#adventapertures2025: day 23

Watch, dear Lord, with those who wake, or watch, or weep tonight, and let your angels protect those who sleep. Tend the sick. Refresh the weary. Sustain the dying. Calm the suffering. Pity the distressed. We ask this for the sake of your love. St. Augustine So the Wise-Ones were directed from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. Continue reading “#adventapertures2025: day 23”

#adventapertures2025: day 4

They tell me he is a refiner, that he cleanses from spots; he has washed me in his precious blood, and to that extent I know him. They tell me that he clothes the naked; he has covered me with a garment of righteousness, and to that extent I know him. They tell me thatContinue reading “#adventapertures2025: day 4”

#adventapertures2025: day 3

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”

#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”

an elemental year: Sashiko

This piece was originally written as a ‘monk in the world’ piece for Abbey of the Arts here. I am currently spending a year exploring the elements in the company of the Kinship Photography Collective.  My practice group (a special mix of people who are able to meet on zoom during the day in the U.S. andContinue reading “an elemental year: Sashiko”

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”

Epiphany 2025: for coming home

It could be the name of a prehistoric beast that roamed the Paleozoic earth, rising up on its hind legs to show off its large vocabulary, or a lover in a myth who gets metamorphosed into a book. It means treasury, but it is just a place where words congregate with their relatives, a bigContinue reading “Epiphany 2025: for coming home”

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”