“In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.” ~ Marc Chagall

No one has ever laughed at a pun who did not see in the one word a twofold meaning. To materialists this world is opaque like a curtain; nothing can be seen through it. A mountain is just a mountain, a sunset just a sunset; but to poets, artists, and saints, the world is transparent like a window pane - it tells of something beyond....a mountain tells of the Power of God, the sunset of His Beauty, and the snowflake of His Purity. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

A photo that I took today at the Smith Oaks Rookery of an old window of an old broken down abandoned building near the entrance. Taken with my cell phone.

"The experience of colours proceeding from darkness and of music sounding through the fabric of silence, can be likened to the experience of words arising from the natural silence of meditation." ~ from the book "Silence, Music, Silent Music"

God has bestowed upon his people the gift of song. God dwells within each human person, in the place where music takes its source.

Indeed, God, the giver of song, is present whenever his people sing his praises.

Music arises out of silence and returns to silence. God is revealed both in the beauty of song and in the power of silence. ~ from "Sing to the Lord"

St Charles Borromeo Catholic Church, Grand Coteau, La

Beau and I contemplating the train here in Pearland after picking up Cameron from school.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6dJWhbOAU31WGphdW5CbWRqUzQ/view?usp=sharing

"Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or riding in a train." ~ Thomas Merton

This morning I rescued two cute but battered end tables from someone's trash pile and I am going to paint them and make them like new again. There was a dresser and bed headboard and footboard too but to heavy for me to pick up alone. Someone beat me to the punch and scavenged the handles from the drawers.

St. Thomas Aquinas, the angelic doctor, maintains that the love of beauty is a natural good that brings peace and harmony to the human soul. The pursuit of beauty, albeit one of the highest of natural goods, can, however, be perverted and turned away from its proper end. St. Thomas, again reminds us, that even though "Every one loves beauty, spiritual people love spiritual beauty and carnal people love carnal beauty." (Comm. in Psalmos, 25, 5) Whereas spiritual beauty is ultimately found in its Source, God, carnal beauty can, and often does, lead away from Him. From the very beginning the pursuit of beauty has had its dangers and pitfalls. “And the woman saw that the fruit… was fair to the eyes and delightful to behold.” (Gen. III, 6) http://agdei.com/Art&Beauty2.html

"...we can also miss the deep-down Christ-pattern of reality because of its sheer elusiveness. God's presence in the singularity of created objects - the infinite housed in the finite, the shoreless ocean absorbed in a sponge - can be glimpsed but never held for long. It flashes before us like lightning, illuminating everything for a brief second before vanishing again. As creatures with finite rational powers, we find it impossible to hold in our minds the spiraling depths of inscape in a bird feather or fish scale. "Our vision fails, our thought fails, we cannot follow it home, we cannot reach its littleness or its vastness, for the end of both is God." We must be content with the realization that "God's way with us [is] to hide and reveal Himself at the same time" - not because God is coy, but because we can only take in so much." ~ from The Art of Dying and Living, by Kerry Walters, Lessons from Saints of Our Time

Images help us know when our sense of self, our relationship with God and others is distorted. They invite us to see and acknowledge unresolved feelings around hurt and forgiveness, as well as the blockages of pain and suffering. Above all, where can the healing and transforming power of images be experienced more effectively than in the space of a person's encounter with the divine source of healing and transformation? In the gospel story of the Samaritan woman, imagination may draw us to see the jar which she lowers into the well as an image containing her feeling responses and reactions to Christ challenging her in conversation. As she metaphorically raises draught upon draught, the Samaritan woman seems to reach down into the depth of her limited image of God, self, and other to encounter the transforming power of Jesus who mirrors and exalted image of God and the human person. ~ Art, Containment and Language of the Soul, Renate Dullman

Whenever we create or ponder images in a space set apart for silent, meditative and reflective experience, something will be known and understood about our inner feeling responses and resistances to new awarenesses, insights, and the kind of exchange which transforms into the 'image that we reflect' (Cor 3:18). Most importantly, images we make or contemplate in the context of prayer can enshrine moments of peak experience, which are thus held and remembered in visible form long after the experience has faded. ~ Art, Containment and Language of Soul

"What is done in love is done well." ~ Vincent Van Gogh