Today, March 8th, is International Women’s Day. Today I helped hang an amazing art show called Celebrating Women. When I arrived at the art gallery with six others who were also planning to help hang the show, the paintings leaning against the wall looked wonderful, but it looked like an overwhelming task with more than 70 paintings to hang, plus a whole wall of little paintings.
As we walked around the room we could see how much thought and effort had gone into each painting. They were colourful, energetic and as varied as the women who had painted them. There were themes like pregnancy, nursing mothers, abstracts, flowers, portraits of women, nudes, sculptures, pieces that included poetry, woven hangings, gourds (one made into a bird house and another one made into a vase), and many more in variety of mediums.
Two of the women were the main planners of for the placement of the paintings and they went back and forth checking colours and flow and which sizes would look good together. There was a lot of cooperation in the group and everyone was called upon for their opinion. All opinions were taken into consideration and experimented with until a consensus was drawn. All the paintings that had been submitted were accepted, as opposed to other shows, like juried shows, where some are rejected. There was a real effort made to include everyone and show everyone’s piece to its best advantage.
There was a wall of small acrylic paintings called self respect is my inner light. Those paintings were done by women in a shelter. After going back and forth for a couple of hours we finally had the placement down and then began the hanging. Two people started from one end of the gallery and two started from the other end. We didn’t do any measuring. We all agreed from experience that it was better to just eyeball it and basically hang the paintings with spaces between them that felt intuitively right.
It was a show about women, painted by women, (we didn’t make a rule about that, but 95% of the paintings submitted were women’s art), hung by women in the spirit of how women work together and cooperate in doing a task.
This spirit of cooperation and communication, sharing and including everyone, when applied globally, is the only way to create a better world. It is the feminine values which will go on to sustain the world, not the competitive “me first” values which typify the general values in the world today. It is the women, (mothers) and artists of the world who can demonstrate to others a better way to live. And men are not excluded. Every man has a feminine spirit within. Each one of us has to find the feminine spirit within. The future of the planet depends on it.
Interestingly, universal love is not called sisterly love, but brotherly love. Why? Because as souls we have no gender, but as souls we enter into matter, into a body, to play out our part in the drama of life. Because we “enter in” we are called brothers. We souls are brothers and we are a family. We have bodily parents but the whole world has one universal, spiritual parent, whom many of us have forgotten. God comes, at this time to bring unity and peace to the entire world family of souls.
[Special guest writer Carol Biberstein makes her living as an artist, art teacher and Farmers’ Market Bread Lady in Brampton, Ontario, Canada. She has been a student of Raja Yoga meditation for 6 ½ years, has changed a lot from the inside outward, and expects to transform completely. She writes about deep spiritual matters to inspire others to transform their lives. All thanks goes to the Creator, the one who inspires the re-creation of the world!]
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