I love the San Francisco Bay Area in the summer time. No. I love the San Francisco Bay Area...all the time.
But I especially love the San Francisco Bay Area in the summer time. That’s when I can see God on display in city after city, town after town, on most weekends... if I choose to follow the displays.
I thought I’d stopped this special past time since I'd moved away to Arizona for three years. But, no, this summer, the joy of seeing God on display is in me greater than ever.
You see in the summer time in the Bay Area, as I’m sure in many towns and cities in the Southwest United States, at least, there are all these people ....all these people with the greatest of talents...
...all these people who can paint like you’ve never seen before...
...all these people with imagination you’ve never believed possible in one human body...
...all these people with creativity that is exploding and being put and twisted on canvas, silk, wood... in glass, in brass, in leather, in wool, in water and in the air...
...all these people show up in the Bay Area in the summer time. (In Arizona, too, to a lesser extent, and if you want to see them all the time there...just go to Sedona)...
...in city after city, in town after town.
The immensity of the talent on display every weekend day is beyond belief, especially now that these people with eyes and imagination we didn’t know possible can marry technology with their talent.
They can turn a photo upside down...around and then some...and have you thinking you walked into the Twilight Zone of Magic in Art!
That’s what happening in city after city, town after town, in the San Francisco Bay Area with all these people.
Yes. They are turning these towns into Twilight Zones of Magic in Art!
It’s magic..
It’s God.
You see on any given weekend day in the summer time, if I choose to, I can go to Art and Wine Festivals that are held throughout the Silicon Valley and up and down the Peninsula Area of San Francisco Bay.
In order to not compete with each other on the same weekend, the towns now work it out so that one weekend, you may be at an Art and Wine Festival in Fremont, where I live, and the next weekend, you can cross over the Dumbarton Bridge and go to Palo Alto’s. Then the next weekend...to Menlo Park’s. The next weekend...to Sunnyvale’s or Mountain View’s...to Los Altos...and on and on and on.
And if you still haven't had enough...you can cross over the Golden Gate Bridge and go into Mill Valley or Tiburon or Sausalito... to get some more!
Most weekends you hear musicians playing from Jazz to R&B and see so many artists with such a range of talent. At each booth, you can see so many different displays of talent. Artists who created "wares" for us to enjoy from their raw talent.
One artist I spoke with for a time this past weekend said that she’d moved from painting on canvas to silk because she wanted her art to reach more people. So, now she has her art on silk...silk scarves that you cannot imagine! And now she said more people can afford her art for a fraction of what it would have cost them to purchase the same art on canvas. She’s using her skills now to touch more souls...to give them a little bit of God’s presence and power wrapped around their necks... or their waists... or around their shoulders.
This artist spent time showing me how she gets started with each piece: plain white silk! From there she traces the art onto the silk with a pencil. Then she starts injecting colors and starts “painting” on the silk. When she’s done, she’s got vibrant rich colors...designs of all kinds...that’s when she knows God came alive in her!
Then there are the photographers. There are those who spend the midnight hours in the Grand Canyon, outside Flagstaff, Arizona, or in the mountains in Utah somewhere, waiting for the night to turn to light...for dawn to start creeping in...so that they can creep out of their cabins...and get the right view...the right vision...the right angle on their lens. They then snap... and snap... and snap. They capture images of the Canyon, with the light hitting it in ways you and I would never see because we just won’t be up at that seemingly ungodly hour to get the right shot!
Then there are those artists who work with stones...then the ones who work with metal and turn them into earrings... and necklaces... and bracelets... and “things.”
There are those, too, who work with wood. They see things in wood...in plain wood...that you and I would look and look and never can imagine. But they do. They see the same piece of wood we see. But with them...they start imagining the wood turning into a bird, or a turtle, or a dog, or a cat or some other creature of nature.
Yes. That’s it...Creatures of Nature!
That’s what these artists are too: Creatures of Nature!
Creatures of God...seeing things you and I can’t see with our naked eyes.
Make sure you don’t miss them this weekend when they’re in your town.
Wherever you are in these United States this weekend, I’m sure there’s an Art Festival going on somewhere.
Try to go out out and support the artists. Even if you can’t buy anything, just show up to let them know that you care.
If you can afford it...buy their stuff, even if you already have so much “stuff.”
In that case, buy their stuff as gifts...and give it with love to someone else.
And when you give it to your people, just tell them…
...that God made it for them...
...that God sent it... with love!
Namaste’,
Che’
1 comment:
Exciting free spirit, you! This was a delight to read. One of my books, The Journey of lIfe (100 lessons from around the world), has a woman in it with a shop in Walnut Creek. She starts her little lesson of Taking One Day at a time with this sentence: "I'm a rooster and a Gemini". Since I am both as well, I have decided to go and meet her. She is 74 and smiles like an angel. Why not go? Life is for living. Live love laugh. Thanks again for INSPIRING the artist in all of us.
Post a Comment