not a perfectly healed or optimised human being.
The last two stanzas of 'The Man Watching', R.M.Rilke
When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers’ sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.
Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
–Translated by Robert Bly
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