Artist Journal by Brooke Morgan
Brooke Noel Morgan is a multimedia artist and the founder of Nomad Collective, a global lifestyle brand which she began in 2014. NC was born from a desire to support artists around the world by connecting them to the modern market. In 2019, the brand grew a lifestyle branch, called The Abode, which is a 1940s adobe style home that serves as a gathering place and a gallery where Brooke hosts a variety of events and features the work of the Nomad Collective community. It is also her home and the place that gave birth to her personal art practice, which is growing and expanding. Current mediums include mixed media, poetry, photography, sculpture, and interior curation. Brooke’s work is characterized by abstract organic form and a close connection to Mother Nature.
We invited her to share a journal /
I sit now and I wonder — how do we know if we’ve truly changed, truly transformed, truly evolved from old ways of doing and being in the world? Perhaps this knowing or this longing to know is not for us to grasp with the egoic mind. Perhaps transformation is an infinite loop of becoming that transcends the watermarks of time and dwells in the deep ocean that we know as eternity. Perhaps this knowing dwells in the loving care of the Great Beyond. This sacred place, this infinite loop is what most interests me now. Living in the unknowing: offering each day, each dilemma, each bend in the road to the Divine and letting the gifts of enlightenment arrive in their own time, in their own way. Making room for magic. And allowing the toxic elements of ego to sink to the bottom of the well and be absorbed by the earth, so that they no longer taint the living water the soul longs for.
To live an undivided life, to restore wholeness, integrity, to breathe a sacred breath into every moment, from the mundane to the mountaintop...to allow the low, to allow the emptying out, to allow the barrenness and the in between. This tolerance, this acceptance of the full spectrum of the human experience….this is the work for me now. At times, I want to run and hide as a doe in the woods. I want to be alone and be cut off and free from all of the noise, the pain, the difficulty of living in the world. But there is a fine balance between gracing the ocean floor and coming up for air. Both are essential. Living out in the world, in the open air, can be challenging for me. My interior landscape is so vibrant and consuming at times, I just don’t have the energy for the air (or the energies) out there. I feel so vulnerable. Yet, deep down I understand that life outside of the cave informs the inside. As an artist, the real living is what informs my work and awakens my subconscious. And most of real living happens in relationships with other human beings. Paradoxically, in this real relating lies the divine mystery of things. It is all so beautifully and wonderfully confusing.
So back for a moment to a former question — how do we know if and when we’ve evolved? What marks the death of an old life, the birth of a new? Maybe when the veil between inner and outer worlds seems less opaque, maybe when the line between me and “other” is less visible to the heart’s eye, maybe when the stream outside of the cave flows in, when the suffering becomes the joy, the fear becomes the hope, death becomes birth, a singer becomes the song, a traveler becomes the path. Or perhaps, we know, when, in that moment of stillness under the sun, the wordless wonder of it all travels through tears, and our heart cracks wide open, as a seed in Winter, overflowing with gratitude for simply being here.
Credits
Art is meditation.
Art is letting go.
Art is confrontation with everything
I know and don’t know…to be true.
A collaboration with the divine,
tapping into the sublime nature of things
and resting there
There is the undoing...and there is the unknowing. The ego prefers neither. Yet the ego — my ego —
is so weary, so tired, so over its old ways of operating, that I have no choice but to offer it up on a golden platter to the Divine and let the soul lead. Living has never depended on it more. The old life is gone; the new one is becoming.
I just celebrated 40 years of life in this human body in December. It was a magical day, a day that I hope to remember forever, a day that felt like both a death and a birth at the same time. On that day, a former life in me died...one marked by ambition, achievement, avoidance, accommodation, neglect, denial, resentment, and control. As I remember the spiritual happenings of the day, they are innumerable, some unnamable. For example, I passed two dead animals along the road during my travels up to a waterfall in Kentucky, where my grandfather stood with his film camera many moons ago. One of the deceased was a deer, the other a buzzard of some sort. Then, on my way home, a funeral procession traveled up the mountainous two laned road as I was coming down - directly in my path, far too close to ignore. As someone who doesn’t believe in coincidences and thinks, feels, dreams in metaphors, I believe there was a message for me in all of this: a message of death, a message of birth, a message of completion, a message of beginning again.
