All gods are homemade,
and it is we who pull their strings,
and so,
give them the power to pull ours.
Notes: Quote Source. Photo: DK, Feb 5, 7:25 a.m. Cove Island Park.
All gods are homemade,
and it is we who pull their strings,
and so,
give them the power to pull ours.
Notes: Quote Source. Photo: DK, Feb 5, 7:25 a.m. Cove Island Park.
How many times have you noticed that it’s the little quiet moments in the midst of life that seem to give the rest extra-special meaning.
— Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers
Notes:
The Sun’s rays shimmered through the needles of the tall pine tree overhead, and the grass glistened with dew as Joshua walked through the meadow, deep in thought. Sunday morning was quiet in Auburn. No noisy traffic broke the peaceful silence of the Sabbath rest. Sunday should be that way everywhere so people could give their wearied souls a rest from the nerve-shattering noise of their workdays. The quiet of nature is God’s tranquilizer.
— Joseph F. Girzone, from “Joshua: A Parable for Today” (Macmillan Publishing Company, 1983)
Notes:
I didn’t know if there was anything like a God. I didn’t care. But it was mostly clear to me we were not just castaways in some tohubohu bearing an ensign of meaning only for those desperate enough to concoct one: I felt mostly certain more was going on than met the eye—despite not having a real clue just what that “more” might entail. My assuredness on these matters owed less to faith than it did to experience, for I’d been hearing echoes of the uncanny since early childhood.
— Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies: A Novel (Little, Brown and Company, September 15, 2020)
Photo: DK, Daybreak. December 20, 2020. 6:23 am. 28° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford CT
Photo: DK, 6:30, 6:35 and 7:12 a.m., Sunday, Nov 29, 2020, 33° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
It felt as if one’s entire world was one, long Sunday afternoon. Nothing to do. Nowhere to go.
Photo: Eric Kanigan of Sully and me. More on our Sully here and here and here.
Daybreak. August 30, 2020. 5:55 to 6:15 am. 66° F. Humidity 76%. Wind: 11 mph. Gusts: 28 mph. Cloud Cover: 3%. The Cove, Stamford, CT
June 7, 2020. Daybreak. 5:14 a.m. 62° F. Wind: 9 mph, Gusts: 27 mph. Weed Ave, Stamford, CT.
Paul Klee: “One eye sees, the other feels“
Wassily Kandinsky wrote that “Cézanne made a living thing out of a teacup, or rather in a teacup he realized the existence of something alive. He raised still life to such a point that it ceased to be inanimate. He painted these things as he painted human beings, because he was endowed with the gift of divining the inner life in everything. . . . A man, a tree, an apple, all were used by Cézanne in the creation of something that is called a ‘picture,’ and which is a piece of true inward and artistic harmony.” The artist or writer does not impose harmony on reality but—with sufficient reverence and diligence and selflessness and solitude—uncovers the harmony that is always there but that we conceal from ourselves out of a preference for material comfort and fear of the consequences a full and unreserved embrace of harmony requires.
This faith in the underlying harmony roots itself in a love of and appreciation for nature, because nature, no matter how extreme the human abuse heaped on her, embodies a quiet, continual knitting and healing of life, ever dependent on death to make herself anew. “Art is a harmony parallel to nature,” Cézanne wrote—not identical with but parallel to nature. Art of any kind, undertaken with attention and focus and as part of a commitment to discipline, is an effort at reenactment of the original creative gesture—the precipitation of the universe at the moment of its creation. That, I believe, is why we sing, paint, dance, sculpt, write; that is why any one of us sets out to create something from nothing, and why the creative impulse is essentially religious or, if you prefer, spiritual. We seek to recreate the original creative gesture, whatever or whoever set it in motion—the bringing into being of what is. We seek the center of beauty.”
— Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life (W. W. Norton & Company, March 10, 2020)
Notes: Paul Cezanne’s “Fruit and Jug on a Table (1890-1894)