Copyright © 2009 All Rights Reserved
Rev. Donna Belt, an interfaith minister, is the founder of SpiritWorks—a transformative art and writing studio where she works with individuals and groups in a ministry of creativity. Donna moved to Raleigh, North Carolina with her husband, Jim after living in Asia and Europe, where they raised their two children and she studied art, coordinated writing and creativity classes, and contributed to a number of intercultural, religious and hospice publications. She views the creative process as a means to living in the moment—where limitations are unlearned, and where illness and grief are gently healed from the inside
Unlearning Not to Speak
Marge Piercy
She must learn again to speak
Starting with I
Starting with We
Starting as the infant does
With her own true hunger
And pleasure
And rage.
Grace
Author: Rev. Donna Belt
Grace is a silver scaled fish that leaps into my life unexpectedly. Sometimes it gets caught in dream filaments; at other times it leaves its imprint in wet paint. I never feel the tug on the line. Yet suddenly I recognize that I have been visited, through some strange and wordless piece of evidence left for me to decipher until we meet again.
Artwork by Rev. Donna Belt
Meaning, by nature, escapes capturing. As I keep my mother company in her last months, my mind wants to form words to contain this juncture where the physical and spiritual linger in farewell. Yet while I pause, grace expresses through the marks in my collage, reminding me that our spirits are verbs.
We’ve never known a time uncolored by evolving.
In this painting, notice the deep-rose toned form reclining as if on flower-strewn starscape at the bottom of the picture. Even before its last breath, a second entity emerges, climbing upward in its own galaxy of blue light. Presence surrounds the observer, as if bending to whisper into her right ear.
“Life is a circle, Donna,” it says. “You are divinely held in a universe where there is no loss. There is only transformation.”
Grace moves my paintbrush to places where my mind stumbles. It holds the light for me in the emptied house of my childhood with its “For Sale” sign staked in the front yard. It shows me the glow of divine love that holds the world in orbit, even as it appears to be fragmenting.
Grace is my path forward. I put my foot out, trusting that meaning will rush in to provide the ground for my next step.
I am grateful for the flash of a fish’s tail that slides through my consciousness, reminding me that we are all eternal.
And so it is.
Innocence 
Destiny 
Beauty
The Observer
Meeting Death
February 25th, 2009
Author: Rev. Donna Belt
Last month, my mother lay down with Death. And like a young woman having known love for the first time, she will never be the same. And neither will I.
Poetry and art-making are my means to chaperoning her through this lingering relationship. I create word lists from dream images and observe them like tea leaves to see what meaning arises.
“Finality”. Artwork by Rev. Donna Belt
The deathbed awaits my mother
yet the expected transformation
is mine.
The grandmothers hold my pain
as it transcends from shock
to relief,
moving round the cycle
of labor
to birth.
My grandfather places
crocodile teeth
on the green clock
circle of life.
Immersed in time,
I’m not surprised when
it comes to a
soft
gentle
Stop.
Beginnings… Endings… They speak to me in identical voices. My mother teaches me how to live between worlds, as moments arrive one at a time for her contemplation and surrender.
Picking up a paintbrush, I continue my search for some place of solidity from which to hold my vigil. The part of me that will always be my mother’s child grieves because she no longer sees me. I blend in with the other caretakers who know her by room number. Yet I’m reassured through blues and lavenders that hers is a world where Spirit offers something much more lasting. Light shines on the crown of her head and seeps downward so that her human aspects become more and more shadowy.
The clock of life bites with the precision of crocodile teeth, yet loss readily yields to gain. I’m no longer sure what to pray for.
I am the chaperone in the back seat, as my mother embraces her own eternity. This is her final lesson to me in this lifetime: to simply allow.
The Teacher
Contemplation
Surrender
The “Sacred Messiness of Life”
By Rev. Donna Belt
May 2009
In a recent workshop, I joined participants in creating what I called “Intuitive Paintings of Source”. I encouraged them to breathe deeply, sensing into their bodies to discover the presence of the divine that rested there, beyond the doubts and surface turbulence. Then I invited them to follow the lead of their paintbrushes, simply observing what colors and shapes arose.
As everyone finished their paintings, we lined them up on the wall so that we could reflect as a group on what had come forward for each of us. Quickly, I noticed that amidst a grouping of spiraling, rainbowed creations that offered promise of orderly evolution, my impressions seemed much more chaotic. My painting seems to be steeped in fractures where life force drains away. Yet flowering and promise also spring from those hectic areas where things fall apart.
I’ve discovered new sides of myself by surrendering to the place of not knowing. “It is precisely when we become strangers to ourselves, and then love the stranger as our self, that we have the greatest potential for self (or selves) discovery” (p. 32, Kula). It is through our letting go and reclaiming all the conflicting truths of whom we are that the grand design evolves.
Rabbi Irwin Kula urges us to find meaning in “…the sacred messiness; when we can experience, even just for fleeting moments, the fragility of creation and the necessity of chaos” (p. 83, Yearnings, the Sacred Messiness of Life). This has become the focus of my journey as a minister and daughter of a terminally ill mother, to understand faith as a dialectic between my very human feelings of loss and the expansion that occurs as I open more deeply to the eternal.
My relationship with emotions of grief and fear—whether others’ or my own—has changed. I realize that I used to see those feelings as something to be resolved so that I could move on to the meaning-making. Now I see them as gifts of opening and flow.
Tears and laughter are the concoction that best express where I find myself at this time in my life. To embrace them is to surrender to the treasures that I often missed in my hurry to deify order.
I know these things to be true: I am terrified, and yet I am a courageous warrior. I am self-absorbed in my loss, yet more open and understanding of others. I hurt, but I find breathing room in the dark. I have lost my certainty, but gained greater ability to navigate the mystery.
The divine is sinking deep roots within me. With each crack in my foundation, the flowering on the surface becomes more riotous. And God sees that it is good.
Rabbi Irwin Kula and Linda Loewenthal, Yearnings, the Sacred Messiness of Life (Hyperion, 2007).
The Angel and the Abyss
