the air is light blue today

Listening to this song all day long.

I really love this bag.

And Sarah Coakley:

"What also follows is that the silence of contemplation is of a particular sui generis form: it is not the silence of being silenced. Rather, it is the voluntary silence of attention, transformation, mysterious interconnection and (in violent, abusive, or oppressive contexts) rightful and divinely empowered resistance: it is a special 'power-in-vulnerability,' as I have elsewhere called it. Contemplation engenders courage to give voice, but in a changed, prophetic key."

(God, Sexuality, and the Self)

[Joshua Tree, January 2017, 35mm]

eleven zero one

We are moving into a new home this week and leaving behind our yellow house, a space that (minus the cockroaches) has been comfort and safety to me these past two years. I slipped on my wedding dress for the very first time in the bedroom, and a few months later put it on with my mother and sister by my side in that same room. It is the home Austin and I first came home to after our honeymoon, and the place where we have grown in love and understanding for one another. We have argued in this house, planted rosemary and lavender and mint in the front yard, built a raised bed with our own hands, strung lights in our backyard, hosted any number of bonfires and parties. We have filled this space with friends, over and over again, on air mattresses and at the dinner table, the leaves extended to fit as many people as possible.

I rode my bike by the yellow house a random hot spring afternoon in 2015, and thought, I want to live there. I memorized the address and looked it up online when I got home, and found out that it was a rental property, and due to be up for lease come the month that I needed to move. But, the realty company wasn't sure the current tenants would be moving. I spent that next month praying and riding my bike by it almost every day. I called the realty company every week to see if there were any updates, and finally heard word that it would actually be up for rent. It was a little more expensive than we anticipated, but a friend told us to go for it, that the first house that you live in as a married couple carries deep and meaningful memories, and that it would be worth it. So we did.

It wasn't until later that I noticed that the address 1101 was also our wedding date, November 1st—a silly coincidence, but one that makes me happy, and makes it seem fitting that it has been our first married house.

on prayer | 20

"Such a deepening of vision will eventually also involve at some point a profound sense of the mind's darkening, and of a disconcerting reorientation of the senses - these being inescapable fallouts from the commitment to prayer that sustains such a view of the theological enterprise. The willingness to endure a form of naked dispossession before God; the willingness to surrender control (not to any human power, but solely to God's power); the willingness to accept the arid vacancy of simple waiting on God in prayer; the willingness at the same time to accept disconcerting bombardments from the realm of the 'unconscious;' all these are ascetical tests of contemplation without which no epistemic or spiritual deepening can start to occur. What distinguishes this position, then, from an array of other 'post-foundationalist' options that currently present themselves in theology is the commitment to the discipline of particular graced bodily practices which, over the long haul, afford certain distinctive ways of knowing."

(Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self)

our dark greens of meaning

"What if we're here just for saying: house,

bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window, —

at most: column, tower . . . but for saying, understand,

oh for such saying as the things themselves

never hoped so intensely to be. Isn't this the sly purpose

of the taciturn earth, when it urges lovers on:

that in their passion each single thing should find ecstasy?"

—

"How we waste our afflictions!

We study them, stare out beyond them into bleak continuance,

hoping to glimpse some end. Whereas they're really

our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one

of the seasons of the clandestine year—; not only

a season—: they're site, settlement, shelter, soil, abode."

R.M. Rilke, Duino Elegies

[New Orleans, disposable film, 2014]

we don't love like flowers

I am sitting at the studio where I work, "woman-ing" (as my boss says) the gallery for the Saturday brunch hours. A. and I slept in for the first time in a very long while and went to the farmers' market and ate lemon poppyseed muffins on a bench and talked about naming our future dog Poppy, which almost makes me want to get a dog. We are in an in-between space, frantically trying to figure out jobs and housing and whether or not we are staying in or leaving Durham. Everything feels fragile. A trip to the farmers' market at once feels sentimental (if we leave) and boring (if we stay).

I have been inching my way through John Berger's Portraits, reading an essay most mornings with my coffee, and being reminded how much I love reading about art. My two main goals for this year were really just to (a) read more and (b) take pictures. I have been doing both, and it feels right. It feels like where I ought to be. 

We have fennel and leeks and lettuce and peas and basil in our garden, and the first thing I do each morning is walk into the kitchen, open the blinds, and look out on the raised bed to see if anything looks bigger than the day before. They rarely do, but there is great joy when the fennel looks just the slightest bit healthier and larger, or the leeks look rounder and more robust.

These words have been on my mind:

"Let us return, then, to that anointing of his, let us return to that anointing that teaches within what we cannot speak; and because you cannot see now, let your role be found in longing. The whole life of a good Christian is a holy longing. But what you long for you do not see, but by longing you are made capacious so that when what you are to see has come, you may be filled...So God, by postponing, stretches the longing, by longing stretches the soul, by stretching makes it capacious. Let us long, therefore, brothers, because we are going to be filled.”

(Augustine, Tractate 4 on 1 John 2:27-39)

[The Guggenheim in NYC last November, 35mm]

she went over it like a bird

I did not know what else to do the day after the election except to read Dorothy Day. A much needed reminder when all actions feel weighted by insignificance:

"What good can one person do? What is the sense of our small effort? [You] do not see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for one action of the present moment. But we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transform all our individual actions, and know that God will take them and multiply them, as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes."
(Dorothy Day, Loaves and Fishes)

In other news, I just got to spend some time with this wonderful potter and his wife, who both make beautiful things. I am also re-reading Woolf's A Room of One's Own and simultaneously getting excited for a little studio space I may be renting in the spring, a real room of my own.

[Dorothy Day, my fashion icon]

to say the names of things

"God is present and will be present. All of us have heard, or in some way experienced, a call. It may have been a voice in the night or a dawning awareness, a lifelong inclination or an epiphany impelling us to change how we live altogether. How we respond to that call is manifested in our lives as artists. I like to think that what we do and what we make are ways of saying to God, 'Here I am. I am present, too.'" [Mark Jarman, in an article in Image]

Listening to a lot of Hello Shark this weekend.

These—the perfect road trip snack.

[from a trip to Boston, earlier this year, Honeywell Pentax, 35mm]

on turning

My friend Heather, in her Boston apartment earlier this year.

And Joel Meyorwitz, answering the question: What do you look for in a photograph?

"It's a merger of what's inside your head and what's outside your eyes, and finding a way to synthesize that experience—because what's inside your head isn't something that you have predetermined you want to have. It's a notion of what's satisfying, what fills you up. I think about photographs as being full, or empty. You picture something in a frame and it's got lots of accounting going on in it—stones and buildings and trees and air—but that's not what fills up a frame. You fill up a frame with feelings, energy, discovery, and risk, and leave room enough for someone else to get in there. It's full because you're there, because you carried a lifetime of impulses with you that direct you toward the clear sky behind you. You don't know why, but you turn to it."

[Honeywell Pentax, 35mm]

and more, have our being

I spent the bulk of last week at Mepkin Abbey, in Monck's Corner, SC, just a half hour north of Charleston. I went to pray about my life, marriage, and vocation. I went also to rest, to write, to be alone long enough so that words can come to the wordless parts of me. I was surprised at how easily I slipped into the silence of the monastery, how right it felt to be alone and quiet for a few days. I walked away slow hours in the woods and gardens, spiraled through the labyrinth each morning, took at least two naps a day, read for a few hours in bed each night, and learned to listen for the bells calling us back to chapel for lauds, prime, terce. In many ways, it was more jarring to come back to the busyness of real life then to enter into the silence of the abbey.

"For I saw him and sought him; for now we are so blind and so unwise that we never seek God until out of his goodness he shows himself to us, and if he graciously lets us see something of himself, then we are moved by the same grace to seek with great longing to see him more fully; and thus I saw him and I sought him, I had him and I wanted him. And it seems to me that this is, or should be, our usual way of proceeding."

(Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love)

on prayer | 18

"As for myself, I have found faith not to be a comfort but a provocation to a life I never seem to live up to, an eruption of joy that evaporates the instant I recognize it as such, an agony of absence that assaults me like a psychic wound. As for my children, I would like them to be free of whatever particular kink there is in me that turns every spiritual impulse into anguish. Failing that, I would like them to be free to make of their anguish a means of peace, for themselves or others (or both), with art or action (or both). Failing that—and I suppose, ultimately, here in the ceaseless machinery of implacable matter, there is only failure—I would like them to be able to pray, keeping in mind the fact that, as St. Anthony of the Desert said, a true prayer is one that you do not understand."

(Christian Wiman, "I Will Love You in the Summertime")
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this to that

may the tide

that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

[Lucille Clifton]

on prayer | 17

"Almighty God, Father of all mercies,
we your unworthy servants give you humble thanks
for all your goodness and loving-kindness
to us and to all whom you have made.
We bless you for our creation, preservation,
and all the blessings of this life;
but above all for your immeasurable love
in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ;
for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory.
And, we pray, give us such an awareness of your mercies,
that with truly thankful hearts we may show forth your praise,
not only with our lips, but in our lives,
by giving up our selves to your service,
and by walking before you
in holiness and righteousness all our days;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit,
be honor and glory throughout all ages. Amen."

(The General Thanksgiving, Daily Morning Prayer: Rite Two, BCP)

bright sadness

"'Yet even now,' declares the Lord, 'return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.' Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster. Who knows whether he will not turn and relent, and leave a blessing behind him...?" (Joel 2:12-14)

"A journey, a pilgrimage! Yet, as we begin it, as we make the first step into the 'bright sadness' of Lent, we see—far, far away—the destination. It is the joy of Easter, it is the entrance into the glory of the Kingdom." (Alexander Schmemann)

And, this poem.

[painting by Alfonse Borysewicz]

you are my crag

Lately:

Florist, on repeat.

These words, and all of Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine.

One Day Projects by Eliot Dudik and Jared Ragland.

Everything about this house, especially the bedroom.

A. gave me this beautiful book by John Berger for Christmas, which I am thrilled about.

The weekend consisted of this, breakfast club, bread-baking, the farmer's market, and much time spent outside. All good things.

Also, these words, from Minor White:

"If [the photographer] were to walk a block in a state of sensitized sympathy to everything to be seen, he would be exhausted before the block was up and out of film long before that. Perhaps the blank state of mind can be likened to a pot of water almost at the boiling point. A little more heat—an image seen—and the surface breaks into turbulence. Possibly the creative work of the photographer consists in part of putting himself into this state of mind. Reaching it, at any rate, is not automatic. It can be aided by always using one’s camera for serious work so that the association of the camera in one’s hands always leads to taking pictures."

[35mm]

the heaped ashes of the night turned into leaves again

-

I love mornings in this house.

And these words: "This also is Thou; neither is this Thou." (St. Ephrem)

And this: "How can I live now with my heart open to the things that memory will call lovely?"

[in my kitchen, these days of living alone]
-

we are always in medias res

-

-

From Karl Rahner: "Flesh means that person who is on the one hand the frailty, the threatenedness, the inexplicableness, the weakness, the obscurity of this individual, concrete, specific entity, and who at the same time knows this and is afraid.”

Also, this lecture from Professor Samuelson, which I return to again and again. Especially, this: the difference between seeking transformation and seeking escape. And this question: what is your feast?

And these poems.

[photograph from the Basilica of Saint Francis, Assisi, Italy]

not to grasp

-

This is the convent in Orvieto that I have the privilege of staying in this month. It seems like a dream living in such a beautiful space and walking past this little guy every day, and all I can think to say is that I am grateful.

A few other things:

Agnes Martin at the Tate.

Italy has changed my perspective on eggplant. Sliced thinly, grilled, and topped with balsamic, fresh mozzarella, and basil—few things are better.

Also, these words from Father Martin, which I scribbled down awhile back, and which are necessary words today as I meet with certain disappointments:

"We are not to grasp at that which we desire, rather to extend open hands, the palms turned upwards in prayer."
-

why we must struggle

-

"If we have not struggled
as hard as we can
at our strongest
how will we sense
the shape of our losses
or know what sustains
us longest or name
what change costs us,
saying how strange
it is that one sector
of the self can step in
for another in trouble,
how loss activates
a latent double how
we can feed
as upon nectar,
upon need?"

(Kay Ryan, Say Uncle: Poems)

Found this poem torn from a book and taped on a retro orange fridge the other day, and have been thinking about it ever since. This, especially: to name what change costs us. 

Also: missing my old room back in Durham, and looking forward to creating new spaces there soon.

[honeywell pentax, 35mm]

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on prayer | 15

"The fourth and last of our 'Christian essentials' is prayer, and in particular the need for us all to grow in prayer. Growing in prayer is not simply acquiring a set of special spiritual skills that operate in one bit of your life. It is about growing into what St. Paul calls 'the measure of the full stature of Christ' (Ephesians 4:13). It is growing into the kind of humanity that Christ shows us. Growing in prayer, in other words, is growing in Christian humanity."

(Rowan Williams, Being Christian)
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on silence

"Silence kept with others has a special quality. It is like a fine veil, preserving separateness, yet strangely heightening mutual awareness. Silence requires us to be present to the unexpressed needs of others, needs of which they may themselves not yet know. Cultivating the habit of silence should be seen as one of the special responsibilities of Christian community in a noisy world. It is a powerful means of fostering mutual encouragement among us, whom God has entrusted to one another in this wilderness of pain and doubt."

[Ellen Davis, Getting Involved with God, 127]
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