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Art - The Seed of Earth and Heart


Queenstown is like a bee hive, buzzing with all kinds of wayfarers, adventurers and vagabonds. Beedogs from all over the world zip down to this honeycomb, and relish in its nectar – the beauty, the adventure, the freedom. The more I engaged with this energy, the more my desire for the life of freedom was pollenated. I am a Sagittarius, and I long for eternal freedom. 



And it wasn’t a pipe dream either - it was a ripe dream. I had already starting writing the story of my own dream life – a journey of heart and meaning, guided by the compass of my life purpose and talents. I pulled out my old journal, where the sketching’s of Joshua St Clair were scribbled over the page. This was my ticket, but it still needed a bit of refining if I was going to make it a reality. I didn’t even know who Joshua St Clair was!

I was crunching through the final few weeks of college time as if it was biscotti. But thankfully I was balancing this rock solid brunch with my love for art, soft and succulent like a nectarine. It was as though I had a secret love affair with the art side of my soul, sneaking away to the Queenstown waterfront where the daddy-long-legs of art and life were weaving their webs. I sat in their company, a little fruit fly, lacing a string of words into my journal. I was fascinated by the waterfront folk and their lives, where passion prevails, and love for existence is acknowledged and appreciated by joyous beedogs. 



Collapsing into the gentle strum of sweet guitars and mythic pianos, I wondered what all of these magicians had in common. Perhaps I was looking too far into it, because the answer was so simple: they were following their hearts!

I guess art is as simple as giving your heart the paintbrush, and letting it paint what it so desires. But I still felt like something was missing. 

You can’t make a lemon meringue without the raw ingredients and the tangy citrus. So I started to wonder: what are the raw ingredients of the art that we create? Where do we get the citrus from? I melted into my creative space to seek wisdom from my own art – the tunes that I had composed during my gap year. There were five tunes that were particularly rambunctious, like bumbling bears – they were epic and adventurous, and more advanced than all of my other compositions. Two years had passed since composing them, and I still couldn’t play them to their justice.

I recited them rigorously and with an open ear, trying to understand their origins. What was the source, the inspiration? They told a story that was grand and expansive…a story of a soul that was evolving and stepping into bigger shoes. Suddenly, it made perfect sense. They were reflections of my life at the time, as they had poured from my heart as life was starting to open up for me and become a more epic experience.


If my art was a reflection of my life experience, did that mean that I had conscious control over the quality of the art that I was creating? Of course it did! Art is inspired by our own life! This was a huge breakthrough in my life purpose. I shifted my efforts from mastering my art to mastering my own life. Rich art comes from rich life experiences!

Okay … I knew that if I wanted to produce powerful art, I needed to follow my heart, and seek rich life experiences. But, even still, something was missing.


After one particularly colourful evening, I found myself in the back of a car zooming alongside Lake Wakitipu, following the plump moon to a place called Lake Sylvan. Behind the wheel was Leila, an enthusiastic adventurer, artist, and fantasy fanatic like myself – one of the few people I have met who also listens to fantasy music. This was the first time meeting Leila - my Irish companion Curtis had told me all about her, and now we were both in her car onwards to her favourite destination. 

“I can’t believe you guys haven’t been to Lake Sylvan!” she said excitedly. “It is a magical place!” I trusted her ardour. We arrived to a camp fire under twinkling stars – it was a cozy gathering of allies. We meditated under a nearby glow worm cave, and trekked through the silent bush to Lake Sylvan. Leila was telling me all about a fantasy novel she was writing, and it re-ignited my own ambitions for writing a fantasy novel series that had graced my imagination in times of the past – The Prophecy of Pilkenhorn. Leila was the first fellow fantasy writer I had met, and I was grateful for her company. It was re-invigorating. 


Leila waved her hand across the moon swept Lake Sylvan as if it was a paintbrush. “It looks like a dragon!” she said, gesturing to the surrounding mountains. I felt the fantasy, the mysticism, shivering down my spine. The magic and the beauty of the Earth was knocking on my hearts door, wanting to eat grapes by the fireplace. Was this the main ingredient of the recipe for Art that I was trying to understand? This enthralling, deeply mysterious connection to the world around us?

I tried fully grasping this insight during my adventures around Queenstown’s nooks and crannies with my good buddies Sahil and Curtis. My camera became an additional limb, and I was eagerly capturing the world around me with the click of a finger. Suddenly, it all made sense – the puzzle had completed itself. I wanted to capture the aliveness of each place, the essence of each experience. Of course I wanted to share the worlds' wonder! We are here to celebrate this wonderful Earth! And Art was my buzzing beedog, my magic wand, the seat of my sorcery. 




In the deep reflection of Moke Lake, Joshua St Clair was born. My ultimate purpose in life was set – I have come here to discover the beauty of the Earth, to live rich life experiences, and to tell this story through art. In a wounded world, what better purpose is there than to inspire and heal the hearts of our fellow Earthly companions, so that they too can awaken to Life’s breathtaking majesty?

After much meditation and adventure, I had finally cracked the cryptic puzzle that was begging to be known in my soul. Our very life is the greatest work of art there ever was, and we have conscious control over how magnificent it can become. We are the flutes for divine wisdom to play its magical music, each possessing this magnificent power to create Art, born from a marriage of Earth and Heart. In fact, these two words are reflections of one another – if you look closely, you will see that they are the same word. 

And the seed of these words, nestled like a precious dove, is Art. 

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