Thursday, June 28, 2007

Nobody Started It, Nobody Is Going To Stop It

I came up here from the monastery last night, sloshing through the cornfield, said Vespers, and put some oatmeal on the Coleman stove for supper. It boiled over while I was listening to the rain and toasting a piece of bread at the log fire. The night became very dark. The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside! What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!

Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen. But I am also going to sleep, because here in this wilderness I have learned how to sleep again. Here I am not alien. The trees I know, the night I know, the rain I know. I close my eyes and instantly sink into the whole rainy world of which I am a part, and the world goes on with me in it, for I am not alien to it…

—Thomas Merton, from the essay, "The Rain and the Rhinoceros"

See Heron Dance.

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Sunday, June 3, 2007

Red Duck (2006)






















"Red Duck" is the last image from my 40-year retrospective (1966-2006). It was painted after I had a dream last June, where the only thing I could remember was that I had seen a red duck. The dream seemed to be a good omen, and I thought that there might be a new series of paintings in the works. Instead, it was the last image I painted until I started painting again in March of 2007. It could well be considered the first in that same series on which I have been working since March of 2007.

Although I have 24 new paintings, I am going to take a break from blogging for a week or two. Thank you to Loren, Lori , robin andrea , bev and kjm for your comments and encouragement since I began my 40-year retrospective in December of 2006. Thank you to all who have been visiting without leaving any comments.

Here's a sampling from my porch garden. The seeds I planted a few weeks ago are coming up, too.





Friday, June 1, 2007

Hand True (2006)






















Hand true
who
paints
thy self

The haiku-like poems I wrote and used in this short series of Appleworks6 "paintings" are what have been coined "stodolas," after the creator of this form, Scott Stodola. Scroll down here to the 18th and 19th poems for a sampling of his poetry, which in this sampling was published in paragraph form, although the true poems were not in that form. In a "stodola," the first line has two syllables, the second line has one syllable and rhymes with the first line, the third line has one syllable, and the fourth line has two syllables.