FROM the infinite dance of the stars to the teeming ecosystems of forests, seas, gardens and deserts, all living creatures share one breath, one blood, one unified existence. Each instantiates a single fleeting chance to experience the tapestry of being in its richness and glory, to witness wonders that are at once common to all but inescapably unique—the privilege of one particular viewpoint. It is so for you as it is for me.

To know that we are in this place, are this place, now, to wake up and make the discovery, is to be an artist. Every person is an artist once, meaning to say that at some point in life, usually around twelve or thirteen, everyone glimpses the responsibility and freedom the discovery of who we are entails. Most understandably take fright.

Five windows light the cavern’d Man; thro’ one he breathes the air;
Thro’ one, hears music of the spheres; thro’ one, the eternal vine
Flourishes, that he may recieve the grapes; thro’ one can look.
And see small portions of the eternal world that ever groweth;
Thro’ one, himself pass out what time he please, but he will not;
For stolen joys are sweet, & bread eaten in secret pleasant.

So sang a fairy once to William Blake. Most of us are happy to steal our joys and eat our bread in secret. The alternative of coming awake in an overwhelming reality, in a universe offering but one unrepeatable opportunity for experience doesn’t bear contemplating.

But Blake is right. With enough courage we can all pass out what time we please. Our first explorations are by candle in the dark. It’s impossible not to shrink from such wonder and terror, not to back away from the knowledge that thoughts and awarenesses comprising our very being are no different from the stuff of a bird’s wing, a snail’s shell, or a worm’s fat body.

From Mother Moth by Adrian Bell, here is archaeologist Alfredo de Rhodes’ describing what might be taken as the artist’s first awakening:

I stood at Hell’s Gate, as Dante once had stood, and I with no Virgil at my side. If my courage failed, I make no apology, for I ventured alone in the Underworld. My candle was my brave companion, though what it disclosed are not things one friend shows another. The walls of my confinement were blood-red sticky clay, such as God moulded to make Adam: not the creation of the first man’s stature, glowing limbs and human visage, but of his entrails wound with worms, the interior scaffold upon which the life of every man is hung. (p.62)

‘All hope abandon ye who enter here’ say the ‘dreadful words’ written above Hell’s Gate. But take heart, for as Dante showed, the Gate of Hell is also the way to Paradise. Art is the great adventure that treads the path, and everyone we meet along the way, whether people, animals, birds or insects—all living beings—reveal consciousnesses, loves, delights and longings just as real and present as what feels real and present to me now. Art forms. Windows opening into eternity. Reflections in the eternal mirror.

‘Tell me,’ Blake asks the Fairy: ‘what is the material world, and is it dead?’ So answers the Fairy—the statement of the artist :

I will write a book on leaves of flowers,
If you will feed me on love-thoughts, & give me now and then
A cup of sparkling poetic fancies; so when I am tipsie,
I’ll sing to you to this soft lute; and shew you all alive
The world, when every particle of dust breathes forth its joy.