The Rapture Of Being Alive

August 2, 2023 Carl Barnett

Why we create and collect is our pull toward meaning and our need for purpose. As Joseph Campbell has said "the rapture of being alive" within "the experience of living." The awe of equanimous beauty. Who we are, where we are.

**Image** **| Carl Barnett Design/Studio**

Creative Work Of All Kinds

August 1, 2023 Carl Barnett

“ In creative work...creative work of all kinds...those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook...a different set of priorities.

Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity... Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always...are forces...that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit... Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness... He who does not crave that roofless place eternity should stay at home. Such a person is perfectly worthy, and useful, and even beautiful, but is not an artist. Such a person had better live with timely ambitions and finished work formed for the sparkle of the moment only..

There is a notion that creative people are absentminded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true. For they are in another world altogether. It is a world where the third self is governor... The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work... who is thus responsible to the work... It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be... My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely... My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive... There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

- Mary Oliver -

Collecting As Means To An End

July 31, 2023 Carl Barnett

Collecting is a means to an end, a means to find meaning, breadcrumbs from the past to the present moment. The things we collect are documents of purpose, and inspirations of beauty. They give life weight, mirroring who we are and where we are, as we pass from here to the unknown, there.

**Interior Design Master Class** **| Carl Dellatore**

**NOURISH Gallery** **| Jon Hudson Barlow**

The Meaning Of Things

July 28, 2023 Carl Barnett

It is the meaning of things that we hope not to lose, not as much as the things themselves as what they mean to us, their stories and associations, our desires toward purpose, and meaning in life. We are collectors by nature, gathering the sustenance that wards off the void and unknown. Beauty is our faceted mirror, what we embody and desire to see, and to hold.

**NOURISH Gallery** **| Kathryn Robinson-Millen | Liadain Warwick Smith**

“Beauty is our faceted mirror”

Nature And The Creative Endeavor

July 24, 2023 Carl Barnett

**NOURISH Gallery** **| Liadain Warwick Smith | SENTIENT | Kathryn Robinson-Millen | VULPE**

Nature and the creative endeavor are both a reflection of who we are and our place within a bigger picture of living. It is within these two we learn who we are, our intuition, biology, mind, body and the equanimity of beauty. We are created from the stars, born from water and nurturing soil. It is through nature and creativity we find our purpose, build our meaning and rest in the knowledge that sustains and pulls us. Nature and the creative endeavor echo our histories, vibrating in body and rippling time.