Enlightenment, for me, is having an embodied, sensual and felt interconnection of oneself with all other beings on this planet through all time. It is a deep ecological awareness of one’s unique, present makeup of fire, water, air and earth that has evolved through 4.6 billion years.
The path to enlightenment is littered with the corpses of gurus and any number of other people who have made it their business to tell a privileged few what to think, wear and eat , along with where to live and how to live.
Does being on a spiritual path require a teacher/guru anymore than one requires a personal trainer for physical health?
Maybe yes, maybe no.
Seekers of enlightenment should witness the bloody birth of a child along with drinking wine from a chalice; should work in a hospice with the dying along with attending meditation workshops; should put their hands in the soil daily along with putting their hands together in prayer.
More than anything enlightenment should not be a masculine construct of left brain thinking divorced from the flesh of the earth.
The real challenge in living a life of authentic spiritual awareness is to become “common as mud” — both metaphorically and literally.
And no one better encapsulates this then my mentor Paulus Berensohn.
Regular visitors to my blog will know that Paulus is one of my closet friends and major influences. Dancer, potter, teacher, journal maker, philosopher, deep ecologist and “fairy godfather” to many, he has much to offer all of us to strive to bring an artistic response to a world in need.
Last year, another great friend of mine Neil Lawrence shot a feature documentary on the life and work of Paulus called To Spring From the Hand. Neil expects that the film will be released and available for sale in the first quarter of 2014, but in the meantime has made a beautiful trailer and a 10 minute film called Soul’s Kitchen. If you go to – www.springfromthehand.com – it will take you to the main website where you can watch the short film, the film trailer and explore past posts.
The photos above are when Paulus was here at Windgrove eleven years ago in 2003.
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