To journey without being changed is to be a nomad. To change without journeying is to be a chameleon. To journey and be transformed by the journey is to be a pilgrim. Mark Nepo from Christine Valters Paintner, The Love Of Thousands, (65) Why begin a journey, especially when one has no idea of whereContinue reading “#adventapertures2025: day 3”
Tag Archives: darkness
#adventapertures2025: day 2
If it’s true that the universe consists of atoms and void and nothing else, then everything that exists—the sun and the moon, mother and the flag, Beethoven’s string quartets and da Vinci’s decomposing flesh—is made of the elementary particles of nature in fervent and constant motion, colliding and combining with one another in an inexhaustiblyContinue reading “#adventapertures2025: day 2”
#adventapertures 2025: Sunday 1
In the season leaves should love, since it gives them leave to move through the wind, towards the ground they were watching while they hung, legend says there is a seam stitching darkness like a name. Now when dying grasses veil earth from the sky in one last pale wave, as autumn dies to bringContinue reading “#adventapertures 2025: Sunday 1”
#adventapertures 2025
In order to subscribe to this #adventapertures series, please go to the home page and click the white subscribe button which is normally found at the bottom right of the screen. If you already receive an automatic feed via email from WordPress on behalf of imageintoikon.com – then you’re already signed up! You need toContinue reading “#adventapertures 2025”
I am limited
Last week it was my great honour to have another ‘monk in the world’ post published on the Abbey of the Arts Blog. Here is that post: A few months ago I wrote these words in response to a series of photographs (some of which are pictured here) I made in collaboration with the KinshipContinue reading “I am limited”
Watchnight: for growth (unknowing)
I clear the surface of my desk and make a pool of light with my lamp. I go off to fetch matches and light a candle. One light is steady and sure, the other uncertain and flickering. I open my notebook and work between these two poles. On balance, it’s where I prefer to be:Continue reading “Watchnight: for growth (unknowing)”
Christmas Day: for birth
Light splashed this morning on the shell-pink anemones swaying on their tall stems; down blue-spiked veronica light flowed in rivulets over the humps of the honeybees; this morning I saw light kiss the silk of the roses in their second flowering. my late bloomers flushed with their brandy. A curious gladness shook me. So IContinue reading “Christmas Day: for birth”
Blue Christmas: for mourning
Grief is a response to an irreversible loss… To generate grief rather than sadness, the thing lost must carry great emotional weight, and it must pull back the veil that covers a transcendent aspect of the world. Breathe out to push the fog away from a brilliant pinpoint of light. … Gravity holds my feetContinue reading “Blue Christmas: for mourning”
day 20: for nourishment
In winter, we are prone to regard our trees as cold, bare, and dreary; and we bid them wait until they are again clothed in verdure before we may accord to them comradeship. However, it is during this winter resting time that the tree stands revealed to the uttermost, ready to give its most intimateContinue reading “day 20: for nourishment”
day 7: for discomfort
She loves the wind. There on the edge of the known world, at ninety, In her tall house, any wildness in the elements Is as welcome as an old friend. When the surgically patched elms and sycamores Crack off their heavy limbs in the freak snow storm Of October, she rejoices; the massy hail ThatContinue reading “day 7: for discomfort”