The craving for colour is a natural necessity just as for water and fire. Colour is a raw material indispensable to life. At every era of his existence and his history, the human being has associated colour with his joys, his actions and his pleasures.
-Frenand Leger
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
–Pablo Picasso
Green is the prime color of the world, and that from which its loveliness arises.
–Pedro Calderon de la Barca
Ocean: A body of water occupying two-thirds of a world made for man – who has no gills.
-Ambrose Bierce
A soul is but the last bubble in a long fermentation in the world.
-George Santayana
When I face a blank page with the intention of creating, it’s a little daunting — or, as Bean days, “nervous-making.” If I don’t have any ideas, I try to sit with my curiosity as my hands move. One line on the page begets another, and another. Sometimes I’m really surprised with what comes up. Sometimes I really like what I do, and other times I feel unimpressed, but I’m nevertheless astonished at the process.
If you are not killing plants, you are not really stretching yourself as a gardener.
-J. C. Raulston
On this November 1, I made a little art. It so happens that Art Every Day Month is this month. I participated for five years (five!), but I skipped 2010 and 2011. And I’m not sure I’m really committed in 2012. So I didn’t sign up for it officially. But just in case, I made something “quick and dirty” today, grabbing what was at hand:
The only noise now was the rain, pattering softly with the magnificent indifference of nature for the tangled passions of humans.
-Sherwood Smith
God pours life into death and death into life without a drop being spilled.
-Author Unknown
Until I attended graduate school at St. Edward’s University, I didn’t know much about Dia de los Muertos. In 1997, after I’d left the fundamentalist non-denominational church I’d been with for years — and with it my entire social network — I struggled greatly with loneliness and depression. Thus I found myself sitting frequently in the Our Lady Queen of Peace chapel, trying to root myself.
On November 1, I discovered an altar covered with painted skulls, candles, photos, and flowers. A number of people gathered, including Dr. Edward Shirley, Professor of Religion and Theological Studies. He led a meditation and gave a little talk about the meaning of this day. I remember at one point asking, “Is it possible to miss someone you never knew?” I was thinking about my maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather; both died long before I was born. Ed answered that yes, he thought so.
After that introduction, I got to know him and spent time talking with him. He was one of the most loving people I’d encountered. His laugh was infectious. His presence was healing. His friendship and guidance were a balm and ballast for me at this time of transition. He accepted people wherever they were at; at that point I was an atheist, certain that traditional Christianity was not my path. I searched for a way to connect with the universe and to find a vocabulary to voice this connection. It was Ed who called my attention to Buddhism.
Ed died suddenly in mid-August, leaving behind a devastated family and community of friends. His impact in the world was deep, and he was much loved. I miss his presence in this world, but his departure brought me to a threshold of understanding what Zen Buddhists call Big Mind.
So, in honor and remembrance of Ed, I offer this tribute on the day that brought us together.
Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.
-John Muir
The first time I heard this spoken-word passage, I was so moved I had to pull off the road and cry. It was a few months after 9/11. It resonates with me still. If you have a few minutes, maybe if you listen it will speak to you too.
If the embed isn’t working you can see the video here.
At least ten years ago my mother gave me a magnetic notepaper holder to hang on my refrigerator. It had a delicate angel and rainbow picture, with a saying about love on it. For a long time I’ve realized it doesn’t appeal to me anymore. Lately my hands have been feeling restless and unsettled. Tonight I put on Tracy Chapman and pulled out scissors, paper, and glue and gave it a new cover.
I’ve been thinking about God lately, in the context of Being, Consciousness, Love, and Mystery. Back in the 1990s, I slogged through times of aching isolation and loneliness. Friends came and went. I felt so alone and small. I struggled to make ends meet. At one point, I meditated on love as an ocean. The tides of love may be high or low in a given day, but the ocean is always there. It was a reassuring concept.
As I created tonight, the Breton Fisherman’s Prayer floated into my awareness: “Oh God, Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.” It is, of course, a prayer for protection. But perhaps, at least in the case of Love and Awakening, the boat is our Ego. Maybe I’m not ready to give up the boat entirely, but I could go swimming more often.
“The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.”
–John Muir
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. This insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms— this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men.
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own—a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism.
It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we can dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature.
I happened across a post on Deepak Chopra’s website where someone asked why we are given the parents we have. Putting aside the knowledge that the question “why” is a sticky, tangly, distracting web, (it doesn’t really free a person, it simply looks for a place to park blame — on oneself or another — disguised as understanding), I was curious to read the answer. His answer was concise and helpful, particularly because he avoided attempting to answer “why.”
It’s true our life circumstances are organized by intelligence of our higher self for our awakening using the material of our past actions. But rather than trying to figure out a particular spiritual rationale for your parents’ behavior, suffice it to say that it has contributed you to the level of strength and self-reliance you have attained so far in your life. Your upbringing also highlights that an important part of your spiritual growth will require you to learn how to be your own nurturer and protector.
–Deepak Chopra
However, I found the first comment below also useful. She doesn’t attempt to assign reasons why either; she also points out the futility in attempting to heal relationships with people who are toxic and chained by delusion:
The influence of our parents on us is so great that when we’re given destructive parents, it’s our special challenge in life to overcome their influence. This, I feel, is the awakening and growth that you can find in your family situation. The dysfunctional behavior of others isn’t our responsibility. We must accept that there are those who will never awaken to their destructive behaviors. In my experience, few abusers (including alcoholic abusers, like your mother) recognize their abuse within their hearts. In other words, they don’t FEEL they’ve done anything wrong because they can always justify to themselves why they did what they did. If they don’t feel they’ve done something wrong, they don’t see that there’s anything to change, and so they won’t change. As the wise Mr. Chopra says, those of us from dysfunctional families must honor the strength we showed in making it through our past. We must face the fact that we can’t heal a destructive relationship with those who don’t see their own destruction.
-Rainbow
The tree is more than first a seed, then a stem, then a living trunk, and then dead timber. The tree is a slow, enduring force straining to win the sky.
–Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.
–Leonardo da Vinci
When we’re young we have faith in what is seen, but when we’re old we know that what is seen is traced in air and built on water.
–Maxwell Anderson, Winterset
There’s a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else’s work in the morning; it’s as if stillness experiences the pain of being broken. The first minute of the workday reminds you of all the other minutes that a day consists of, and it’s never a good thing to think of minutes as invidivuals. Only after other minutes have joined the naked, lonely first minute does the day become more safely integrated in its dayness.
–Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
To sit without emotion, hope or aim,
In the loved presence of my cottage fire,
And listen to the flapping of the flame,
Or kettle whispering its faint under song.–William Wordsworth
A small speckled visitor
Wearing a crimson cape.
Brighter than a cherry
Smaller than a grape.A polka-dotted someone
Walking on my wall.
A black-hooded lady
In a scarlet shawl.–Joan Walsh Anglund
When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies. And now when every new baby is born its first laugh becomes a fairy. So there ought to be one fairy for every boy or girl.
–James Matthew Barrie
