AMY MEISSNER
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Soul experience.

1/4/2015

9 Comments

 
"Imagination is woven into the child's drawing. This reveals the close connection between the forces of memory and the child's own experiences. Imagination is born after the third year and from now on it adorns everything .... Soul experience now becomes pictorial presentation. Children's souls 'play' with what they have experienced and what they remember, and it is lifted up into their imagination."

Michaela Strauss
from Understanding Children's Drawings: Tracing the Path of Incarnation
Amy Meissner, collaborative work. From the post Soul experience. www.amymeissner.com/blog/soul-experience

Children are natural creators, myth makers, capable of World Building and existing in that somewhere-realm between spheres of physical and spiritual.

Amy Meissner, collaborative work. From the post Soul experience. www.amymeissner.com/blog/soul-experience
Amy Meissner, collaborative work. From the post Soul experience. www.amymeissner.com/blog/soul-experience

Sometimes the only "guidance" required is the space to move their bodies, the time to do so.

Luxuries, really.
Really.

The most luxurious part being our own awareness, as adults, to grant this time and space. And to remember to do this for them:

     to let them just, be.

Amy Meissner, collaborative work. From the post Soul experience. www.amymeissner.com/blog/soul-experience
Amy Meissner, collaborative work. From the post Soul experience. www.amymeissner.com/blog/soul-experience

When was the last time you were so lost in work, any work, and able to exist between the physical and spiritual? Was it this morning? A decade ago? Do you even remember the feeling: Time is gone. Form is gone. Logic is gone. And what one is left with is what some call freedom, some call bliss, some call nirvana. A stillness of the mind. Through creation.

When did this concept become a luxury?

And while it seems like everyone is searching for such a thing, and people want to sell you such a thing and entities want to help you attain such a thing ... really it could be society's act of de-valuing it in the first place that has placed such a high value on it now. 

It is the soul experience that makes us human.

Children know this, without knowing.

Amy Meissner, collaborative work. From the post Soul experience. www.amymeissner.com/blog/soul-experience
"The soul-spiritual nature of small children is primarily engaged in the process of bodily incarnation. They build the bridges of life between body and soul. In their diagrammatic pictures, that which is engaged in building the body rises to the surface of visibility. They are as it were, the sand washed up out of the ocean of organ-formation, out of the subjectless and objectless 'No-Man's-Land' of life processes."

Wolfgang Schad,
from Notes on the Study of Man
Amy Meissner, collaborative work. From the post Soul experience. www.amymeissner.com/blog/soul-experience
Amy Meissner, collaborative work. From the post Soul experience. www.amymeissner.com/blog/soul-experience

As adults, can we retrieve it? This mystery?
As artists, this is the constant journey. The living question. The fierce will. The World Building. The space to move our bodies. The time to do so. The re-valuing.

The soul experience. 

Amy Meissner, collaborative work. From the post Soul experience. www.amymeissner.com/blog/soul-experience
Artist-led collaborative student work, grade 1, 2013. Vintage wool yarn, found objects. Hand crocheted, hand woven.

For related links, see the post Soul fever and most posts under the sidebar category Children.
​
9 Comments
Deb Hardman link
1/4/2015 09:59:36 pm

Thank you for a meditative post. Its beautiful both the words and the weaving.

Reply
velma link
1/5/2015 07:25:57 am

this is a lovely project, and a loveliness of honoring both children, artist collaborator, wool, sticks, and stones.

Reply
Amy Meissner link
1/7/2015 08:44:08 am

Thank you for your comments, Ladies. It was lovely to re-visit this project here and to remember the point of such things.
XO Amy

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montana joe link
1/8/2015 01:31:42 pm

pablo picasso told us, “every child is an artist, the problem is staying an artist when you grow up”. thank you for reminding us that the problem therein is in the "attempt" to stay an artist. that we rather simply need to "be an artist". to "allow" and "experience" like a child. awesome!

Reply
Amy Meissner link
1/9/2015 02:51:52 am

Montana Joe--that Picasso quote is one of my favorites. Thanks for sharing it here and thanks for reading!
XO Amy

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Ruthe in Dillingham link
1/11/2015 02:38:23 am

Amy--I am delighted to "meet" you via homerSapiens. I just began a FT job with little ones 0-3. They live in a world of magic and wonder and have invited me in. My artist self is honored. I believe that even before age 3 they express and weave. Your work , family life, Alaskan experience and expressions are resonant and ring true for me. Quyana! Thank you

Reply
Amy Meissner link
11/1/2015 08:30:48 am

Ruthe,
I'm so sorry -- I just realized I never replied to your lovely comment! I've just reposted this and saw your name here. Yes, you DO have a full time job...now your little ones are probably more like ages 1-4. I'm so happy that you've found this blog and I hope you'll be able to sneak away now and again for a quick read. I know how difficult it is to get any time for yourself. Until they start school, this doesn't really resolve itself, and even then, there are other commitments that pull. I wish you the best and I love that your "artist self" is honored and, I hope, nurtured through all this as well.
XO
Amy

Reply
Tammy link
11/1/2015 10:36:12 am

Oh .. lovely true words you have spoken here. I see this unrestrained freedom of expression and imagination when I place blank canvases and acrylic paint in front of my two younger grand children. They paint easily have stories to go with their pictures. The older seven year old is already unsure and wanting to please other's. It restricts her creativity. She wants be like others. This saddens me and I try my level best to assure her that there are no mistakes and that her work is beautiful because it's hers.

For me I have learned that painting or creating is my respite in the chaos of life. Losing myself in the moment of color's and strokes or stitches and textiles is my best serenity. Keep posting and writing! As always I love all of your work .. ps my grandchildren inspire me, I suspect your children do that for you.

Reply
Amy Meissner link
11/3/2015 05:47:00 am

Tammy,
I see this restraint in my own children as well -- especially the younger one, who learned to knit beautifully when she was 5 (made a HAT!) but couldn't handle the idea of making mistakes. She put the needles down for over a year until she started up again this fall. I find the best thing I can do for them and this fragility is to model that I'm making mistakes all the time -- we also talk at length about the mistakes made in science and how this is what makes science, science. And then we hope they have the temperaments to weather the ups and downs. Not everyone can ... I know there are days when I can't either.

Thank you for showing here and reading, Tammy --
XO
Amy

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    Amy Meissner, textile artist. Photo credit Brian Adams, 2013. www.amymeissner.com

    Amy Meissner

    Artist in Anchorage, Alaska, sometimes blogging about the collision of history, family & art, with the understanding that none exists without the other.

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