I am flooded with information, new connections and ideas. The internet is my athanor, the alchemical furnace that supports transformation. Everything, including this rainy day, conspires to make me feel like jumping out of my skin with excitement for this delicate, powerful experience of living.

As you know who follow this blog, I’m on fire because of the online art course, BIG, that I just completed. Luckily, the inspiration grows because of the Facebook tribe for all the BIG painters who have gone before me.

Hali has inspired me with her Art as Prayer project.  I intend to participate and maybe you’ll be drawn to do that too.

Then a video made by friends of another Fearless artist moved me with their artistic message for re-imagining our lives.

My own first attempt at presenting a slide show about Ecstatic Postures and mounting it on YouTube makes me laugh now that I have read the book, PresentationZen by Garr Reynolds. I can’t wait to redo the powerpoint with zen in mind!

And then, and then I’m powerfully inspired to create a new video to answer the question lodged in my soul: What is the ALL that I want to leave behind for my descendants?

Immediate answer: My love for living on this miraculous, mysterious, flourishing earth.

And then here comes Theodore Richards and his book Cosmosophia.

I began reading it two months ago and it is so full of deep thoughts and dense information, a global overview of religious traditions and early cosmologies that I stumbled and put it aside. I returned a few days ago and along about page 161 and Chapter Nine I started shouting Yes, Yes, YES. Dog eared page after page. I couldn’t keep up with writing notes to myself in the back. My book has actually changed shape with all those dog ears. I can’t imagine Kindle ever being so sensually gratifying!

Richards begins and ends the book with the womb, many wombs actually. I find that riveting because they relate to an epiphany in my own life. I have written several books, though never published. I’ve begun the “same” book three times now and was looking for inspiration in the Spring of 2008. I asked for a dream. And I got one – a huge one that relates to being truly born on earth. I’ll share that story, maybe on Friday, because I feel the need to paint it, too. In the meantime, I want to share a bit of Richards’ thinking on the subject of womb because it relates. On page 36, he writes under this sub-heading:

Cosmosophia: The Compassionate Wisdom of the Cosmic Womb

In keeping with the oldest of the Wisdom Traditions…wisdom can be understood not so much as something that comes from humanity, but is embedded in the mysterious processes of the cosmos. Cosmic wisdom is the capacity of the Universe to experience itself as a coherent and compassionate whole – a womb – even as it gives birth to novelty. As I watch my infant daughter in her crib, I can see in her eyes a yearning both to learn and grow and to regain the sense of safety and nourishment she felt in the womb. The newness of the world into which she has been born…allows for new connections to be made. . .and at the same time, there is something lost in her departure from the intimacy of the womb. For the rest of her life, she will strive. . .to regain a felt sense of the world as her new womb…What we seek is not a return to the womb we have left but to embrace the metaphorical womb into which we have been born.

Imagine the world as a safe and nurturing womb for all of us. Delicious idea, isn’t it. Makes me want to dance, to feast, to celebrate.