I love the arts. I love music, I love drama, I love literature, I love films, I love dance. I love all of the cultural disciplines that are included in ‘the arts.’
The arts are a means of expression, a means of sharing, a means of communication. They can move us to laughter, or tears. They can help us understand what our life experiences do not provide exposure to. They can help us to live vicariously through other characters, or creatures, or simply the created.
I love to go to Bard on the Beach productions (Bard on the Beach) in the Vancouver area (even though, I admit, I normally do not enjoy Shakespeare). There is nothing like beautiful architecture to delight my imagination. I love to watch an individual dance across a dance floor, like I would never have the gracefulness to do. I so enjoy reading a book, or poem, or verse that makes me stop, and just enjoy the words on the page. It is a joy to watch amateur or professional actors play parts, as though they are those very characters. I can be moved to tears by a song played by a musician with a giftedness that comes from more than just endless hours of practice.
One thing I am becoming aware of, though, is that not everything can be duplicated by the arts. There are some things that, no matter how hard we creative humans might try, we cannot duplicate the ‘real thing.’
Within nature there are things that, in my humble opinion, painters, artists, musicians or even photographers cannot match reality. Things like an eagle in flight, a rainbow, the sound of rain falling at night, or the sounds of an eagle, or an owl, or chickadees, or a band of coyotes (I never want to meet up with them on a walk, but there is something so hauntingly beautiful about their yipping and yelping).
In human life there are communications and responses that plays and films fall short of duplicating perfectly. Things like a parent looking into the face of their newborn baby, or the look between a couple who are in love, or a first kiss, or (something horror movies cannot reproduce at all) a persons responses to a trauma.
We cannot live vicariously through the arts. We need to live, really live in order to really experience our own life experiences.
We also need to recognize, and credit the originator of all of the arts of man, and that it is only through His incomparable creation that we have a model, a muse, through which to create, perform and express our gifts through the arts.
“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ Acts 17:24-28
itsawonderfilledlife 