I had a dream the other night: In the building where we live one of the condos is going to be rented out for a couple of months, so I decide to go take a look at it. When I first walk in, there is a small cramped kitchen with a stairway going up from the middle of the room. I climb the stairs and discover a lovely room up above with floor-to-ceiling windows and a view of some lovely old stone church ruins (similar to the ones I saw in Ireland–photo above is on the Dingle Peninsula) and beyond

“After all, the goal is not to make art, but to be in that wonderful state that makes art inevitable.” -Robert Henri from The Art Spirit “I don’t believe in it. . .Plumbers don’t get plumbers block, and doctor’s don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working and then expect sympathy for it?” -Philip Pullman, author of The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, Book 1) These two quotes have caught my attention today, in part because they seem to each speak of a different end of the

The other essay in the Theological Aesthetics book I am reading that has especially moved me is by the liberation theologian Leonardo Boff from his book Liberating Grace: “The poet, the musician, and the writer feel overtaken by inspiration.  On the one hand, it is they who do the work. Their energy and their deepest selves are totally involved. The effort to express themselves often leads to complete exhaustion. On the other hand, they feel possessed by something that is above them, outside them, or within them. It drives them to create, compelling them to express their inner experience to