Abbey of the Arts

Transformative Living through Contemplative & Expressive Arts

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  • Books
    • Breath Prayer:
      An Ancient Practice for the Everyday Sacred
    • Sacred Time:
      Embracing an Intentional Way of Life
    • The Wisdom of Wild Grace: Poems
    • Earth, Our Original Monastery:
      Cultivating Wonder and Gratitude through Intimacy with Nature
    • Dreaming of Stones: Poems
    • The Soul's Slow Ripening:
      12 Celtic Practices for Seeking the Sacred
    • The Wisdom of the Body:
      A Contemplative Journey to Wholeness for Women
    • Illuminating the Way:
      Embracing the Wisdom of Monks and Mystics
    • The Soul of a Pilgrim:
      Eight Practices for the Journey Within
    • Eyes of the Heart:
      Photography as a Christian Contemplative Practice
    • The Artist's Rule: Nurturing Your Creative Soul with Monastic Wisdom
    • Desert Mothers and Fathers: Early Christian Wisdom Sayings Annotated & Explained
    • Lectio Divina–The Sacred Art: Transforming Words and Images into Heart-Centered Prayer
    • Water, Wind, Earth & Fire: The Christian Practice of Praying with the Elements
    • Awakening the Creative Spirit:
      Bringing the Arts to Spiritual Direction
    • Lectio Divina: Contemplative Awakening & Awareness
  • Poetry | Art | Music
    • Music + DVD
    • Poetry by Christine Valters Paintner
    • Poetry Videos
    • Dancing Monk Icons
    • Other Art Collaborations
      • Monk in the World art series by Kristin Noelle
      • Saints & Animals art series by David Hollington
      • Sacred Time art series by Alexi Francis
      • Mary block print art series by Kreg Yingst
  • Programs
    • Lift Every Voice: Contemplative Writers of Color Book Club
    • Community Online Retreats
      • Harriet Tubman and Howard Thurman-on Being Free
      • Writing Into Bloom
        with Christine Valters Paintner
      • Revelations: The Mysticism of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe
      • The Wisdom of Wild Grace: A Weekend Retreat Online
      • The Spiral Way:
        Celtic Spirituality and the Creative Imagination
      • Sacred Balance:
        Aligning Body and Spirit Through
        Yoga and the Benedictine Way
    • Self-Study Online Spiritual Retreats
      • Creative Flourishing in the Heart of the Desert:
        An Online Retreat with St. Hildegard of Bingen
      • Dreaming of the Sea:
        A women’s discernment journey through the story of the Selkie
      • Earth, Our Original Monastery
        A Companion Retreat to the Book (SELF-STUDY)
      • Exile and Coming Home:
        An Archetypal Journey through the Scriptures
      • Eyes of the Heart:
        Photography as Contemplative Practice
        (Companion retreat to the book)
      • Journey with the Desert Mothers and Fathers
        (SELF-STUDY)
      • Honoring Saints and Ancestors:
        Online Retreat for the Season of Remembrance
      • Lectio Divina:
        The Sacred Art of Reading the World
      • A Midwinter God:
        Making a Conscious Underworld Journey (SELF-STUDY)
      • Sacred Rhythms of Sky, Sun, Sea & Stone:
        A Creative Retreat with the Elements (SELF-STUDY)
      • Sacred Seasons:
        A Yearlong Journey through the Celtic Wheel of the Year
      • The Soul of a Pilgrim:
        Eight Practices for the Journey Within
        (a companion retreat to the book)
      • The Soul's Slow Ripening: 12 Celtic Practices for Seekers of the Sacred (a companion retreat to the book)
      • Water, Wind, Earth & Fire
      • Watershed Moments
        in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures
      • Way of the Monk, Path of the Artist:
        A 12-Week Companion Retreat to The Artist's Rule
      • The Wisdom of the Body:
        A 10-Week Online Companion Retreat to the Book
      • The Wisdom of Mary and the Sacred Feminine
    • Live Programs: Pilgrimage & Retreats
      • Writing on the Wild Edges (Ireland)
      • Hildegard of Bingen (Germany)
      • Awakening the Creative Spirit: Experiential Education for Spiritual Directors in the Expressive Arts (Northwest)
  • Calendar
  • Reflections
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Monk in the World Guest Post Series

Wisdom Council: Guest Post from Melissa Layer

I first met Melissa Layer in person at a workshop I was leading at St. Placid Priory, as she lives in the beautiful Northwest as well. She took several online courses, including the very first one I ever taught on Benedictine Spiritual Practices, and then she then participated in the Awakening the Creative Spirit intensive and in monthly supervision groups I was co-leading for soul care practitioners, and later I asked her to assist me in the Sacred Rhythms Writing Retreat last summer.  She is a kindred spirit on many levels.  So I am delighted she is a part of the newly formed Wisdom Council (click over to read her bio).  Read on for her reflections:

“When wiggling through a hole
the world looks different than
when scrubbed clean by the wiggle
and looking back.”
—Mark Nepo

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAWhen I read these words in Mark Nepo’s book, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen, I circled them.  I enjoy lectio divina, a Benedictine practice of divine reading of selected scripture and other writings.  I was intrigued that “scrubbed clean” were the particular words that shimmered (as Christine would say!) for me.  Her invitation to me, as a member of the Abbey’s new Wisdom Council, to share my experience of being a monk in the world and an artist in everyday life has been a portal for me to reflect upon the appeal of these words.  They are one way to describe my spiritual journey.

Scrubbed clean.  The first time I went to a Korean women’s spa in Seattle, I decided to experience a full body scrub.  Women soaked in hot pools and lounged in cotton robes, hair tucked beneath cotton mob caps and faces stripped of makeup.  The scrub area was at one end of the large room, designated by a row of waterproof tables.  Korean women stood ready with scrub gloves, plastic buckets and bottles of liquid soap.  We stretched out on the tables, naked as the day we were born.  My hesitancy at being so exposed and vulnerable dissolved beneath the small hands of “Sunny”, the young Korean woman who efficiently scrubbed every square inch and crease of my middle-aged body.  She wrapped my head in a steaming hot towel and periodically sluiced me down with a bucket of warm water.  My resistance swirled down the drain with the soapy water.  I surrendered.  At the end of the hour I arose from the table, pink and glowing.  Scrubbed clean.

There were other times when I received the gift of purifying water and the intentional touch of another’s hands.  These occasions introduced me to sacred ritual and ceremony.  As a child, I experienced humble foot washing in a small country church where the golden pine floors glowed beneath the battered tin basins of warm water.  Children, adults, and elders all crouched there in rays of sunlight, tenderly bathing and drying one another’s feet.  Scrubbed clean.

Part of my adolescent rite of passage was being baptized in the river running through the verdant northeastern Washington valley where I had been raised.  The white folds of my robe rippled in the swirling green current of the Pend Oreille.  I grasped the minister’s thick wrist and allowed his strong arms to take the weight of my blossoming body as he submerged me.  Rising up, fresh and cold and enlivened, I immediately felt the way Spirit had carved a new channel through the vessel of my body.  Scrubbed clean.

As a woman ripening in years, I welcome the gift of reflective wisdom that allows me to understand how Spirit has flowed and molded me.  Scrubbed clean by life with its narrow passageways; wide vistas of heartbreaking gratitude and despair; dark descents; mountain summit ecstasy; spiritual crisis and emergence; miles of winding journeys alone and with others.  There has been the midwifing of others through their dying time; holding the space to find grace in deep grieving; serving as a companion to those that teeter in threshold places of transition, despair and possibility; inhaling the scent of my newborn daughter’s downy head in a rosy sunrise; bathing and anointing the bodies of my parents at their death; gazing into the blue eyes of the anesthesiologist as I counted down from 10, descending like a contemporary Inanna as I sacrificed my left breast to a silver scalpel; fasting, vigiling and surrendering in a red rock canyon during my 4 day solo in a 14 day quest.  These breakings of heart are awe-filled events from which I don’t recover but through which I am uncovered (M. Nepo).

These life experiences are a vibrant creativity that streams through the widening conduit of my being.  There is passionate artistry in my service to others through deep listening, heightened intuition, spontaneity, art, ritual and ceremony, spiritual practices and play.  I bow to a soul-full life of transcendent experiences in both the dream and waking realm, as well as in nature.  The appearance of symbols and synchronicities inform me that the veil between what we perceive and Mystery is not only thin, it is sometimes invisible!

On the summer solstice I stood barefoot in the cold sea.  In my pocket there were treasures of colored sea glass worn to a milky transparency.  I would add them to the bird nest on my altar that also holds old marbles disgorged from deep within the sand.  There is an eagle feather there, discovered after I witnessed a young eagle fledge from the nest on the bluff.  A large rusted spring, uncovered by the relentless tide, reminds me of the symbolic spirals that surface in my conversations and in the sandplay of my clients.  Nature is abundant with her gifts to me.  Owl wings, a talon and dove feathers embellish a fierce driftwood woman who wears castings of my face and one-breasted torso.

The Super Moon tide tugged powerfully at my ankles that night, the sand shifting beneath my feet.  I found the rhythm, felt the one great heartbeat, and joined the dance.  I bent, washed my hands in the sea water, and splashed my face.  Lifting my arms high, I offered my wet palms to Spirit’s dipper of sparkling stars.  Scrubbed clean.  

Melissa Blog Photo Collage

 

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7 Comments July 14, 2013

Upcoming Programs

  • Writing Into Bloom with Christine Valters Paintner
    • May 1, 2021
  • Revelations: The Mysticism of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe
    • May 13, 2021
  • The Wisdom of Wild Grace: A Weekend Retreat Online
    • May 15, 2021 - May 16, 2021
  • View All Upcoming Programs

Recent Reflections

  • Monk in the World Guest Post: Reverend Deb Goldman
  • A mini-poetry reading from Christine plus other publishing news
  • St. Kevin Holds Open His Hand and Radical Hospitality ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess
  • Monk in the World Guest Post: Greta Kopec
  • Monk in the World Podcast + Harriet Tubman Mysticism ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

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