Everyday creativity, such as tending an allotment, can give you a feeling of calm, immanent, spirituality Photo: anonphotography / flickr CC
Spirituality and the everyday
David Crouch reflects on feeling, meaning and an immanent spirituality that he finds in everyday life
One of the most powerful moments of feeling that I have experienced happened after I had completed a presentation on community gardening, life and space at an art gallery in the middle of England. The session was on refuges. I talked about small plots of land and what they meant to people who cultivate them. A tall, thin Indian woman, a gardener, looking very tired, came up to me on the edge of tears. As her eyes lit up she told me that for once she felt connected and proud of what gave her life meaning.
I had been talking about my beliefs. I believe that as individuals we are all open to being creative. Much is made in contemporary media of ‘cities of culture and creativity’ and the ‘creativity’ of the artist. Being creative seems always to be ‘out there’ – but nobody has a privilege of creativity. Creativity is of and in living. It is part of our being alive. It is a felt, almost fleshy, lived feeling of meaning and wonder that we can find in being alive. Such everyday creativity speaks a feeling of a calm, immanent, spirituality. Individuals doing things, however apparently dull and mundane, need be neither.
Tending the earth
Two allotment holders, John and Alen, talked with me about their feelings. They tend plots adjacent to each other on a site in Birmingham. John said: ‘We learn things from each other. You are very social and you are very kind. You make me feel good, you don’t come and call at me. Things in your garden you always hand me, little fruits, which I have valued so much.’
Alen responded to his feelings: ‘And I have learnt things from him. I’ve learnt some ways of planting, real skills about planting, Jamaican ways of growing and cooking. And I’ve also learnt about patience and goodness and religion too. It all links in.’
Travelling
I also spoke with people who spend time in the apparently mundane matter of caravanning. One caravanner, Tim, said: ‘It all makes me smile inside. I mean, everyone just comes down to the ford and just stands and watches life go by. It’s amazing how much pleasure you can have from something like that. I just sit down and look and I get so much enjoyment out of sitting and looking around and doing nothing. We wake up in the morning, open the bedroom door and you’re breathing air into your living…’ The deep feeling he expressed was made palpable by the opening-up that his wife and son feel. Their son is able to discover a confidence in his life; able to interact with other people doing simple tasks. They each feel release from pressures and revel in the moments of joy, of connecting with energies that are beyond, yet seemingly through, everyday tasks.
Artists
Curiously, artists’ lives are ordinary in many respects too. For them, moments of merely wandering about can have elation just like the caravanner. The International Modern Movement artist Peter Lanyon talked about coming across familiar places unawares; of moments, perhaps sitting atop a bus, when ‘fusion’ happens, and when ‘something clicks with me.’ These are moments, among the ordinary, of heightened feeling. My interest in art is primarily in its potential to illuminate how we feel; our feeling of a sense of becoming, that in and amongst art and living, is expressive of those feelings.
Everyday experiences
Of particular interest to me are evident feelings, meaning and a kind of spirituality that can emerge when we are anywhere: doing everyday tasks, finding ourselves anew in particular surroundings: trees, hills, streets and buildings, other people, and sounds. What we are doing can resonate with, and gives character to, particular sites and moments. These feelings and resonances can occur when we are away from ‘home,’ perhaps on holiday, in moments of discovery. They can also emerge in events and surroundings that are very familiar, where we can feel transformed, momentarily, amongst our changing emotion.
Sacred space
Place or space as ‘sacred’ does not rely upon institutional framing or permission. As in the case of the caravanner and his family, a site, what we do and the moment of feeling can come through, and enrich, our everyday life. Feelings of wonder or enchantment can appear as immediate, not beyond our own life, but within and around us. They can merge with the character of the landscape that emerges in our flirting, poetic life.
It is not merely a matter of formal religion, with its fixity and practice, that mean such feelings can happen.
As the philosopher Martin Buber expressed, ‘I have given up the “religious” which is nothing but the exception, extraction, exaltation, ecstasy; or it has given me up. I possess nothing but the everyday out of which I am never taken … I do not know much more. If that is religion then it is just everything, simply everything that is lived in its possibility of dialogue.’
In his reflections on human relatedness Buber thoughtfully engaged the idea of ‘I-Thou’, in a feeling of attitude and doing, care and affect, of mutual regard. Our flirting with space, too, can be a gentle logic of love: of a newness that can re-engage our pasts and our feeling and be creative and original. It can also reconnect us with eternal love and a feeling of spirituality.
I feel that this character of being alive is not always accessible or to be relied upon. Its possibility is expressed beautifully in Australian thinker Ann Game’s sensitive and open narrative: ‘This was the first sunny morning after days of rain, and the world was clean and full of promise. As Max and Leo and I walked to school, hand in hand, I could feel the world smiling at us, with us, through us.’
David’s latest book, Flirting with space: journeys and creativity, is published by Ashgate, 2010.
