The next two art works we are featuring from Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality are by Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow).

The first work is “Rain Cloud and Oceanus.” Although Joseph grew up in the high desert of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, he has a special relationship with the oceans. One of his formative visions was of meeting Oceanus, the Lord of the Oceans. At the Sound Peace Chambers around the world, a fire ceremony is done on the 7th of each month for the purification of the oceans.

The next painting stands at the doorway of a very important chapter of the book, which we offer as a free pdf download – Chapter 14 Spiritual Democracy. I found this concept of Spiritual Democracy in Steven Herrmann’s book, Spiritual Democracy: The Wisdom of Early American Visionaries for the Journey Forward, and he had found it in the work of Walt Whitman. This concept resonated with me and for Joseph also. The painting below is an older one from 1997 that was called Earth Child, but Joseph added to the painting, making it “Earth Child of Spiritual Democracy.” I think of this fellow as the heart of our book, a seed to planted in the soil of the soul of the human being that blooms as spiritual democracy.

Here is what Joseph has to say about Spiritual Democracy:

“Religious liberty happens to every single human baby child when the human being swallows and drinks the milk from its mother’s breast at feeding time. Thus the American soul is in the making stage.

“What I am saying is we have to start at the foundation of what makes a human being to grow up in that religious liberty. That is the only way it is going to work if we are really going to follow the real way that we become individuals. If we don’t start at the beginning. . . .

“So I am telling you now as I am reading your paper that the idea of religious freedom was already being educated through the sound, and the being and vibration of every single swallow of swallowing-ness every time the baby was drinking its mother’s milk. This is my contribution to the idea of spiritual democracy and religious freedom,” (Joseph Rael, Becoming Medicine, 382).