It’s the things we do; the times when we turn off our cell phones, power down the laptops and the televisions, the 24/7 stream of news and entertainment, the onslaught of stimulus. It’s the things we do when we make time to be silent and do something we love, whether it is walking the dog or scrapbooking, shooting hoops on your own or picking on the guitar, taking a stroll through the woods or dancing barefoot in the yard. It’s the things we do that draw us deeper into ourselves and further from the rattle of the everyday life.
Tonight the Gallery opens an art show titled Sacred Hobbies. It was a phrase that starting insinuating itself into my language as I struggled with not having time to do my yoga practice. I went back to one of the basic principles of yoga; that yoga is not our physical practice but the way we live our lives. So I started working that theory into my life; when I had to choose between taking my half hour off to either do asana or take my amazing dog on a walk I choose to take my dog for a walk but for that to be my yoga for the day. Leaving the phone behind and not just taking in each moment of our walk but enjoying each moment (even the picking up of the poop moment). And I instilled this new awareness into other areas of my daily life, stealing precious minutes and turning them into profound experiences or taking what seemed like chores and making them my new sacred hobby. My walk up the hill to my office became walking meditations, my job making sandwich and scones turning into the sacred art of nourishing people. And my life, my little life as a struggling yogi and women, became enveloped with prayer and beauty. And I wanted to share!
I started talking this idea of sacred hobbies up to friends. What do they do in their lives that helps keep them sane and plugged into their own inner landscape? There seemed to be something for everyone and it was one friend in particular that gave birth to the exhibit opening tonight. Her own Sacred Hobby was making a thousand paper cranes; she had no “intention” for the cranes but asked if I would be interested in hanging them at the studio. It seemed a perfect fit and also a way to broaden this conversation I had begun among my friends out into the Community. From that reaching out into the Community I asked another local artist, a photographer who still shoots on film and develops his own prints at home in a self built darkroom, to join the show.
When I think back to just over a year ago when I opened Second Star Studio, it was in a way the biggest Sacred Hobby I’ve ever had and now it has helped to bring even more of them into my life. This show began as the tiniest spark of an idea and now holds a very special place in my life. I am so please and grateful for the shift in perspective, helping to see the profundity in every aspect of life, to embrace the idea of sacred as something other than solemn and of course to share this all with my Community.
