Welcome to Wednesday and the theme of Cycles and Seasons.
Today we explore cycles and seasons, the nature of incremental, gradual change as well as shifts in our lives that can happen quite suddenly.
This current season has brought so much grief, pain and shock. We're living in a global pandemic with no definitive end in sight. We are witnessing a social movement in our country. This is a tumultuous season.
Pandemics and social movements are not new in the course of human history. When we engage, they require us to listen, learn, labor and lean into the uncertainty and the discomfort of change.
And is not time even as Love is, undivided and paceless? But if in your thought you must measure time into seasons, let each season encircle all the other seasons, And let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing. —Kahlil Gibran, in The Prophet
Opening Prayer: Open our hearts, O God, to the subtle shifts within our souls, to the quiet yearnings of our hearts.
Art from Our Community:
The Leaves of the Tree by Laurie Rudel, September 2019
Encaustic and oil stick, 8" x 8"
Laurie writes, "When I got my first pair of glasses at age eight, I looked up and exclaimed, 'Trees have leaves!' Before that moment I could only see trees as brown sticks topped by green blobs. This piece, The Leaves of the Tree, invites us to take a closer look, to contemplate the particular in the midst of an overall background. As we grow older, as we learn to see more clearly with the eyes of our hearts, what else might come into view?"
Art from Our Community:
Primary Witnesses by Scott Burnett, Late Winter 2020
Acrylic mixed media on birch cradleboard, 18"x18"
Scott writes, "As is often the case for me, the figuration in the birch surface started a conversation. I followed the lines and shades in the wood with acrylic ink, and later added acrylic paint with palette knives. It remained in that elemental state for months, since the red-yellow-blue (plus a bit of purple) pleased me. I was content to allow for a tacet in the conversation. Eventually, it asked for three moves: green, vertical, and texture. I made a field of multiple greens on dense paper, and tore vertical shapes that might evoke a primal sense of trees. I fixed them to the surface with gel medium and then added some paint — mostly squares (because that’s what I do)."
Artist Prompt: Describe this season or cycle of your creativity, of your life. Has this time apart from others helped or hindered?
A Poem for You:
“The Bird in the Tree” by Ruth Pitter
The tree, and its haunting bird,
Are the loves of my heart;
But where is the word, the word,
Oh where is the art,
To say, or even to see,
For a moment of time,
What the Tree and the Bird must be
In the true sublime?
They shine, listening to the soul,
And the soul replies;
But the inner love is not whole,
and the moment dies.
Oh give me before I die
The grace to see
With eternal, ultimate eye,
The Bird and the Tree.
The song in the living Green,
The Tree and the Bird –
Oh have they ever been seen,
Ever been heard?