A Pause for Beauty:
An artist’s journal.
The Beauty Of Creation; The Beauty Of Love
God changes appearance every second. Blessed is the man who can recognize him in all his disguises. One moment he is a glass of fresh water, the next your son bouncing on your knees or an enchanting woman, or perhaps merely a morning walk.
- Nikos Kazantzakis
Night Descends
(If interested in this print, please email me)
Perhaps we’re never more aware of the beauty of Creation than in wild nature. Or perhaps we’re most aware of that beauty through the sensation, the experience, of Love:
What I learned from Art is that God, if there is a God, is not an object so much as a relationship — the reconciliation of all things to all things. When I feel reconciled to God, I feel awe for the gift of creation, I feel love for my fellow creatures, and I feel peace within myself. This is the gift Art shared with us.
We are very reasonable creatures: but to feel the grace of God, one must forget about reason and go on a pilgrimage to a place where we no longer “see as through a glass darkly,” to a place where we are able to see the death of a caribou or a chicken with eyes of gratitude, rather than with eyes of conquest. Art had taken us on a pilgrimage to that holy place, the Garden of Eden which resides within our souls.
Jesus had spent forty days in the Wilderness, Saint Anthony a lifetime; but for us, seeing the world from a different perspective had taken about three months. It had not been until our second forty days that we had begun to feel grateful instead of angry.
Gratitude came first in the form of appreciation for small favors, small favors which we now understood to be not so small, the gift of rain, the gift of the sun, the gift of the life of a caribou which had died for us . . . . With the growing sense of gratitude came a growing sense of love: love for the creation, love for one another, and love for the grace of God which made us feel so peaceful.
- George Grinnell, A Death on the Barrens(In 1955, George Grinnell and four others embarked on a three month canoe trip in Canada’s Barrens led by Art Moffatt, through territory that was then largely unmapped. They ran out of food, got caught in cold weather, and Moffatt drowned when the group inadvertently went over a waterfall.)
The two excerpts above are also in The Heron Dance Book of Love and Gratitude
To read A Pause For Beauty posts from earlier this month, most of which are early drafts of my new book, The 45 Laws Of Living A Quality Life On Your Own Terms, visit here.