The history…..my journal raw broken notes as we build a monastery of angels and artists……
The ART chapel: A haven of integration of art and spirituality. Like a Labri for artists. Arts resources and creative exchange. An art monastery.
It’s not a dwelling unit it’s an Arts Chapel. Haven retreat connect create.
Offering workshops, retreats and arts sabbaticals, international arts events, film openings, poetry readings and book making workshops.
A place to be yourself through the arts.
It’s a modular space having mystics makers dreamers and great open dialogue. Teaching workshops, art therapy, art skills, excellence.
To haven artist a gallery house. Learning to live inside our metaphors. A spiritual autobiography.
An in the hood arts center, place of creative exchange and reflection refinement, integration.
A monastic arts and resources library.
Writerly space, contemplative, maker.
Active and contemplative.
A chapel for the arts. Like Rothko’s, but you can also linger in this chapel. Not a chapel TO the arts, but one of and from the arts. It is an angel come to earth, that you can dwell inside.
It’s not a home. It’s a chapel. And we need chapel’s these days!
Places to leave the everyday and step into an open heaven space and get vision in peace. Contemplative but active!
Not quite a home. Our main house is a home; the addition is more a sanctuary or monastery or chapel.
That welcomes the community into its belly or hearth just to BE.
It is a place where being can expand and feel safe enough to become.
Thanks to all the midwives who have helped us birth an angel. Their hands incarnated our prayers and vision!
It’s a metaphor you can dwell inside of.
Art for artists. But also a teaching of the symbolic imagination.
It has our DNA on it, but also is open to other’s. It is an open ended quest-ion.
But hopefully it expresses already the amount of truth we have known and loved.
That people matter, that art is an integral part of who we are. That we should feel safe enough to create and hear and explore our names together.
And that we need to be like kids to enter the Kingdom.
That the kingdom is filled with wonder and whimsical joy. That we can live inside those realities while here on this odd and beautiful earth.
This art house is a piece of art that holds many levels of Reality and what is possible. We hope it blesses for many generations to yet come!
It has been tiring to birth it—for two odd artists-but we pray worth it to bring God just fun pleasure and a bit of whimsy in His Long Day! That never ends.
Or maybe it will just be a mystery to many, like a great poem you can enter from many angles, and keep getting new lines depending on your season of life!
Either way, this building is art, and art is irreducible to simple categories or systems. It requires and encounter, and to the degree you enter that dialogue you will be transformed. And we will transform together. We pray!
Art’s function is as an invitation to encounter God. In new and unexplained ways. We hope this Art Monastery will allow for that conversation to occur for many!
Our house isn’t luxury, it’s fine art. Art is not a luxury.
We have met all the previous tenants on our property, even the little girls who are now in their upper 80’s. We got their blessing before building on. To respect the generations including those before, is basic Wisdom.
The house is like Gaudi in the sense that it will have unfinished aspects to be continued when we move in, and hopefully beyond. Like art, it is a conversation to enter, not a doctrine to agree to.
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She just wanted to make a house to haven her soul. Hers was lost when young, so I said yes; it nearly killed us both and could’ve broken us apart.
It didn’t only because God is One.
Yet, would I do it again, never in this life time. Did we make great art. That we did.
Did we make wonder and an open ended question of mystery beauty grace and other big words. They are all in the mortar by now, as long as that lasts.
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Forgive me for mocking you just wanting
To write our names on the cement before
It dried forever Love. Forgive me for my snottiness before we leave this earth my love. My friend, I was having a bad day
And forgot your little girl’s heart which lost the whole house. And here we are
Making a new one. That’s enough to write our names on any tree or house or life. Let’s write our names, and write them large like the word Love while here dear.
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The Art House is an expression not a mission. It is an expression of our identities and our identity together.
It is a symbolic poetic statement of our lives together.
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Have the mention the dogs we lost during building this haven for heaven and earth to meet, conjoin and confluence on another. As they have already crossed over dimensions and we are still here making a space they would’ve loved:
I always get dreams before my dog’s cross over into their world. With my first, I saw Jesus and He asked me to hand Him Freda’s tennis ball. I naturally said why? But handed it over. The next day Freda died. So I immediately knew He was playing ball with her. And what a better shepherd than me! It was strangely comforting.
Plus Shepherds like shepherd dogs!
