A Love Supreme

By Cindy Santos Bravo, director of visual and performing arts
The director of visual and performing arts shares her inspirations and how we can come together during this challenging time.
A few months ago, I was inspired yet again by the 1964 essential album A Love Supreme, created by the phenomenal mind of John Coltrane. The album enters you into a laboratory of sounds finely adjusted through the skillful art of improvisation based on a skeletal structure. It is created by one person to reflect the many influences and connections in his life. What if we all took pause in our creative mind and spirit to create a reflection of the myriad of influences and energies within our life? How different would the world look today if every one of our respective mental, physical or emotional endeavors came into the world to bring disparate parts of a life together? 

Nine years ago, I stepped onto the campus of La Jolla Country Day School, dreaming big about the world I wanted to create as a teaching artist. Specializing in multimedia practice, I wanted to help impact the lives of all the students I would meet, as well as to learn what more art education could offer. Six years into that dream, a new reality formed and my life has reached new meaning because of the people I get to improvise, shape and cultivate a personal version of A Love Supreme

VAPA, which stands for visual and performing arts, is a team of 16 teaching artists who immerse our campus into a cacophony of inspirational collaborations 365 days a year. Our collective dream is our discipline. We converse, disagree, realign, envision, test, share and play to provide the strongest foundation for every child and young adult to allow the surge of their creativity to reign supreme. 

The world has changed, and as artists, we know that what lies ahead is a transformation within each one of us. “Us” is the most critical word in the previous sentence because it is rooted in our connection to one another. If we can demonstrate and provide our students, families and faculty with an art education that includes self-love and optimism, we can support all future generations to care for humans and our planet with the greatest source of inspiration that we have ever seen. 

VAPA is both a team and a way of life, for we are both artists absorbing and creating a new reality and educators who support the fire burning bright in all people. 

Let us come together during these challenging and exhausting days to work on a skeletal structure centered on love and the dignity of all persons. Let’s improvise, jam together and give sound to a higher level of consciousness. Our community must continue to redefine what it means to be globally-connected humans on an amazingly resilient planet.
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