The arts keep wonder alive

The uniqueness of artistic expression lies in how it can keep alive our connection with the numinous all through life.

A child's creative fun with marbles

The great Pablo Picasso said, ‘Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.’ I don’t think Picasso meant that everyone should make a career practising an art form. He knew how much innate ability and single mindedness that path required. His intriguing statement is more about retaining a vital childhood attribute. This is a genuine openness and sense of wonder.

We come to earth from the spiritual realms 'trailing clouds of glory’ as Wordsworth wrote, and it takes some years to become fully earth dwellers. While young children eagerly explore their new world, adult carers can help them maintain their relationship with the numinous. It is done by encouraging imagination through stories, accepting their fantasy friends, open ended ‘play’ in nature, painting, dancing, singing, music, dressing up.

I think I was fortunate as a child. My mother didn’t mind that my brothers and I messed up the living room in imaginary games. And when I wrote my first proper story - I was seven years old - my mother bound the pages together to make a book. I still have it, spelling mistakes, childish illustrations and all. Star of the Circus was a tale of rivalry, sabotage, fairy help and restitution for innocent Becky the amazing tightrope walker. On the back cover was a list of ‘other books by the author’. I don’t think they eventuated, although I was always writing, drawing, dancing and dreaming.

My father loved astronomy. He would take me outside and encourage me to name the planets and constellations. As well as reinforcing memory, the starry sky stimulated my feelings of awe, helping me to retain a connection with the spiritual realms. I spent my childhood moving between two worlds. There was my everyday life with its ups and downs – often painful. The other was filled with adventures, exotic places and magical beings - the realm of the imagination. Many children inhabit such places of wonder, despite the availability and impact today of in-the-face ready-made digital images.

I loved climbing trees and every climb meant I might glimpse the fleeting entities hiding there. But I vividly remember the day I realised they had disappeared. I was enjoying a beautiful tree, appreciating the whisper of leaves in the breeze. I knew about the life cycle of trees. I could list the homes they offered to creatures from birds to insects. But I missed that magical vision.

This is about maturing, I recognise that. In keeping with society’s norms, we leave behind childish notions and find our way in the ‘real world’. It begins at school, sometimes ridiculously early, with 5-year-olds cramming to pass tests. Mostly it’s later in adolescence that we are asked to abandon the dreaming consciousness of childhood in favour of rational and pragmatic knowledge. And usually we do.

But what if that rejected consciousness could mature alongside the one replacing it? What if we acknowledged that this former way of being and experiencing, if educated and expanded, might become in maturity wonderfully enriching – for us and society? To enhance our lives, the imaginative consciousness common to children needs to mature alongside adult rationality and grasp of practical realities.

As an adult, I continued my involvement in the arts. Along the way, I discovered that the arts play a vital role in achieving a fully rounded maturity that does not abandon the creative expression of childhood. Music, dance, drama, creative writing, visual arts and their combinations are important for the getting of wisdom. The arts can assist us to gain self-awareness, open mindedness, empathy, and a universal view of life – all signifiers of maturity.

Yet in many fields and many professions, including those where rationality and practicality rule, there is room for creative imagination. It comes from how we express ourselves in an activity. Something of that child-like wonder is often present when a person approaches their task with commitment, delight, wisdom and love. Wonder thrives there.

So what is special about artistic expression?

The arts are vehicles of expression in a unique way. The work a genuine artist creates allows us to directly access a metaphysical dimension of human consciousness. The power of sense experience through which the arts function leads us to that other inner place, which is as real as anything physical. This is a potential available to artists in any field and to all who respond to the artwork.

As I have come to understand them, the arts keep wonder alive and have a unique role in human life because they create a bridge between the two worlds. The medium is physical, the world of the senses with its colours, shapes, textures, sounds, tastes and scents. Then through imagination, inspiration and intuition all this is transformed into something new that is more than physical.

Genuine artworks, whether we are doing or receiving them, evoke a heightened feeling that lifts us beyond the commonplace, and we experience with a deep knowing what could not be conveyed in any other way than by the symbols expressed in visual images, words, 3D forms, music and movements.

Laurie Anderson, pioneering multi-media performance artist and film director, said that art changes the world, secretly. It’s as if something slips into your blood stream. The young child experiences and allows this instinctively. Maturity involves recognition, which enables us to unravel that secret and knowingly utilise and build on our inner experience. We become open to heightened understanding of self and the world.

The world changes because we are being changed, and who we are and are becoming, does impinge on the world. Each art form enables change differently, which is why it’s wonderful (and necessary) that we have such a variety of expressions. I explore precisely how this occurs and why every true work of art is transformational in Prodigal Daughters. This book came from a respectful and deeply personal space because for me, genuine art in all its manifestations enables me to re-engage in a world of wonder, a spiritual world that was never really lost. That's a unique gift.