“one thing and another”
one thing and many others
One Thing and No Other
Mandala: One thing and another . . .
Category: POSTS BY MONTH
The Wings of the Morning
Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit?
Or wither shall I flee from Thy Presence?
If I take the WINGS of the MORNING
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea
Even there shall Thy hand lead me
And Thy right hand shall hold me.
If I say surely the darkness shall cover me
Then the night shall be light about me.
I made this painting long ago, during a year when I was a librarian for a year in a theological college. A personal G*d, whom one would address as Thou, is not part of my spiritual imagination, yet some of the Psalms resonate with me, as do these (selected) lines from Psalm 139. They also remind me of the second and last verses of one of my old-favorite poems, by Yeats:
The LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE
-William Butler Yeats
Sometimes when anxiety, or fear these Covid days, threaten to take over, I can reach down to “my deep heart’s core” and know that I do have some peace there, even if sometimes, “peace comes dropping slow” ! And even in “the uttermost parts of the sea” with darkness covering me, I will have some Light there, and Peace there, in my deep heart’s core, by whatever name one wishes to call it.
To anyone who has to fly to the uttermost parts, through illness or other circumstances: may you be blessed with Peace.
Sunflower and mandalas
This is part of a small series of sunflower pictures made from photos of sunflowers, mostly in the community garden where I had a plot. Sunflowers are another of my favorite plants and the seedhead in the centre (one of nature’s patterns) together with the surrounding petals, makes something like a mandala.
At the back of each sunflower in the series are two circles containing cultural, religious or universal circular patterns, in this case a star and a maze.
Quiet tree “as evening comes at evening”
No comment! This is the Tree being Quiet.
Tangled Garden: Hops
Concrete Abstract 1
Black Plate Mandala
This is a natural “mandala”: crystals which formed overnight from a salt on a wiped black dinner plate. (It’s a similar process to the “Perfectly Imperfect Mandala” earlier, except that the photo of this one had only very slight editing, whereas the other one had a lot of cutting and pasting)
Tangled Garden : Robin
I made The Tangled Garden Series as a reminder of the black and white illustrations in the children’s and botanical books of my childhood, and in some Japanese prints.
Apart from the fact that I love plants and many animals, what especially interests me is their patterns, which are brought out better in black and white such as the Branching Pattern of leaf veins and branching of tree-branches
These are not straight B/W photos, but originally coloured ones, which I have worked on “by hand” so to speak, not just using pre-made filters, to produce the effect which I wanted. Time-consuming!
Sidetracks
When I looked up the word sidetracks on Google, I was surprised to find that almost all of the definitions – at least as far as I went – were very negative! I had not thought of it that way when I made this pic, far from it, although I must admit that sometimes getting sidetracked is not a good thing! For me, however, I think of it more as the times when I have discovered something wonderful which I would have missed if I had kept on going on the route on which I started out .
Then I discovered a site called Wordhippo, which I had not encountered before, and my faith in thesaurus-type sites has been restored! Thank you, hippo, for reminding me of all the pleasures that footpaths, back streets, lanes, pathways, trails, wynds and so on have brought me in my life. And, getting sidetracked, I learnt what ginnels, snickets and twittens are!
In remembrance of places which no longer exist
Have you ever gone back, many years later, to visit a building where you once lived, or simply a place which you loved, perhaps as a child, or in your travels, only to find it has been demolished and you never knew?
Whenever you thought about it, maybe even decades after you left, it never occurred to you that maybe it no longer existed?
And people…. it’s a bit of a shock sometimes to find out, perhaps from an old friend, that someone you lost touch with over the years, maybe someone you went to school with or worked with, has been dead for many years, but if you thought of them, you imagined them going on just as they were in those days.
Such an experience really brings home the knowledge that the pictures we hold onto, in our minds, of people and places (or events) may be very much our own imagination and not fact!