Cloister of the Heart : Writing to you from Udaipur, India

Monday, March 25, 2013

Writing to you from Udaipur, India

Sitting in the most palatial room overlooking trees filled with squirrels and surrounded by bougainvillea hedges, I am writing to you from the Chunda Palace in Udaipur.

Udaipur is the capital of Rajasthan in India and it was ruled by hundreds of years and many many generations of the Mewari royal family.

After Independence in 1947, ages of bloody batters and extravagant lifestyles were ended as the Indian nation, by the tick of a block, voted for democracy.

These palaces have now been turned into museums or in this case, a hotel.

Every inch of the hotel is covered in the most exquisite paintings and carvings, enamel mosaics and and hand crafted furniture.

Our suite is almost like a mini-palace on its own. It boasts a beautiful four poster bed and an entire wall of ornately carved windows. The floors are marble which glistens with specks of gold. The room as an elevated section where one can repose on beautiful thin mattresses and bolsters - which is what I am doing now, writing on the floor. I feel like a beautiful Indian princess with my mendi painted hands!

There are fresh flowers in every corner and beautiful shrines everywhere!!

Yesterday we visited the local Jagdish Mandir and had a wonderful impromptu bhajan experience with drumming and dancing. I will share more of this incredibly warm and beautiful country with you as I travel further north.

Blessings
Hettienne

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My life as a Pilgrim to sacred places

Pilgrimage and sacred ritual is my foremost spiritual practise. Raised Dutch Reformed Protestant, the rich lustre of sacred and holy places offered a well of inspiration for my parched soul. My travels have taken me to many different religions, cultures and traditions. You will see on the internet that I have written on many aspects of the spiritual journey. Until I came into contact with the mystical side of Christianity. My first ritual I attended was the festival of Archangel Michael in Mont Sant'Angelo in Italy, then visiting Padre Pio. Then followed walking the pilgrimage of Bridgid, the sacred well and labyrinth in Kildare, Ireland. And that is when my art appeared in the form of paintings. Ritual grounded in the knowing of the unconscious, awakens us from the dream of habitual seeing and thinking. The conscious mind lacks the ability or maybe the neural pathway to communicate the new-found wisdom intellectually, and thus the expression through art steps in. Well, that is only my experience and understanding, of course. But I had not been an artist till I participated in sacred ritual.

My stay at Lourdes and participating in the rituals daily, turned me into a full time artist.

When one participates in a ritual (probably any ritual, but when you regard it as sacred, you add a certain 'light' to it) you are transported into a different time and space : colors are different; the light is different; everything has meaning and the ordinary become extra-ordinary. My art novena for Lourdes in particular, highlights my statement that our lives are the altar to the Divine and I strive to capture that numinosity of the sacred ritual in my photographs and altars. I only started creating sacred altars on my return from Lourdes. These small shadowboxes are vignettes, a moment in time in the life of ordinary human beings, lifted out of the mundane into the numinous, merely by seeing life as sacred.

Wisdom of Oscar Wilde

“It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us.” ― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

"In an old song the Mother sings: 'My sleeping is my dreaming, my dreaming is my thinking, my thinking is my wisdom.' She is the bed we are born in, in which we sleep and dream, where we are healed, love and die. In her wisdom we remember day's broken images and carry them down into dreams where their motions roll into shadows and root, growing into stories." ~Meinrad Craighead

Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. ~Rumi

I am the mother of fair love and of respect and of knowledge and of holy hope. In me is all grace of the way and of the truth; in me is all hope of life and of virtue - Ecclesiasticus 24:24.

OPEN FLOWER

Near your breastbone there is an
Open Flower.
Drink the honey that is all around that flower.
Waves are coming in:
There is so much magnificence near the ocean!
Listen: Sound of big seashells!
Sound of bells!
Kabir says: Friend, listen this is what I have to say:
The guest I love is inside me!
~Kabir

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Monday, March 25, 2013

Writing to you from Udaipur, India

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