Showing posts with label spirituality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spirituality. Show all posts

December 18, 2015

Favorite Quotes #11 - So Many Truths

Musings as we spin from the old year to the new one.....

I've liked this quote for many, many years.  It is from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke.

"...show patience towards everything in your heart that has not been resolved and to try to cherish the questions themselves....  Do not hunt for the answers just now -- they cannot be given to you because you cannot live them.  What matters is to live everything.  And you must now live the questions.  One day perhaps you will gradually and imperceptibly live your way into the answer. "


January 7, 2015

The Arts: Visual Meets Verbal

A short while ago, I got a most wonderful email.

A woman wrote that she had seen and enjoyed my quilts at an exhibit a couple of months ago, and shortly thereafter, at her poetry group, had heard a newly written poem that matches one of my quilts.  She shared a photo of my quilt with the poet, who then asked me if she could update the first line of her poem to include the title of my quilt.  I said, "Of course!"

I asked for permission to share both the poem and the story here, and permission was kindly granted.

December 31, 2014

On Beauty - Favorite Quotes #7


I've spent some lovely hours on a sad and comforting task, helping a dear friend plan a memorial for her father by looking for good words to share.  I re-read many poems collected in my young adulthood that have been un-re-read for years and years.  I wandered into Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, because that has good words for everything in Life.  And I stayed and wandered in those words for a good long time.  Ahhhhhhh..........



On Beauty

      And a poet said, "Speak to us of Beauty."
      Where shall you seek beauty, and how shall you find her unless she herself be your way and your guide?
      And how shall you speak of her except she be the weaver of your speech?
      The aggrieved and the injured say, "Beauty is kind and gentle.
      Like a young mother half-shy of her own glory she walks among us."
      And the passionate say, "Nay, beauty is a thing of might and dread.
      Like the tempest she shakes the earth beneath us and the sky above us."
      The tired and the weary say, "beauty is of soft whisperings. She speaks in our spirit.
      Her voice yields to our silences like a faint light that quivers in fear of the shadow."
      But the restless say, "We have heard her shouting among the mountains,
      And with her cries came the sound of hoofs, and the beating of wings and the roaring of lions."
      At night the watchmen of the city say, "Beauty shall rise with the dawn from the east."
      And at noontide the toilers and the wayfarers say, "we have seen her leaning over the earth from the windows of the sunset."
      In winter say the snow-bound, "She shall come with the spring leaping upon the hills."
      And in the summer heat the reapers say, "We have seen her dancing with the autumn leaves, and we saw a drift of snow in her hair."
      All these things have you said of beauty.
      Yet in truth you spoke not of her but of needs unsatisfied,
      And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.
      It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,
      But rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.
      It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,
      But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.
      It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a wing attached to a claw,
      But rather a garden for ever in bloom and a flock of angels for ever in flight.
      People of Orphalese, beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.
      But you are life and you are the veil.
      Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
      But you are eternity and you are the mirror.




November 19, 2011

I Never Really Did Like That Pattern

My longtime friend Leigh Gaitskill used one of my quilts to illustrate a recent post on her blog.  Thanks, Leigh!!  Leigh is a yoga and spiritual teacher with many years of practice and healing and learning.  You can read her post, about how we may have hidden the diamond heart, our central spiritual essence, at:  http://bluegrassnotes.wordpress.com/2011/11/18/living-from-essence/

I Never Really Did Like That Pattern

Here's my artist statement about the quilt.  Yes, it certainly has many similarities to the concepts that Leigh is describing.

AddThis