Up: [[Artists and Art Movements]] Created: 2022-01-02 Instead of pushing ahead into an art lesson or a bodywork session, as I felt I ‘should’ do, I did exactly as I wanted to do and I put Vimeo on my tv screen, paid for and watched an hour long documentary called ‘Praying with Images’ about the artist, and former Benedictine nun, Meinrad Craighead. I learned many things in the hour. Certainly many things about Meinrad, a visionary artist. But more, and most important, many things about myself. Foremost among these learnings is the need to explore, to fill the well, to feed myself; to focus not on producing, but on quietly, contemplatively taking life in, opening to images that speak to me, letting them speak to me without dashing immediately to the thought of “What can I **do** with this?” I’ve learned this important lesson because I so enjoyed the Monopalette class yesterday. See [[A Good Learning Experience for Me is…]]. And because I read, this morning, Terry Wilding’s brilliant long essay [**On Influence**](https://windling.typepad.com/blog/2011/01/influences.html), making me realize that I need to find my influences, soak in my influences, and that the influences I have now are decidedly **not** the influences that drove me in my career and that I talk about in [[Favourite Books]] Meinrad’s images are of birth, God as Mother, animals like coyote and badger, and [[Symbols]] of the feminine — water, water over stones, night, the [[Moon]]. This first image is of Demeter and Persephone. ![[Demeter and Persephone by Meinrad Craighead.webp|400]] ![[Coyotes Meinrad Craighead.webp|400]] ![[Hagia Sophia Meinrad Craighead.webp|400]] ![[Woman with spiral Meinrad Craighead.webp|400]] I’ve realized today that some of the symbols I love are related to the [[Archetype]]s aligned with Instructions for Life — [[Hestia]], [[9 - Hermit]], and [[Bride]].