Being new to a city is a beautiful experience. Every day is a different adventure. Every moment fresh. Around each corner – some wonderful surprise.

Last Saturday in my adopted hometown – Savannah, Georgia – the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) held its annual Sidewalk Arts Festival. It is an event held in the grand Forsyth Park.  Current, past and potential SCAD students get their own square of sidewalk, a big box of chalk, and the opportunity to create whatever they want in that little piece of real estate.

The results were absolutely amazing. Blew my mind away. Hundreds and hundreds of little works of art, created in just a few hours with chalk and water. All created knowing that the creation would be lost to a power washing first thing Monday morning.

Would you try to create something beautiful knowing that it would be destroyed immediately afterward? If you would, could you do so with any real enthusiasm or passion? I mean, why bother right?

I’m certain you can probably think of a couple reasons you might want to bother.

Yet, have you thought that one reason might be to get closer to your higher power, the God of your understanding? That which you find to be divine. Your creator. Whatever name you choose to call All That Is in this universe.

Maybe you thought that. Probably not.

I have found that I get closest to the divine when I am doing something that I get totally lost in. Something that completely takes me away from the time and place I think I am in. Something that quite literally takes my breath away I am so involved in it – like I forget to breathe.

Now when I was not attuned to thinking in this manner, I experienced these moments as a pause in my mind chatter; a moment of unexplained clarity of sense-of-self; a deep inner peace which I felt like I almost overlooked.

Only when the idea was placed in my head that these were moments of something very special did I begin to pay more attention to them. Not the kind of attention that comes to you before you start something; and not necessarily the kind of attention that comes to you while you’re doing something; but the kind of attention where you notice that you have been somewhere special just on that edge of doing and finishing.

That “AHA!” moment where you know you have been in a deep connection with All That Is in the universe. Ironically found while focusing on just one little thing.

Like a square of sidewalk.

Art, or more specifically the action of art, is a perfect example of this focus. Art is quite simply, the process of creation itself. One of those points where we deeply connect with our own Creator – by doing the very thing a Creator does:  Create.

So enjoy these pictures of a few SCAD students connecting with their higher power. Creating beauty.

Take care and seek peace,

Vince