Touching the #Sublime: #Art and #Travel

 On our recent trip to Chicago, I almost didn't make it to #TheArtInstituteofChicago. I had reasoned it wasn't likely to live up to the #TateGalleries. How wrong I was. To stand in front of Monet's Irises, is to enter the creative mind of a genius and enter into the #sublime. I found myself overcome with emotion - a state somewhere between weeping and joy rose in my chest and threatened to overwhem me: a kind of ecstasy: here was an abject experience of engaging with a stunning unique creation. A completely new, and arguably mind altering experience. But how do we enter into this sublime experience? By opening mind and heart and looking, with the eyes of a child: in wonder. What provokes it? I believe a divine connection between artist and viewer that touches both takes place - like experiencing the eternal in the temporal. A form of time traveling takes place. There I stood in direct communication with the living work of a dead artist, but it was his work that continued to speak and it spoke of creation, the creation as he saw it back in 1914, and creation as I was viewing it in 2024. Across space and time his soul communicated with mine and it spoke of a rich engagement with creation that caused him to create something fresh and new and astonishing out of the fabric of the heavenly design he saw before him. I see this as a spiritual act, though I am not ascribing Monet's motivations in creating Irises. I can only describe the affect it had on me, over a hundred years later. It was simply and fundamentally an extraordinary experience for me, even a spiritual experience, if you believe, as I do, that all creation was created by God and by becoming children of God, who create in turn, we enter into this divine communication that transcends space and time, given God dwells eternally outside of time. Georgia O'Keefes bleakly beautiful New Mexico landscapes are rerendered in full glorious colour as if her creative eye had splashed kaleidoscopic paint over the landscape; viewing my first Helen Frankenthaler in the paint was thrilling a psychedelic mishmash of her private physical and internal landscapes; Joan Mitchell's Cityscape was an actual joy to behold, and Grant Wood's American Gothic were all highlights that remain splashed vividly in my mindscape having been projected there by these inimitable creators. I was like a toddler on ten iced buns, racing around, trying not to miss anything in the limited time that I had which was what was left of the afternoon before it closed. 

 

Chicago is a stunning city with an emerald green river that runs through it from Lake Michigan that is as wide as the sea. I was struck by how clean the city is compared to London or Paris. We spent an unexpected three weeks with friends at their house in Lamont thanks to the Aer Lingus strike that had us lingering like The Cranberries song for a further week which meant we were able to experience our first Fourth of July replete with fireworks hotdogs and burgers and lots of fun with our incomparable friends. A highlight for me was sitting on the wide white porch within sightline of the American flag and a lawn as wide as the Sargasso sea, sipping coffee and allowing my mind to drift and expand with all that was novel. Other highlights were the #PuertoRican murals. On the Sunday I went, the racing of motorbikes up and down the main street, gave the works and extra dimension of power. Afterwards, we experienced the explosive garlicky spicy taste of Puerto Rican food. As you can possibly tell the neurons were mind blowing. There is something so powerfully unifying and humane about art when it is not exclusified, to coin a new term, as it should never really be, and sharing food for that matter. Those murals point up that truth along with any by #DiegoRiviera.

Travel does something expansive to the mind and the imagination. Where the everyday or the commonplace causes one to just tick along in auto mode, new sights and sounds stir the imagination and unlock creativity as one shifts into high gear and the brain is lit up in new ways. As we know, the #brain is a muscle. Traveling, with all it’s rich, visionary stimuli, causes the brain to quite literally workout. See it as an imperative Arnie experience. Now I’m dating myself, age wise. Who is the new Arnie? Everything seems much more possible when traveling. The mind and imagination are constantly evoked and stirred as fresh ideas come. When we are freed from our everyday constraints, the freedom that traveling allows brings with it unexpected insights and solutions to problems, as the soul becomes unburdened and the mind uncluttered. #Traveling also boosts the happy chemicals in your brain. Yes, it boosts dopamine. What a dream! It is the greatest of treats and a gift to experience and explore, to get to be a big kid in God's infinitely creative and ever inventive playground. It's the best way to forget your troubles and get happy. I loved the city of #Chicago with all its attractions and being in that wondrous museum, but to just sit and be in another landscape is pure bliss and instigates the sort of internal travel that changes mind and soul and recharges spirit. Oh to travel more! Glad to vicariously relive it here: the benefits of travel stay with you even after the experience has ended.

 

#Travel Broadens the #Mind and Expands the #Brain

I recently returned from a mind and heart expanding trip to Chicago aka The Windy City. It wasn't windy during our visit but we certainly felt the winds of change as one does when traveling. Traveling expands not only our physical horizons, but also our mental ones, in that it helps us literally expand our thinking by making surprising connections which cause new neural pathways to form. You can quite literally cause your brain to grow by enriching it with fresh experiences. How many times have you had breakthroughs with problem solving or creative ideas when traveling?

Earlier this summer, I’d been fortunate enough to attend a writer's conference in Wheaton which is a small town in Illinois. Wheaton College was founded by the abolitionist Jonathan Blanchard and was a safe harbour for runaway slaves during the Civil War part of the Underground Railroad it was the first college to take black students. You can read more about Blanchard Hall and its role in the Underground Railroad here: https://www.wbez.org/shows/morning-shift/whats-that-building-blanchard-hall-at-wheaton-college-and-the-underground-railroad/484bc97e-b846-4763-bbd4-fc215a2efab7. Wheaton College is also the site of the Billy Graham Museum. Some delightful friends of ours had lent us their condo in the city. The condo, was situated right on the river with astonishing views, so my husband and children, were able to go sightseeing while I went off to college. Each morning I experienced the bliss of simply having to turn up and attend fascinating and informative talks in a completely new environment which was in and of itself thrilling. Everything was different. Everything was new. Even traveling there through the insane Chicago traffic was a buzz, particularly interstate 290. All these highways are named after presidents. I’m pretty sure president 290 must have had a live fast, die young mentality. I must look up more on Ike Eisenhower. The 290 is situated near the Chicago loop, where everyone appears to go loopy. There were some hilariously battered vehicles on that road. More than once we clocked vehicles without their rear panels.  

Meals during the conference took place in an award-winning canteen with so much choice as to induce gobsmacking wonder and an inability to choose. The American attendees seemed nonplussed at the lavish abundance, whilst I tried to maintain a semblance of self control and increasingly, the ability to do up the button on my jeans. Even trying new food can set neurons firing. Certainly the ice-cream machine had my brain in a tizz, so much so that I had to avoid it after the first day, such was it's magnetic pull to my brain. The sun was out and so was I. We all know that a lack of vitamin D makes one glum. I adored the Chicago heat so much, that I wandered about suspended in it at every ten minute break while most people ducked into the shade, moony face raised to the sun in abject adoration. The sun is a rare treat in Wales and I was going to lap up as much of its intensity as possible. 

I was there in cicada season which was wild. Walk under a tree and myriad wings like mini helicopters assaulted you as they landed in your hair with a small but not insignificant thud. The ringing noise that accompanied tese joyous flying sequences penetrated skull and bone in the intense heat. The wildness of this intensity was only intensified by the cicada experience. I was told by the event organiser that the cicada season of 2024 was the first in 17 years that periodical cicadas emerged from the soil as fully fledged adults. I was awed by this. I related to this, I identified with those critters who’d burrowed out of the soil. It took some doing to burrow out of UK soil to get over there in the first place. I was once againthe 17 year old kid who left my home in Africa to travel to Europe, desperate for new experiences. If you’re in a rut, try to travel. The only way out of a rut is to physically move out of it. If you can’t hop on a plane or train, hop on a bike and take a new route. Vary your walking route to work. Embrace change. Whatever you do, make it new. It’ll make you a better, more empathetic, happier person. More soon.

#mindrenewal #braintraining #expandyourmind #mentalfitness