Couldn't art be a good aid to spiritual practice because it can be inclusive, expressive of any of the dark or light corners of the heart? Art is such a vehicle for creativity, but I guess everything needs to be.

This opening of the heart can never be rote. Yesterday's words and images won't do for today. That's just the skeleton. It was the process that opened our hearts, not the words spoken, not the product. The product will be the same tomorrow, can inspire tomorrow's process, but can't substitute for the process itself. The creative process.

The world itself is new every day. (Hence Julia Cameron's thing about creativity putting you in synch with the universe.) We always need a way of looking at the same old stuff. New. It is the act of creation/expression itself, not the words or the images created, that relaxes our restless doubt. (That doubt is the hemmed-in heart, the not-open heart.)

Learn this new every day, as if I never knew it before.