I’m thrilled to share with you that starting in January 2010, I’ll be teaching a course in Los Angeles, CA called Spirituality, Science, and the Creative Process. The course will be presented by the Continuing Education program at Otis College of Art and Design, and enrollment is open to the public!

Here’s a description of the course:

Great ideas inspire enduring art. This course explores the grand themes shared by spiritual philosophy and cutting-edge science, using them as source material for artistic creativity. Examining energy, duality, infinity, chaos, evolution, and actualization, students write reflective journals each week about how these and other spiritual and scientific themes can be applied to their creative process, inspiring resonant artwork in any medium. Special presentations by artist Marcie Kaufman highlight the work of visual artists inspired by both spirituality and science, and a hands-on workshop mid-course guides students in enacting and illustrating some of the grand themes discussed in class.

The course runs 10 weeks, Saturday mornings, and will include and expand upon all your favorite poetic interconnections between spirituality and science. And Marcie Kaufman, my co-conspirator for the term, is brilliant and engaging, and her mid-course workshop is sure to be deep, enlightening fun.

Here’s a link to enroll in the class:

http://www.otis.edu/ce,course.php?crs=539&sem=25

Looking forward to seeing you there!

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Back in July I was asked to contribute a review blurb to an upcoming book called Death & Sex. The request came from Dorion Sagan, one of the book’s authors—an amazing writer and a friend of this blog. I immediately said yes. I was sent an advance copy of the text and spent the next few evenings unable to put it down, rapt.

The book is a hybrid: two essays by different authors bound into a single work. Tyler Volk’s Death examines how our passing feeds the greater cycle of life, our bodies breaking down into food and energy for other animals and plants. Our greatest personal fear is thus recast as an ecological act of self-sacrificial love. It’s a deeply spiritual view of dying.

Dorion Sagan’s Sex suggests that our procreating has cosmic implications. We reproduce to continue life. And viewed from the perspective of thermodynamics, life on Earth actually exists to help spread the concentrated energy of our sun into surrounding space. Nature likes its energies evenly distributed, and we ease an inequity: we take in localized sunlight and disperse it into space as heat.

Simply by living we’re doing God’s work, spreading the good solar news.

Death & Sex is out now, and my review blurb is printed inside. This blog post is to thank Dorion Sagan and Chelsea Green Publishing for the honor and pleasure, and to turn you on to a fine, fascinating read.

If you pick it up, let me know… Comments always welcome.

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