Icons of the Inner Life, An Audio Read-Aloud
The peculiar and timely wisdom streaming in from worlds beyond, for such a time as this
“The human heart wants a wholeness of experience, and I feel the human heart can find no satisfaction in a mental abstraction representing the Divine Reality. It must have wholeness because it must have something that it can relate to, that it can recognize, and the heart recognizes, right away, this wholeness.”
Icons of the Inner Life: Children, Angels, & Fools
This recording is a longer piece—more like story time. Last summer I found a little gem at a local used bookstore, a collection of art and words by Cecil Collins.
Here’s what the inside jacket says:
Cecil Collins is widely regarded as England’s most important visionary artist since William Blake. Although their work is very different, both were motivated by a quest for spiritual truth, for beauty, harmony and eventual serenity.
Collins’ writings speak directly to today’s world. His address on Angels is offered here, for the first time, in its original form.
In 2004, a student of Collins named Stella Astor gathered up words and images after he died and packaged them as a sacrament, so others might be nourished by the same presence that called to her.
I read the preface, a brief and compelling biography of Collins, and an off-the-cuff speech he offered at the unveiling of stained glass windows he had been commissioned to create.
Opening to a direct encounter with the wisdom
Let us open to the wisdom streaming in for such a time as this, streaming in through Cecil Collins art and life, each of us uniquely.
If there is a single seed of recognition—a word, a sentence, an image, gesture or felt sense.
write it down
paint it
collage it
vocalize it
inhabit it.
And then see what grows.
Listen to Kirsten read from Angels
If you want some company as you listen, I’d be honored to accompany you.
