The Creative Alchemy of Living as an Artist

Expressing the creative potential within our beating hearts and human bodies is one of the most fundamental desires in life. You have it, I have it. I think we all have it: wanting to make things with our own hands, carve my own wooden spoon, shape materials and textures and cut things up and blend different colors into harmony and contrast. Stay up all night crafting utilitarian objects and impractical beauty. Writing poetry that oozes from the holes in the fence that keeps my soul contained in an earthly identity. Add the extra bit of energy that makes something completely unique, adding my own personal frequency and light code, my own individual manifestation of divine spark, a paintbrush stroke just so or a dance movement that says who I am in a more complete way than an autobiography in 23,000 words.

I don’t want to live like a lonely, misunderstood, self-centered and eccentric artist. Well maybe just the eccentric part. I want to make art in my community where art isn’t just an activity or hobby to do alone after work hours or on weekends or when depressed. Art is life. Art is breathing. Art is connecting with spirit and bridging our divine nature into the things we see and sing, touch and move. Everyday. All together.

Living as an artist … it’s inspiring and intense. It’s being a magician, it’s a creative alchemy on a grand scale. It’s shaping reality to reflect the most pristine vision of sunlight and fields of tulips and blue dusk on the Seine and shadows in the woods at night.

What does it mean to be an artist living in community? Here are some thoughts on being an artist shared by Falco Tarassaco – late founder of our community – who inspired, amongst other revolutionary artistic acts, the underground Temples of Humankind with visionary art to awaken the divine spark in humanity. In Damanhur, I love living and co-creating a magical reality with hundreds of others citizens in a dance of interconnectedness and free will. Here are Falco’s words… 

To be an artist.

Thanks to art, each one of us can dare to express to the maximum our invested personal power, discovering talents, developing some individual particularities into skills. Art is not just painting, sculpture, there’s also poetry, word, dance, directing theatre scenes, making costumes, creating thousands of different kinds of music, where everyone’s voice can be a key to opening up toward courageous seeking and discovery.

Even in our capacity to criticize, we must, on the one hand, keep in mind the truth of the aesthetic result, and on the other hand, offer encouragement to the artist for having taken a risk.

I want to see art in its minute forms, that is, objects for everyday use, ones that come about from imitation of ritual objects, or a playful game, or motivated by a legend or a joke.

Art as a method to think of new things, to stimulate in people capacities and sensations, amazement, fun, scandal, putting what you are made of to the test.

There is something fundamental that seeking and artistic courage can do for all of us: it can help us to open and share of ourselves. You need to have the courage to discover yourselves, to write and share poetry, to really show something of yourselves to others.

So, art is presenting who you are to other people, discovering who you really are, trusting in yourselves and in each other, truly giving of yourselves, not just showing but really giving…

– Falco Tarassaco

 Living in community is a constant theatrical practice of living this kind of generosity as an art form. Not just offering an object, but the soul, your life’s mission ignited and on fire, burning with a thousand different flames, all blazing and sparking together in more than a lifetime of sleepless nights and saturated days.

So, don’t wait. Don’t wait to buy all the supplies you need, rent an art studio, book a gallery show and order catering for opening night, before you decide to make a mark and express your creative spark. Start today. Do something, anything that makes you feel you are creative, connected and alive.

Pick up that ukulele you brought back from Hawaii and only strummed three times. Make dinner tonight, although this time, make it with awareness lighting up your palms and knives, turning the beets and polenta into an alchemical symphony of taste and color.

The next email you write comes out as stream of consciousness with experimental use of punctuation. Let laundry folding become a sock puppet theater.

Pull out the poetry you wrote years ago and keep it in your back pocket, so casual conversation with your roommate becomes spoken word in the hallway for an audience of one.

Your soul has something to say. Let it come out and play.

~ Quaglia Cocco

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How do you keep your creative fire burning? Comment below…