When I took piano lessons in the first grade, my favorite piece was Through Central Park. I liked it because you could "hear" the clip-clopping of the carriage horses in the music. This past weekend we saw Central Park dressed in snow, and enjoyed it as much as the kids (of all ages) who were sledding or making snow people. I especially enjoyed it through Sister Jan's eyes--she had never seen snow before, and would periodically stop and poke it with a hand or foot and say, "Isn't it miraculous stuff?"
We also visited the Metropolitan Art Museum, heading right for the Impressionists. We could have stayed there all day, but were lured from one lovely room to another by the art of one culture after another. Every human culture expresses itself in some art form, even headhunters of Papua New Guinea! It occured to me that Central Park is like the art museum, a place set aside to allow us to get in touch with creativity at an even more basic level--the creativity of God.
I'm in severe withdrawal from National Public Radio, since I can't get any good station for news and classical music in my room. It's as real as hunger. All these hungers: for nature, arts, music, all forms of creative expression, and spirituality...are genuine human needs. For the first time I paid attention to the section in the Declaration of Human Rights (the U.N. passed it in 1948) that says "Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts..." (Article #27) Imagine having to say that we have a right to the very thing that distinguishes us two-legged, big-brained human critters from all the rest. Creative God, fill ALL our hungers!
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