Up: [[Spirituality]] Created: 2023-07-29 I have read the introduction and first chapter of a book called *Eyes of the Heart: Photography as a Christian Contemplative Practice* by Christine Valters Paintner. Paintner is a Benedictine oblate who runs a virtual monastery called [Abbey of the Arts](https://abbeyofthearts.com)These chapters clarified and reinforced that my interest is in contemplative practice without the labels of either Zen Buddhism or Christian. I recognize that this is a contradiction in terms. I know that contemplative practice is rooted in both of these traditions and that stripping it away from these traditions may reduce its meaning. But as I reread Ulrich, started reading Paintner and had the open, spacious time to simply be, I was finally able to return to my initial desire for doing this work. I have relearned and reminded myself that all of my forms of personal expression — art, writing and photography — are tools, if I want to be mechanistic, or conduits, if I don’t, that allow me to gaze more deeply into both inner and outer worlds until that process means that *both of these worlds come to form a single one. And it is this world that we must communicate* as Cartier-Bresson says in his beginning of chapter quote. My second reading source, and the one that really pulled all of these pieces together for me, is a book called *Tarot for Change* by Jessica Dore. I’d pulled the Ace of Cups this morning. Dore was writing about how [[Cups]] are usually thought to be about the emotions we experience and was making the point that we always seem to look at the world from this narrative — *What have I done, what can I do, what should I do to influence the world around me?* She says *We rarely ask and get quiet enough to hear what our environments might be expressing through us.* This really hit home. I absolutely loved doing the expert sessions in LYT11. They fed a part of me that I thought had died when I went through burnout. **And** they also reactivated the *What can I do, what should I do…* narrative that has been my companion my entire life, the very story that took me to burnout. My desire for Being rather than Doing is precisely the desire to be contemplative; to listen for the mystery and beauty that might wish to be expressed. > [!Orbit] Jessica Dore in *Tarot for Change* > We tend to think of contemplation as having to do with thinking, but it is really more a creative process of coming into dialogue with other forces, such as emotions. The prefix con-, meaning ‘with,’ tells us that it’s a collaborative process, and ‘templum’, the Latin word for temple, connotes sacred space where a deity was believed to reside. (p. 181) Note: Templum is also the root and the intention behind a [[Temenos]].