(C)ontemplation is . . . awakening, enlightenment, and the amazing intuitive grasp by which love gains certitude of God’s creative and dynamic intervention in our daily life. . . contemplation is a sudden gift of awareness, an awakening to the Real within all that is real. A vivid awareness of infinite Being at the roots of our own limited being. An awareness of our contingent reality as received, as a present from God, as free gift of love. —Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation  New Square Mandala  You point to something as having Quality and the Quality tends to go away. Quality is what you see out of the corner of your eye.
- Robert Pirsig  When I was a child there was a TV show on which every now and then the announcer would call out, "Circle gets the square." I don't know why. But circles and squares do have a special relationship, don't they?
 G - 16 Until art is allowed its full and proper place in spiritual meditation, meditation itself will remain elitist, a complex and convoluted exercise for an elite minority of professional pray-ers… Matthew Fox
 Antoine de Saint-Exupery. "More wisdom is latent in things as they are than in all the words men use."
 Life feels less threatening when we back away. Wild animals feel safer when they're in a zoo, trees are safer in parks, and art is safer in museums, behind glass. But we pay a high price for our safety, don't we? We will never know what a wild animal really is if we only see it in a zoo, trees can never be fully trees in a park, and contemplative art must be experienced intimately, up close and personally.
 Graphite on gridded paper. About 7 x 7 inches. “There must be always remaining in every man’s life some place for the singing of angels, some place for that which in itself is breathlessly beautiful.” -- Howard Thurman (1900-1981) African American minister and educator Have I ever made anything that could be called breathlessly beautiful? Have I ever tried? I don't think in terms of beauty all the time, but the more I think of proportion the more I think of perfect proportion. A friend asked me recently if this is how I see the world, as ordered and beautiful. My answer is that this is how I see the invisible world, the world within the apparent world. It is a world that has not received much widespread attention since Medieval days, when God was posited as the Architect of the Universe, but it is still there. Still here. Even visible, on a good day, to the contemplative eye. |
AuthorI am an artist. I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Categories |
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