Deep

"What do you see?"
"What do you think?"
"What do you wonder?"

Last week was busy. Among other things, I took an intensive class in arts integration offered by the Alameda County Office of Education Art is Education program linked to the California College of Art in Oakland.-- Arts integration is a fancy term for the art of connecting the arts to everything else you can think of. And yes, art does. This field of study results in amazing intellectual bursts, aptly demonstrated by the talented leaders of the course.

I have too much to do to make this blog entry a detailed report, and anyway, that would be done more effectively by the printed handouts from the course, taught brilliantly by Tana Johnson and Julia Marshall. I just have a few kind of sidelong impressions as I look back at the week.

The three questions at the top of the page are part of it, but not all. Those questions are a short way of reminding me to stand back from what I'm doing or experiencing and respond like an observer or scientist. Or artist. Or learner. I want to live my life "in the moment," but some of those moments I want to expand on, by knowing what I'm seeing, thinking, feeling, wondering.

But something else is going on here. Part of the structured activity was creating our own avatar or mythological creature with special abilities/powers. When it came to creating a graphic story (cartoon to my generation), after all the preliminary steps, something happened in my heart. When I looked at the one page I'd created, with figures and dialogue bubbles on blue and purple backgrounds, I thought someone else had looked into my psyche and interpreted it with Jung standing by. To my near-tears amazement, the "comic" was about a mother avatar and her little girl avatar, who was thirsty and had to wait for dream time. A mythical blue sheep appears in the final box, alongside a tilted little avatar, who says, "ummm. (Sigh)" The metaphors in this simple activity reached deeper than I can say without telling you my life story. Soul deep.