Anna Redsand

SPIRITUALITY AND CREATIVITY
Part II

In September, 2015, I interviewed my friend Tina Kragh Rusfort in the village of Vester Skerninge, Denmark. I posted the interview in four parts in May, 2016, followed by a piece on a painting of hers that hangs in my living room. I'm reposting my interview with her because it will be followed by a new interview that represents a companion piece to this one. And because what Tina has to say about spirituality and creativity is of value.

“How did you experience your spirituality as a young adult?” I asked.

“I experienced it as connected to creating. I had my special, sacred place with my paintings. To paint I needed to be alone, so I set up a nice area with a high quality of aloneness. I loved my colors. I fell in love with them when I was making them wet. So they would be ready for the alchemy. I would surrender to them, making a draft with pen. Then I would let the color talk because it would translate my feelings, so when I concentrated on one area of the motif—it might be a young couple or a woman in the garden—I wouldn’t control it. The motif would tell me its story. I had a lot of those pictures. Wet and wet.”

I was fascinated, though not at all surprised, since I’ve known Tina for a long time, by the interplay of imagery and spirituality in her life. I asked if there was more.

“Privateness,” she said. I wouldn’t know how  Read More 

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness…. Broad, wholesome, charitable views …cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime. ~ Mark Twain



CAMBODIA JOURNAL: DAYS 7-9

During the next three days we developed a kind of routine. I had recorded the second part of my interview with Wayne on Sunday (Day 6), and when we finished on Monday, I felt an unexpected release. Our talks were fascinating, and I was getting what I had come for, but when I turned off the recorder, I started sharing more of myself. It was like old times, when Wayne and I knew each other 30-plus years earlier in Gallup. Only it was better, because both of us had found a measure of freedom from our rule-bound religious upbringings.

In the mornings, Cheyenne and I read and napped, the heat and humidity making us more lethargic than usual. I went for a walk one morning along Read More 

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness…. Broad, wholesome, charitable views …cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime. ~ Mark Twain


CAMBODIA JOURNAL: DAY 6

It’s harder to write about Wat Opot than about ancient temples, the delights of riding in a tuk-tuk, and the lush Cambodian countryside. The lives here were not once lived in now ruined temples, and though it was a minor wonder that in ten years ten buildings had been constructed where there were only rice fields and marching red ants, telling about Wat Opot requires going deeper. I have to tell about lives that have been formed by great tragedy and yet are some of the most vibrant, joyful lives I have ever encountered.

When Wayne took us on a tour on a humidly brilliant Sunday morning, our first full day at Wat Opot, he salted the tales of each building, its function and how it came to be, with stories of children and parents and how they came to Wat Opot. AIDS had touched every single one in Read More 

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness…. Broad, wholesome, charitable views …cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime ~ Mark Twain



CAMBODIA JOURNAL: DAY 5 CONTINUED

After the service in the temple, the crowd of us walked with solar flashlights to the low wall in front of what had once been the hospice center. We grownups sat on the wall, all of us waiting for the generator to bring two hours of light. I couldn’t help thinking of the summers when we lived at Teec Nos Pos. There the generator at the BIA school came on for two hours, also in the evenings as darkness descended.

Under a large spreading tree at Wat Opot, children climbed and crawled over us, hugging, sometimes clinging tight with what felt like desperation, other times simply Read More