Saturday, October 21, 2017

Artistic self-mastery

What is artistic self-mastery?  Enjoy these images illustrating some qualities of self-mastery in art from the Journey Oracle deck of divination wisdom cards available from my Etsy webstore.


One purpose of self-mastery is going into the blood pulse.  This means to evoke our creative soul, our guiding spirit, and go into a way of being in which an ongoing exchange of giving and receiving creative impulses are constantly available.


One mission of self-mastery is finding eloquence with which to give a gift.  As Lewis Hyde says of Walt Whitman, "Those who can express themselves in speech have been given that mysterious something, like the mouthpiece of a trumpet or the reed of a wind instrument, through which experience is transmuted into sound." With self-mastery we begin by taking in the gifts of deep experience and then bestow these gifts outward in a flow of gratitude.


One strategy of self-mastery is really seeing something.  When a fully lived experience passes deeply into us, it increases in both inner and outer meaning.


One gift of self-mastery is self-confidence. This is the state of climbing out and up into a clear space.  Not into haughtiness but to a way of being that is active, autonomous, self-contained.

Great experiences fracture the acceptable truths of how we imagine our lives.  When our imagination is awakened--as it will be by learning these qualities of  artistic self-mastery--revelation will emerge.