O Holy Night, Images Sacred & Sublime

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art, Christmas, Christmas music, inspiration, O Holy Night, photography, universe

Star_birth_in_Messier_83_(captured_by_the_Hubble_Space_Telescope)

I’ve gathered some images, sacred and sublime, to scroll through as you listen to “O Holy Night“, one of my favorite Christmas carols.

I love this song, not only for the haunting melody and beautiful  lyrics, but also because night has always seemed holy to me.

When I walk out beneath the stars on a cold or balmy night, I’m awestruck by such beauty and mystery and magnificence. I feel humbled and incredibly grateful, as if witnessing the hand of the divine writ large across the sky.

The images below are my gift to you. They reflect what this season is all about for me, a sense of the sacred and sublime–scenes of the birth of Christ and families celebrating Christmas.

Photos of spectacular sunsets and winter wonderlands–nature in all her glory.

And finally, images of an infinite universe stretching out and wrapping about the earth as if we were a holy gift just waiting to be unwrapped.

Enjoy!

 

Walters – The Adoration of the Shepherds

Peter Paul Rubens – The Adoration of the Magi

 

Paul Gauguin – Christmas Night (The Blessing of the Oxen)

Attributed to Carel Fabritius

Heilige_Familie_und_Hirten_im_Stal

From Christmas throughout Christendom – The Christmas Tree

Viggo Johansen – A Christmas Story

Waiting for Father Christmas – Theodor Hildebrandt

Glorious Sunset

A White Christmas

Blackbirds flock at Nightfall

Frosty Trees in Winter Wonderland

Cosmic Skies over Bali

Northern Lights over Greenland

Stars trailing through the night

Earth Rises in the Night

Hubble_Directly_Observes_Planet_Orbiting_Fomalhaut

Night Mist as seen by Hubble

Cartwheel Galaxy

Orion as seen by Hubble

The Milky Way Galaxy

Our home Earth wrapped up in the Milky Way Galaxy

(First posted in 2012)

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“The Secret of Happiness” – A Coda to My Last Post

Tags

happiness, inspiration, life, spirituality, Zen

After my last post on “happy endings” for our novels or ourselves, I’ve been thinking a lot about what exactly constitutes happiness and where it is to be found. Is it a goal worth striving for? Or should our life journey have a more practical, or grander,  purpose?

Is it to become fulfilled, to live up to our potential? Or simply to be “good,” to live what most would agree to be “the good life”?

Maybe it’s to “do no harm,” or to leave this Earth better than we found it, or to alleviate suffering wherever we find it?

Perhaps our journey is to find God, to become enlightened, to fathom the mysteries of the universe?

Or simply be present, bearing witness to all we encounter, the good, the bad, the ugly, the pain and suffering, the laughter and joy?

Maybe it’s just to gaze up at the stars in awe, and wonder what it’s all about.

But where does happiness fit into all this? Can it be found at all?

In my novel I have a chapter called “The Secret of Happiness.” Two characters, a young wife and her husband, are arguing about it. She’s come to believe that the secret of happiness is simply to stop thinking. To give the mind a rest from all its encircling doubts and fears and uncertainties.

He has another idea. “There is no secret to happiness,” he tells her.  “It’s all out in the open. You just have to grab it on the fly.”

I like his answer, as well I might, being the author of it. And I know where it came from.

There’s an old Zen story about a frustrated student who accuses his master of keeping the secret of enlightenment from him. The master claims that’s not true at all. “Do you not pour my tea for me? Do I not drink it?”

Still the student thinks the master is being deliberately obtuse. Then one day when they are walking through the mountains steeped with the sweet scent of trailing arbutus underfoot, the master turns eagerly to the student and asks, “Do you smell it?”

When the student says he does, the  master replies, “You see, I haven’t been hiding anything at all.” It was always right there, ready to be crushed underfoot.

So could it be that happiness, like enlightenment, isn’t hidden at all, but must be grabbed on the fly? Not because it’s elusive or evasive or enigmatic. But because in our headlong rush toward whatever hopeful ending we imagine for ourselves, which is always in the future, just out of reach, we overlook the abundant pleasure of life lying at our feet. Sometimes these pleasures seem too lowly, too humble, too ordinary to even note, let alone grab onto. Yet the self-so-ness of this unobtrusive good would fill our lives with such sweet moments of happiness, of warmth and well-being, if only we would have the presence of mind to note it.

It comes even in the midst of all our troubles, our worries and resentments, pains and hungers. Not “in spite of,” as I put it in my last post. But right there in the midst of it, that unconditional goodness permeates life and is woven into the fabric of reality.

A happy ending for my novel, or my life, is beside the point. Allowing our lives and our life’s work to be to infused with these sweet, rare essences is enough.

Photo of trailing arbutus by Justin Russell, public domain.

Seeing the Self in What We Love

Tags

inspiration, Love, Philosophy, self-realization, spirituality, The Self, Upanishad

I’ve become mesmerized by the quote below I found on The Beauty We Love. These first four lines, especially, move me.

A wife loves her husband not for his own sake, dear, but because the Self lives in him.

The husband loves his wife not for her own sake, dear, but because the Self lives in her.

Children are loved not for their own sake, but because the Self lives in them.

Everything is loved not for its own sake, but because the Self lives in it.

Reading these words, I feel the truth in them. When I look at and love my husband, my son, my daughter, what I’m seeing and loving is something, a Self, so much larger than what we each are alone. Something that resonates within me and within all the things I love. Something that is not an other, but what runs through and connects all others. It makes each loved one more dear to me, more rare, more real, than what mere personality or even individuality,  personal affection, or familial attachment alone would support.

The tenderness in the Chagall painting above captures that reflective love, that mirrored Self, so beautifully.

The rest of the quote lies before, which I also sense to be true, although more abstract.

This Self has to be realized.
Hear about this Self.

As a lump of salt thrown in water dissolves
and cannot be taken out again,
though wherever we taste, the water it is salty,
even so, beloved,
the separate self dissolves in the sea of pure consciousness,
infinite and immortal.

Separateness arises from identifying the Self with the body,
which is made up of the elements;
when this physical identification dissolves,
there can be no more separate self.

~ from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

The self dissolved into “a sea of pure consciousness” is a lovely, restful image. But it’s missing the intimacy and immediacy of those first four lines where that sea washes through the faces I love. That image is far more meaningful to me, and truer, I believe, to the intent those verses imply. That Self is not abstract. I feel it in my bones.

“Something in This Sleeping Earth” – Two by Whyte, One by Fiske

Tags

art, Blogging, David Whyte, Earth, Gertrude Fiske, inspiration, Nature, poem, poetry, spirituality

Gertrude Fiske, American Impressionist

All My Body Calls

All my body calls
for something in this sleeping
earth
we call the spirit.

But how
from lifted arms
where stars run through fingers
and the night is like sand
do I breathe a fragrance of its wisdom
do I call its name
or listen to the drops
that trickle down to earth
and hear
life being given
not only through the moving hands of the forest
but through the hand that reaches in
the dark unmoving regions of the chest
and uncovers slowly
the enormous
indistinct
shape of the ocean.

by David Whyte

Fallen in Love

That day I saw beneath dark clouds
the passing light over the water
and I heard the voice of the world speak out,
I knew then, as I had before
life is no passing memory of what has been
nor the remaining pages in a great book
waiting to be read.

It is the opening of eyes long closed.
It is the vision of far off things
seen for the silence they hold.
It is the heart after years
of secret conversing
speaking out loud in the clear air.

It is Moses in the desert
fallen to his knees before the lit bush.
It is the man throwing away his shoes
as if to enter heaven
and finding himself astonished,
opened at last,
fallen in love with solid ground.

by David Whyte

What struck me in the poems and the painting is that “something in this sleeping earth” that we are only half-awake to, what Whyte calls “spirit.” I see that spirit clearly in the painting by Friske, the two women immersed in the forest, in that yellow-green light, in those parting branches, those “moving hands.”

And in the second poem, that sense that there’s nothing to wait for, it’s all out here in the open, “speaking out loud in the clear air,”  as solid and humble and astonishing as the ground beneath our bare feet.

In another poem, Whyte writes:

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

What are we waiting for? Especially in these trying times.

All times are trying. All lives are trying. We have to grasp, right here, right now, despite all that, what’s waiting half-hidden all around us this very moment.

Many thanks to The Beauty We Love where I found these poems, and to The Uncarved Blog who shared two wondrous poems by Stephen Levine and pointed me toward this site. It’s one of the things I love about blogging, finding these hidden treasures that speak so eloquently to things I feel and cannot say. 

Inside the Holy Grove of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia

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Antonio Gaudi, architecture, art, cathedral, church, inspiration, La Sagrada Familia, travel

Stepping inside La Sagrada Familia cathedral is like walking into an enchanted forest. Your gaze goes and up and up, following the trunks of  trees toward light-filled branches.

The forest is made up of several kinds of stone, so each tree trunk has its own subtle shade, some leaning red, others green. They branch out at the top into smaller and smaller columns, like fingers stretching out to hold up an impossibly ornate ceiling.

Only it’s not a ceiling at all, but a canopy of leaves and stars woven tightly together, as you would find in any forest grove.

Toward the right of the main entrance is the heart of the cathedral with two massive organs and rows of pews for worship. There floating  beneath an umbrella of lights is the upward-gazing figure of the Christ.

Along the sides of the main chamber are spiraling staircases moving up the towers, to what and where, I do not know.

Colored light floods the cathedral, streaming through the stained glass windows, or projected along the walls and columns, flowing from blue to green, and gold to scarlet,

Glimpses of the crypts below can be seen through artful cut-outs in the stone.

 

Toward the exit is a large loggia featuring some of the furnishings Gaudi created for the cathedral, and a single simple painting, capturing the tenderness and grief at the fallen Son.

Below are two virtual tours of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia. The first video is very short and gives you a 360 degree view of the interior main chamber. The second video, which takes around five minutes, shows both the exterior and interior, with some lovely aerial shots outside, while inside the church is full of worshipers during its consecration mass.

 

All the still photos in this post are my own except for the ceiling shot which came from Wikipedia.

My last blog post features the exterior of La Sagrada Familia and tells more about its creation.

 

“A Terrifying & Edible Beauty,” Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia

Tags

Antoni Gaudi, architecture, art, Barcelona, beauty, cathedral, church, inspiration, La Segrada Familia, travel

This stunning cathedral, a tribute to Antonio Gaudi’s genius and imagination, his love of God and Nature, was begun in 1882 and is still a work in progress. It’s hoped to be completed by the centennial of Gaudi’s death in 2026, but many believe it will stretch well beyond that date.

“There is no reason to regret that I cannot finish the church,” Gaudi wrote. “I will grow old but others will come after me. What must always be conserved is the spirit of the work, but its life has to depend on the generations it is handed down to and with whom it lives and is incarnated.”

“La Sagrada Família is made by the people and is mirrored in them. It is a work that is in the hands of God and the will of the people.”

On it’s completion, it will tower 560 feet, slightly less than the the highest natural landmark in the vicinity, Montjuïc hill . Gaudi believed that nothing should rise higher than the hand of God, and he revered Nature, not only as God’s handiwork, but as the inspiration for all that can be called art. “Nothing is art if it does not come from nature,” he once famously said. Therefore his buildings have no straight lines or sharp corners because “there are no straight lines or sharp corners in nature.”

Already his structure dominates the surrounding city of Barcelona, and it is only one-half of its envisioned height.

The model below shows what the completed structure is meant to look like, but only the brown parts are currently built.

Salvadore Dali referred to La Sagrada’s “terrifying and edible beauty.” Art historian Nikolaus Pevsner likened its growth to “sugar loaves and anthills.” Time Magazine found it “sensual, spiritual, whimsical, exuberant!” While George Orwell called it “one of the most hideous buildings in the world.”

I have to admit when I first saw it from the street its hugeness combined with its extremely ornate facade topped by construction cranes made the whole affair seem monstrous and grotesque. But upon closer inspection I found it fascinating and inspiring. Like Gaudi’s Casa Bottla, which I wrote about recently, around every corner, from every new angle, wherever my eye rested I discovered some new surprising detail to delight me.

The facade at front entrance to the cathedral, which celebrates the birth of Christ, is sumptuously ornate, as you see in the photos above. But as you pass through the building to the back entrance, commemorating Christ’s death, the style becomes more stark, with sharper lines, giving it a modern feel, as you see below.

Some of the most interesting and intricate parts of the exterior were the huge portals, the doors through which you pass from the exterior into the heart of the cathedral..

And here at the portal of Gaudi’s masterpiece I will leave you, saving the equally fascinating interior for my next post.

“Perfect Love” – All We Need for What Ails Us

Tags

Fear, healing, inspiration, Love, spirituality, transformation

Francisco “Paco” Zúñiga

The highest common denominator for all spiritual practices and religious teachings is Love. Love with a capital L, meaning that which transcends a personal or ego-based sense of love. Love that embraces all and everything. Love that is the ground, or source, of all being.

It’s a “perfect” love, a powerful love, a love that can change lives, and nations, even as Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King have shown.

“Perfect Love casts out fear” is from the Bible, but it is one of those highest teachings and practices found across cultural and religious divides.

If these teachings cannot be made practical in our ordinary, flawed, imperfect lives, they are of no use to us. But as a mother who has struggled with an almost debilitating sense of fear at times, an understanding of what this verse means has saved me many times.

Fear is at the heart of all manner of darkness. “All that ails us” is some mutation of this life-crippling, joy-killing, action-paralyzing, energy-sapping, emotion. I have found myself in its grip many times. And the only way I’ve found to peel back the strangling fingers of fear is to let a more perfect sense of Love rise within me.

It is understanding that without Love, I am nothing. That love truly is the ground of my being, the source of all being. That love is what makes life worth living. And that when the time comes to depart from this life, all that will have mattered is how much we have loved; not how much we have fallen at the feet of fear. How much we have given, not how much we have taken; how much we have expressed the best in us, and sought to see the best in each other.

“Perfect Love” means to love others more perfectly. This doesn’t mean to love others in spite of their flaws or failings.

It means to love them unconditionally because we know that they are not their flaws and failings. And to know that so clearly and so fervently, that we can keep that love pure, even while doing whatever we can to help them let go of their own fears, and all the failings that go with those fears.

We are not our fears. We are not our failings. We are not our hate, or greed, or selfishness, or addiction, or anger, or violence. These are all manifestations of our fears. And the only thing worth saving or savoring in each other is what we love, and what expresses that love.

“Love your enemies” is the same as saying you have no enemies, a wise woman once said. For those who would appear as our enemies are those so overcome by their own fears that they have failed to see what they love in another. And if we hate them, we have fallen into the same trap.

Isn’t that what the great moral and inspirational figures of our age have taught us? Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela? That love conquers all, even the most insidious, unjust, hateful systems of government that would try to separate, enslave, and dehumanize us?

We are not our prejudices, we are not the cruel things we say or do, the cruel systems that we create and justify. We can’t condone these things, or ignore them.  We don’t give them a pass.

But we understand that, to some degree, the most hateful and cruel among us, are us, in other circumstances. That there, but for the grace of God, go I.

That even the most loving and kind and wise among us, when governed by fear, rather than love, would be the same.

We have no enemy because we see ourselves in him, and the only way to un-make an enemy is to see his humanity, to see us in them.

That’s how Mandela was able to overcome Apartheid and lead to reconciliation.

That’s how Gandhi was able to face the oppressors and free his county.

That’s how Martin Luther King was able to peacefully resist an oppressive system and usher in the Civil Rights Act.

It’s fear for ourselves, our children, our families, our community, our country, our way of life, that leads to resentment and anger and blame and shame and discouragement or despair. That eventually leads to resignation and indifference and apathy and depression and joylessness.

And it’s learning to love ourselves and each other more perfectly that casts out those fears, and frees us from all its crippling mutations.

“Perfect Love” – a powerful antidote for all that ails us.

I reblogged this as a gentle reminder to myself in time of need. First posted in December 2013 in a slightly altered form.

When the Sea Rises and the Light Fails

Tags

Advice, humanity, inspiration, James Baldwin, life, personal, quotations, troubled times

J.M.W. Turner

“For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.” ~ James Baldwin

My world has shifted in the last few weeks in a way that has left me reeling, looking for something to hold onto, to keep from sinking into darkness.

The remarkable thing is I’ve managed to pull myself back from that edge, to realize that no matter what seems to be happening “out there,” what really matters is what’s happening “in here,” in our own consciousness. Will we let an overwhelming sense of loss, grief, and rage pull us under? Or hold on tight to the ones we love, and the things that give us joy, a sense of buoyancy, and the ability to ride out this storm.

I am not alone. Those in the Carolinas experiencing the ravages of Florence have been been facing those rising seas, that failing light. We all experience these calamities, whether of our own or another’s making, or something completely out of our control. Nothing is fixed “out there.” But our minds are our own. We get to decide how we weather our storms, whether we hold on to each other and the things we love, or let the sea engulf us and our light go out.

Mothering the World, A Tall Order

Tags

Deborah J. Brasket, Mothers, Mothers Day, Parenting, spirituality, Tao, Tao Te Ching

Margarita Sikorskaia

My novel From the Far Ends of the Earth is about relationships between mothers and children and all the ways that is expressed, from the most fearful and destructive to the most trusting and freeing.

A huge influence on my understanding of what “mothering” is, or could be, is found in the Tao Te Ching (CHXXV):

There was something complete and nebulous

Which existed before the Heaven and Earth,

Silent, invisible

Unchanging, standing as One,

Unceasing, ever-revolving,

Able to be the Mother of the World.

This Mother of the World, of course, is Tao, the all-pervading, all embracing, unchanging, and unceasing. It’s the thing that evolves, supports, nurtures, protects, and provides space for its “children,” all individual being.

A tall order for a mere human.

Yet something about that passage spoke to me as a woman and mother. It drew within me the desire to embrace my children in that spirit. And I found the mothering of my own two children improved immensely when I was able to step back and project in some way this more expansive sense of mothering that allows them to feel loved and supported without all the worries and anxieties and criticism and fear that accompany a mere human sense of mothering.

This mothering is not as personal, intense, or myopic, as the latter. It doesn’t hover, it doesn’t obsess, it doesn’t fret. It frees them “to be,” and is based on an immense sense of trust—in myself, in them, and in the universe at large. In God, or Tao, or some divine presence or higher power that embraces all of us, and gives each of us the capacity to mother each other.

This is not to say that I often meet this ideal. Far from it.

But I know I mother my own children best and make fewer mistakes when I’m able to embrace them in that larger, more expansive way. And it feels more natural, less constricted, to mother that way.

I find this kind of mothering works best when all-inclusive. When I embrace all around me with the same mothering spirit. Not just my children, but all children, all people, all things—my home, my community, my work—even the individual objects that fill the space around me and the space outside my window.  When I’m able to actually feel and identify with that potential, to “be” the “Mother of the World.”

Mothering, I learned, is a capacity that anyone can embrace: man, woman, child. You don’t have to be a mother, or have children of your own, to mother the world. When you adopt that stance, all things become your children to nurture, cherish, support, love—to help bring to their full potential.

Here’s wishing you all a lovely day of “mothering.”

First printed on these pages in 2015.

 

Fascinating Faces, Tao & the Arts

Tags

art, Asian Art Museum, humanity, Philosophy, sculpture, spirituality, Tao Te Ching, Zen

Some works of art speak to you on a level that is hard to define. You gaze and are drawn inward. Something in you identifies with what you see there. It’s not outside, it’s in here. It was there before you saw it, and the seeing is just a reminder of its presence.

I felt that way when viewing some of the artwork at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Especially in the faces that follow. The one above is my favorite. I cannot help smiling when I see it. I’ve paired the faces with a few favorite Tao verses and Zen anecdotes that capture a glimpse of what I see in each face.

THE MONK – OH SO DELICIOUS

Once there was a monk fleeing for his life, a tiger at his heels, chasing him over the edge of a cliff where he grabs hold of a branch.  He dangles there just out of reach of the tiger’s snapping jaws, while below another tiger is snapping at his feet.  No escape.  Just then he notices a fat juicy strawberry dangling from a nearby vine. He plucks it loose and pops it into his mouth.  “Oh, so delicious!” he sighs.

THE SAGE – WHERE WONDER RISES

“From mystery to further mystery is the entrance to all wonders.”  -Tao Te Ching, (Ch. I)

THE SAVANT – RIDING THE WIND

“My eye becomes my ear, my ear becomes my nose, my nose my mouth. My bone and my flesh melt away. I cannot tell by what my body is supported or what my feet walk upon. I am blowing away, east and west, as a dry leaf torn from a tree. I cannot even tell whether the wind is riding on me or I am riding on the wind.”  -Lieh Tzu

THE MYSTIC – WHO AM I?

“Once I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering here and there. Suddenly I awoke and was surprised to be myself again. Now, how can I tell whether I am a man who dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who dreams she is a man?” Chuang Tzu

THE MOTHER – OBTAINING THE ONE

Knowing the Male,
But staying with the Female,
One becomes the humble Valley of the World. – Tao Te Ching (Ch.XXVIII)

There was something complete and nebulous
Which existed before Heaven and Earth,
Silent, invisible,
Unchanging, standing as One
Unceasing, ever-evolving,
Able to be the Mother-of-the-World.  – (Ch. XXV)