A Pause For Beauty:
An artist’s journal.
Below, the Art Journal posts for the month of April, 2023.
Current month posts can be found here.
Prior Art Journal posts can be found under “Words” In The Top Menu.
Journal Notes: Sunday, April 30, 2023. A walk in the woods and saw a thousand trilliums. Some were some there yesterday but today, this a trillium riot.
Then grocery shopping.
I’m moving back toward more vague, impressionistic images in my art. An artist whose work has been inspiring me lately: Isabelle Malmezat.
We’re watching “Chimp Empire” on Netflix.
The chimps that live a long and happy life seem to have a distinguishing characteristic: they’re good at relationships, at forming social bonds.
The sacred requires sacrifice. The sacrifice of the group life is compromise, overlooking the faults of others. The sacrifice of the loner is loneliness, and perhaps ultimately the will to live.
The loner though has perspective. The loner can often see truths that are not obvious, and not seen, by the group. The loner has a perspective on the emerging reality.
Of course, nothing is black and white in this. Loners generally have some social bonds, and well-connected members of the group have some independent perspective.
Still, we need both.
. . .
Visit here to read the latest Pause For Beauty (Social Bonds Versus Life As A Loner).
Poetry is the natural prayer of the human soul.
- Rilke
1
A long dark curve is the poem in your body
is the river
is the loon's throat.
Have you ever asked yourself how
the loon's voice
opens?
- Cheryl Hellner
. . .
Read the rest of this Pause For Beauty (Prayer For The Wild Voice) here.
The Edges Of Any Landscape, The Horizon
The edges of any landscape -- horizons, the lip of a valley, the bend of a river around a canyon wall -- quicken an observer's expectations. That attraction to borders, to the earth's twilit places, is part of the shape of human curiosity.
- Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams
. . .
Read the rest of this Pause For Beauty (The Edges Of Any Landscape, The Horizon) here.
Is there a spiritual undercurrent to your life?
Do you feel in touch with it?
How has your life been different when you’ve been in touch with that current, and when you’ve not?
What is your simple message? What is your life about? What worthwhile do you have to offer others? Where’s the “special” in your life? What is unique?
. . .
Read the rest of this Pause For Beauty (Questions I’ve Been Exploring In My Journal Lately) here.
Dawn Psalm, Pine Valley
1
While I was not watching
sunrise came with a ruby throat
and gold-flecked wings.
2
Blue
and a small wisp of cloud
above the dark pine.
A jaysquall
leaves a small bruise
on one corner
of sky.
- read this entire Pause For Beauty (So Quietly the Earth) including the rest of David Lee’s poem of the same name, and my journal notes on paddling Lake Superior here.
3
Boiling coffee.
A blue enamel pot
nestled in warm coals
beside the cold
sliding water.
Sky so close
you fear
bumping your head.
4
A brown breaks surface
rising to wingshadow
drifting on the blue selvage
of pond.
Frazier Hunt writing in Redbook
One July afternoon at our ranch in the Canadian Rockies I rode toward Helen Keller's cabin. Along the wagon trail that ran through a lovely wood we had stretched a wire, to guide Helen when she walked there alone, and as I turned down the trail I saw her coming.
I sat motionless while this woman who was doomed to live forever in a black and silent prison made her way briskly down the path, her face radiant. She stepped out of the woods into a sunlit open space directly in front of me and stopped by a clump of wolf willows. Gathering a handful, she breathed their strange fragrance: her sightless eyes looked up squarely into the sun, and her lips, so magically trained, pronounced the single word "Beautiful!" Then, still smiling, she walked past me.
I brushed the tears from my own inadequate eyes. For to me none of this exquisite highland had seemed beautiful. I had felt only bitter discouragement over the rejection of a piece of writing. I had eyes to see all the wonders of woods, sky and mountains, ears to hear the rushing stream and the song of the wind in the treetops. It took the sightless eyes and sealed ears of this extraordinary woman to show me beauty, and bravery. . . .
Read the rest of this Pause For Beauty (When I open my heart to beauty) here.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
- Mary Oliver, Wild Geese from the book Dreamwork.
. . .
Read the rest of this Pause For Beauty (The world offers itself to your imagination) here.
Nothing in the world is weaker than water
but against the hard and the strong
nothing outdoes it
for nothing can change it
the soft overcomes the hard
the weak overcomes the strong
this is something everyone knows
but no one is able to practice.
- Lao Tzu's TaoTeChing, Chapter 78 as translated by Red Pine
. . .
Read the rest of this Pause For Beauty (Rivers On A Journey In Search Of The Sea) here.
I live my life in growing orbits,
Which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I will never achieve the last,
But that will be my attempt.
I am circling around God,
The ancient tower,
And I have been circling for a thousand years...
Still, I don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song!
- Rainer Maria Rilke, as recited by Tom Wisner at the Heron Dance Fifth Anniversary Celebration.
. . .
Read the rest of this Pause For Beauty (Tom Wisner, Bard of the Chesapeake) here.
Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely outnumbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places.
- Lewis Thomas, The Lives Of A Cell
. . .
Read the rest of this Pause For Beauty (On statistical improbability, beauty and chaos) here.
Happiness is not a matter of intensity, but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
- Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
When I detect a beauty in any of the recesses of nature, I am reminded by the serene and retired spirit in which it requires to be contemplated, of the inexpressible privacy of life, — how silent and unambitious it is. The beauty there is in mosses will have to be considered from the holiest, quietest nook. The gods delight in stillness, they say ‘st–’st. My truest, serenest moments are too still for emotion; they have woolen feet.
- Henry David Thoreau in his journal, Thoreau And The Art Of Life.
. . .
Read the rest of this Pause For Beauty (Notes on Serenity) here.
A Farewell for Tu Huang
Water weaving Ch'u and Wu into a single home village,
you set out on a spring river. It's all vast and vague,
and your sails: when night falls, they'll rest at anchor
along the edge of heaven, that slice through the heart.
- from "The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan", as translated by David Hinton
. . .
Read the rest of this Pause For Beauty (Entering The River World) here.
You ask why I perch on a jade green mountain
I laugh but say nothing
my heart free like a peach blossom
in the flowing stream going by in the depths
in another world not among men.
- Li Po, poet of old China (701–762)
. . .
Read the rest of this Pause For Beauty (In Another World, Not Among Men) here.
I say that it touches a man that his blood is seawater and his tears are salt, that the seed of his loins is scarcely different from the same cells in a seaweed, and that of stuff like his bones are coral made. I say that physical and biologic law lies down with him, and wakes when a child stirs in the womb, and that the sap in a tree, uprushing in the spring, and the smell of the loam, where the bacteria bestir themselves in darkness, and the path of the sun in the heaven, these are facts of first importance to his mental conclusions, and that a man who goes in no consciousness of them is a drifter and a dreamer, without a home or any contact with reality.
- Donald Culross Peattie, An Almanac For Moderns
. . .
Read the rest of this Pause For Beauty (The Mystical of the World is that it Exists) here.
I didn't trust it for a moment but I drank it anyway
The wine of my own poetry
It gave me the daring
to take hold of the darkness
and tear it into little pieces.
- Lalla Ded, woman poet of 14th century India.
. . .
Read the rest of this Pause For Beauty (I didn't trust it for a moment but I drank it anyway) here.
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.
- Galway Kinnell, “Saint Francis and the Sow” from Three Books
. . .
Read the rest of this Pause For Beauty (Until it Flowers Again from Within) here.
Spring is in the air. The breeze is gentle with the smell of birthing, the earth radiates freshness, the birds sing with more abandon than they have for months. The first wildflowers are in bloom in the deep forest: the hardy toothwort, the delicate purple shooting star. The tender green of new growth is everywhere.
— Barbara Dean, Wellspring
It will take you half a lifetime to find the earliest flower.
—Journal entry, Henry David Thoreau, March 26, 1856, excerpted from Thoreau and the Art of Life
. . .
Read the rest of this Pause For Beauty (In Celebration of Spring) here.
I’ve decided to make up my mind about nothing,
to assume the water mask,
to finish my life disguised as a creek, an eddy,
joining at night the full, sweet flow, to absorb the sky,
to swallow the heat and cold, the moon and the stars,
to swallow myself in ceaseless flow.
– Jim Harrison, Cabin Poem from The Shape Of The Journey
. . .
Read the rest of this Pause For Beauty (I Search for the Beauty of Wild Things in Me) here.
Christopher Robin came down from the Forest to the Bridge, feeling all sunny and careless, and just as if twice nineteen didn’t matter a bit, as it didn’t on such a happy afternoon, and he thought that if he stood on the bottom rail of the bridge, and leant over, and watched the river slipping slowly away beneath him, then he would suddenly know everything that there was to be known.
— From Winnie-the-Pooh, by A.A. Milne
. . .
Read the rest of this Pause For Beauty (Siddhartha and Winnie the Pooh: The River's Song of a Thousand Voices) here.
Too lazy to be ambitious,
I let the world take care of itself.
Ten days’ worth of rice in my bag;
a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.
Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?
Listening to the night rain on my roof,
I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out.
– Ryokan (1758-1831)
Ryokan was a Zen master, hermit, calligrapher, and poet. He was known for his great kindness – he would pick lice out of his robe, place them outside so that they could get some sun and then later put them back into his robe. He smiled continuously, and people said that when he visited they felt “as if spring had come on a dark winter’s day.” He took the name “Great Fool” for himself. When a thief stole his few simple possessions, he wrote this famous haiku:
. . .Read the rest of this Pause For Beauty (Ryokan Mastered the Arts of Idleness) here.
I thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings;and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
- E.E. Cummings
. . .
Read the rest of this Pause For Beauty (Everything Which is Natural Which is Infinite) here.
Birds sing of winter survived and new life to come.
I’ve made the decision to make all content accessible to all readers, supporters or not. Heron Dance will exist on the kindness of strangers and friends alike. I’ve also redesigned the website including a slideshow of my art on the front page. Check it out.
Future posts here will include a short poem or book excerpt, and my reflection on the passage, all designed to uplift, to brighten your day.
I’m going to try to publish a little poem or passage every day, and include art. To do that, I’ll use a favorite painting from years long past when my current efforts fall short. They generally do. I recycle at least half of my paintings these days.
. . .
Read the rest of this Pause For Beauty (Birds Sing of Winter) here.
Excerpts from two Robinson Jeffers poems on our relationship with nature.
Journal notes on our relationship with our inner world, inner wisdom.
. . .
Read the rest of this Pause For Beauty (Connecting With, Celebrating The Quiet Inside) here.