Watercolor by Nancy Wait (1987)

An excess of emotion. Of feeling. From the heart. Through the heart of feeling. Onto the cross. Propelled upwards, above the horizontal line of the physical plane. Sometimes you think you’ll die unless you express it. And then something in you does die, in the expression. Because Art takes us to a different place in our perception of what we think we know as reality.

I could call it Art and Descending and it would mean the same thing. Going into the depths of our soul for expression. Up, down, just the one line, that vertical line crossing the plane of the physical world. The cross. Above and below. North. South. The horizontal bisects it, resonates out, east and west.

Art and Ascension. I’ve always known what it is but I haven’t been able to explain it. Not the way I’d like to. It’s something that happens when you do it. Make art. Create a picture or a painting or a poem or a piece of music or a dance. That’s when it happens. In the making of a thing. A feeling that you take from life and give it form. Make it real in some other way. Exaggerate it. So that it becomes more than it is. Because you’ve increased its resonance and hue, its height and weight, its mass and impact. This feeling that profoundly moved you.

Maybe it will affect other people too but you’re not thinking about that when you’re making, creating, feeling and being, exploring, delving into it. This “it.”

What is this it.

An excess of emotion. From the heart. Through the heart of feeling.

You don’t have the words so you draw it.

You can’t draw so you dance it, compose it, put it into verse.

We have the ability to feel and respond to so much more than we can ever express with our five senses. But we have to try. We try. We reach and we reach and we reach. The reaching is where the ascension comes in.

B&W photo of oil painting by Nancy Wait (1990)

This picture here on the left—I’ve been using it as a kind of logo. How art and ascension is a journey inwards. You have to bare yourself, put your ego aside, your identity aside. Go on your hands and knees. A beggar.

It’s a female figure because I’m a female. But if you’re a male, then you go in there with your feminine side. Your receptive nature. Your anima. Your yin self. Into the unknown. In order to know it. This “it.” I’m it. You’re it. Art exaggerates it. So that we may know it more truly.