Cutting the support for the arts to only those that make money!

A forest fire allows new shoots to grow.

Art is part of being but has been separated off as if an 'add-on'. A meaningless existence then makes its meaning as acquisition of things including wealth and power or materialism, which curiously doesn't -value the material, but only what can be got out of it for private or personal gain.

To reconnect with our wholeness - with our Soul - might be served in part by the arts, but if they are themselves subverted by the economy stupid, then they become tools of medication for the suppression and control of symptoms, like a kind of lubricant to allows what shouldnt be tolerated, to be tolerable.

Economy needs radical change in its foundations - which are the ideas we have set in stone and yet are ideas none the less.

Art needs also to get in touch with its roots - so as to communicate something of a wholeness of being rather than merely reflect the disease of our times.

I hold that art is of the verb 'to be'. Thou art Creativity in Heaven - but in artifice you are indebted to the deceiver!

I don't see a shift coming that will restore the pockets of a Prodigal Wastrel - but in the turning towards truth and wholeness of being, we will find we are fulfilled and share in that fulfilment. This is the art of living; a shared sense of what it is to be truly alive - and it expresses in infinite ways that are organically alive and not as an engineered society.

Does it need money to tell a story, to share a poem, to sing a song, to paint a picture or create a sculpture? Yes, sometimes. But mostly it needs inspiration, and the willingness to hang in there with it to its fulfilment.

We live in a rather monocultured society where we are increasingly managed and conformed to the mentality of control. Even rebellion has been commoditized. Is it any wonder it is bankrupt?

Our Father,

Who ART in Heaven,

Holy and Whole is your Nature.

Let it come into our own for we would remember

what we always forget,

when we make a different mind our own.

As if to use a Living Inheritance

to line our personal pockets,

until the bubble bursts.

Let forgiveness replace grievance

Your creative freedom rises

in works that speak of Life

to Life.

Let us not worship a forged copy of a life

that promises much yet only robs our Soul,

but let rip - so to speak

the cat of curiosity from the bag

of 'Thou Shalt Not!'

For what love would have us be

needs not authority of dead gods,

but the wellspring of Life ever anew.

The investment needs to be in the truly Life-affirming, whether in the arts or in economic activity.

Because you love, are impassioned, are moved, and transformed in the giving - not for pieces of silver.

But because shared value is uncovering of what we are in a world that tends to cover it over or squelch it.


(Written into Culture secretary Maria Miller to make 'economic case' to stave off further arts cuts)