Congruence

6 March 2011

I never have understood this brand of non-conformity,

everyone building their own unique

from homologous blocks of vaguely varying hues;

differing degrees of sameness. The very pretty

people somnambulate to and fro scrutinizing;

assimilating bits of cleverly pieced cotton and ramie;

making their resulting congruence

a little less distinctive, a little more

just like everyone else.

Without Fear

17 October 2009

My eyes are open today. I see

how fruitless are the hours spent worrying

about a form and substance you adore.

These conversations never cease behind the eyes,

laughing or weeping. They never cease.

I hear the fretting accusations,

the whispers of starvation. I hear them,

but they grow quieter with time. Or perhaps

I build a wall inside my head, beyond which

their power diminishes--

I am, without fear, who I am.

Caelum

Toying with names for the painting when I should be going to bed. I have no idea whether it's finished. I had originally intended ONE of these to be an acrylic rendering of an old pencil sketch I'd entitled Silent Reverie. However, I like them both so much, I'm afraid to mess with them.

Aaaaand another...

This one's a bit of a teaser, as I've only included the corner of the canvas. Actually, i guess it's just a little less than half of the canvas. I started this painting and left the last as it is because I liked the latter so much, and was afraid to mess it up. I am now falling in love with this one was well. *Sigh*. One of them will have to serve as fodder for a more complex painting. Dunno which it will be yet. Maybe both.

Blaming Barbie

I've spent a good many years blaming Barbie, Bratz and the like for most of the problems so many young girls (and grown women) seem to have with self-image. I just read an article posted by Ruth that shook the foundation of all those arguments, and made me take a long hard look at my growing up, and at my dinner conversation.

I can't say I hadn't thought about my tendency to blame culture, or about the importance of my own attitude toward my own body and my ideas about beauty in general. I also cannot say, however, that I had ever connect these concepts, and realized that while Barbie, Bratz, and all the images with which we and our daughters are inundated on a daily basis mean nothing next to the influence a mother and a father weild in the mind of a child. My comfort with my own body, and my husband's unconditional love for me, will speak volumes more to my daughter in the long run than a ridiculously proportioned doll.

That said, I'm still not a fan. Why Barbie could have been made with smaller breasts and a tiny bit larger waist, I'll never understand. Oh, and flat feet. Who wears heels everyday? Srsly.

Untitled-- nude in acrylic

The Man Who Was Thursday

This book by G.K. Chesterton really is tremendous. I'm not sure if I got it the first time around, or the second, or the third, even with the very competent help of my Western Classics professor, Dr. Strait.

However, I finished rereading it just yesterday, and it became so very obvious to me what it was that Chesterton was getting at-- that God is so very big that one rarely gets a full view of Him, and most times what one sees most clearly is the back of Him, which is to say we see Him indirectly, through nature and through human relationships. And sometimes that reality is so difficult to look at, so suffused with suffering and pain, that we begin to believe that's all there is, and goodness must be an illusion.

But at the same time, when we do finally get around to the Front, and we look into the face of God, He is so very good, so very loving, so wonderfully beyond any dream we could have created in our finite minds, that the evil that exists in the world comes to the point of seeming, just for a moment, illusory, or like a cruel game that we have no choice but to watch play out before our eyes.

The difficulty is that both the Good and the Evil are very real and very present. Somewhere in our gut, we know this, and in our desperate attempts to work against the Evil, we often end up fighting each other, seeing devils everywhere, and nowhere. We find when we get right down to Reality, though, that God is not only at the beginning, commissioning and exhorting us to fight whatever evil we can, whensoever we can, by whatever means we can, but He is also in the middle of it, and cannot be ravaged by it as we are. And so He can lead us on through it, by whatever magnificent or ridiculous path He chooses, out the other side, further up and further in to His Goodness which is Paradise.

I found myself on the point of tears listening as Syme, the hero, says, "When I see the horrible back, I am sure the noble face is but a mask. When I see the face but for an instant, I know the back is only a jest. Bad is so bad that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good that we feel certain that evil could be explained... Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front--"

Dear God, yes. If we could only get around front.

White-Robed Sorrow

I wrote once about George MacDonald's book, _Phantastes_. My life was a chaotic whirlpool of grief and throbbing wounds at the time, and being the non-linear, analytical thinker that I am, MacDonald's fantastic worlds and seemingly random images of beauty, love, grief and the like touched me so deeply. Today I ran across one of the passages which meant the most to me, and I wrote the following about it to my husband:

"There's this scene where [the narrator and main character of the story] is floating along in a boat, making his way down river, and he catches a glimpse of a woman in white running through the woods alongside him. She stays with him right up to the castle. It was, for me, an image of the wounds we receive being faithful to lead us on to something else if we let them- to redemption I guess, cliche though that may sound. But one certainly cannot see it as such when the wounds are fresh and throbbing.

That scene in the book is a gift to me, because the character, and therefore the reader, is given a moment to stand back from the pain and view it somewhat objectively. To see the very thing that wounds us running along beside us in white, weeping for us, leading us on to redemption, is so very beautiful. I remember, though, that it made my heart ache for the woman in the woods. She was just a metaphor for other things, but I guess I think of her as almost a part of ourselves- the part that is wounded and has been lost in so many ways, and cannot completely enter into the joy of the present."

I need to go back and read that book again.

"As in all sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note. Nor do we know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows. Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy. Cometh white-robed Sorrow, stooping and wan, and flingeth wide the doors she may not enter. Almost we linger with Sorrow for very love."

George MacDonald, Phantastes

Another Glimpse

7 December 2007, 2 PM

I slept beside sharper skies
than ever I imagined on my own;
his dreams bled into mine, revealed
sunset skies I’d never known,
fading into diamond-scattered midnight
cerulean, so deep and dark and bright.

I couldn’t catch my breath amidst
the beauty of a thing so brutally
gentle; in the wake of brushing up
against a sea of so much tenderness,
all within me bruised and raw-
aching for another glimpse of Paradise.

Beauty of Ashes

24 November 2007, 12:03 PM
RCB

What matters most,
Beloved, is no longer living in fear
of emotion,
of color,
of light and life and goodness-

of beauty

evincing all I have attained
as cold, dry, dead ash, inert
for want of one to walk the road
beside me toward redemption.

Latest painting

Progress on my most recent painting. I'm really, really liking this one. It's the oil pastel picture done in acrylics, and I'm liking this version much better.

Sidewalk Chalk

5 October 2007, 9:12 AM

"As in all sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note. Nor do we know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows. Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy. Cometh white-robed Sorrow, stooping and wan, and flingeth wide the doors she may not enter. Almost we linger with Sorrow for very love." George MacDonald, Phantastes

Rain falls softly, washing
the concrete as efficiently
as a pounding storm. Sidewalk chalk
is a messy medium- crumbles and smears
skin and clothing with little or no pressure
or provocation. But the rain,

the wild and wonderful rain sends colors
running like tears down the driveway.
I watch them go, lingering with Sorrow
for very love.

Base

27 February 2007, 11:18 AM
A piece from earlier in the year that I never posted

Getting back to things
less base than mere desire-
wondering what constitutes
beauty. Is it form, substance,
some mix of the two? The gentle dip
where waist joins hip-

wherever it is that they join...

Is it the color of skin, the texture,
the incense of body and breath-
these are form; serve function.

Where lies beauty
in the midst of wind and sand?
The face beheld this moment will be gone
tomorrow. All things will be other,
some joys turn to sorrow, and wounds
to succor and balm.