a gift for the collective

A Gift for the Collective

The development of Fellini Arts has been a very personal journey which has led to unexpected expression in my boxes and what I call ‘my gift for the collective’. The words and symbols in the Healing Truth Thoughtboxes mean much more to me than I could ever communicate. Here is how I understand that story.

Rob Fellows, Founder, Fellini Arts

An Arc of Life Segment

Like many, my life arc has brought, in its mid-life transit, a need for reconciliation of disparate and often opposing elements of psyche. I found myself abandoning an established career in technology and business, to follow long held interest in psychology, studying depth psychology, and pursuing training as a Marriage and Family Therapist. Prior to, during, and after these studies, long held beliefs –both conscious and unconscious— were examined, experienced differently, and often turned upside down. Identity, Being, and the foundations of the reality I have chosen, all have come into question. And a transition of perspective, values, and awareness has taken place.

Graduate studies provided a framework in which to engage this transition on many levels, including in image, metaphor, and myth. This is where I first allowed myself to put lights and symbolic objects into boxes in a creative and playful expression of psychological and spiritual concepts. After classes were completed, I continued to play in the workshop and the boxes offered here today were further developed.

A Grief Process

The process has been painful and the transition has been predominantly a period of ongoing depression. Grief is like that. To see and live differently is, in part, about loss. It involves recognizing the loss of what was desired, of opportunities lost, and what might have been. It is also about recognizing personal shadow, regrettable deeds, fallibility and feared vulnerabilities.

Through this period, I yearned for greater integration and personal acceptance. Yet, I was plagued with shame, rage, emptiness, and worthlessness. I spent years isolated and alone, cycling between agitate frustration and numb paralysis. However, something persisted: my interest in creating boxes of symbolic light.

Transitions are like that. There is grief, because there is also discovery of new passion and the means to express it.. Endings and beginnings meld together into a continuum where the new emerges from loss and both are present together. And I have found that only with the freedom of loss and openness of discovery can the twin escorts of change integration –creativity and play –enter.

Integration

Indeed, it was creativity and play that brought each of the different parts of me forward to contribute to the boxes. The physicist and engineer designed the lighting, electronics, and mechanical parts. The businessman traded with over twenty suppliers of parts and services. The psychologist dug for deep felt meaning and the writer turned the concepts over into words. And the artist mediated between them all, holding a vision of something cool they all wanted to be part of.

However, it was not just being able to play these roles that allowed these boxes to be developed. Rather, it was the physicist’s love of light, the engineer’s love of design, the businessman’s love of the connection of mutually agreeable commerce, the psychologist wonder at the human experience, and the artist’s desire for a particular expression of a vision –that were actually at work.

They all engaged something deeper and were simply the means of execution for what is to me a significant expression. Not surprisingly, I found the integration I sought in the doing of this work. Not only are the efforts of all the masks I have worn (physicist, engineer, marketer, business consultant, writer, psychologist) present in each box, but more importantly, they were all engaged together in the creative process.

Reclaiming the family name my grandfather had abandoned when he arrived from Italy Fellini) , a small business was established to offer these thoughts and images to others. This process was most revealing as the artist and the businessman were in an ongoing philosophical debate as to whether commerce or art needed to prevail as a primary guide. It was in their exchanges that I found myself not having to be one or the other, but rather simply host the debate. Yes, decisions had to be made, but it was the acceptance that both sides of me exist and can be present that was important. Even more important was the understanding that these "sides of me" are just ways the deeper soul energy rises and asks to interact with the world. The end point of integration is not a new static make-up. For me, it is an on-going dynamic in which the many facets of me are engaged and the energies inside flow toward connection through the dynamic.

Healing Truth

I look back now and realize that the ThoughtBoxes represent truth I wanted to tell myself (actually, a truth my Self wanted to tell ‘i’). The concepts in my thought boxes are not new. They do, perhaps, have a form that is my unique expression. The words are my attempt at articulating something important: a set of truths that in the midst of depression, I found it would be nice to hold. A perspective and centering that I wished I could stay with. And in creating the expression of this truth, I was able better able to integrate it.

A Gift for the Collective

These are my gifts. My expressions. And I offer them to the collective of which we are all a part. Particularly, in times of stress, I hope that they provide individuals with a perspective about their Selves in the world that they inhabit and it is of some comfort… comfort of a kind that can be both accepted and by which be changed.

Although I will be pleased with whatever acceptance emerges, in offering these creations, I have few expectations. For me, the creation and the offering has been what is important. The boxes represent something sacred for me, yet I really don’t mind if you find them useful only as a paperweight.

Here’s why:

I believe that every experience changes us. Every image we see, every sound we hear, every bump we stumble over, presents the opportunity for us to make meaning. And we use these experiences in each meaning we make henceforth. We can not throw them away. They are part of us and they change us. And since we are all part of the world, every change in us also changes the world in some way.

We have many choices about what we experience and what meaning we make from experience. I would ask you a few questions: What does it mean to “Be” in one’s life? How do your choices change when we believe our very existence is a participation in every moment and influence upon the one that follows? And what kind of world do you imagine you would live in if every choice impacts the world albeit in some small manner? The main question, though, is What meaning do you want to make?

I believe that by bringing more of our full, true selves forward –by simply being who we are and following true passion, not just our appetites –we make a more positive contribution to the collective and add to the positive forces in the world.

Doing simply what we can do has an effect. Even if only gratifying an appetite, we have an effect. Yet, often we become closed, believing we know the meaning of the experience at hand. Even worse, we get lost in the false belief we are isolated and what we do and experience has no effect on either ourselves or the world around us. And in believing such, we defend and preserve our lack of awareness both of the greater whole of ourselves and the greater whole of the world of which we are a part.

For most it is painful. And many often end up in an addiction to appetites in a search for purpose, as a distraction, or as a means to mitigate the pain of perceived isolation, meaninglessness, and impotence.

When we enter relationship with ourselves, we contribute to the world. Otherwise the darker elements of ourselves are allowed to wander in the world unconsciously, unopposed and un-integrated. And they can have a horrible effect.

I believe that when we enter relationship with the world and harness what we can do to express, manifest, incarnate, or otherwise reveal the transcendent truth of our experience of being human and being alive, we are doing the best we can. I simply have "literalize'd" it by offing gifts items that are my gifts and, thus, what is important to me has already been done.