The Gleanings Project: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

“Light in the Darkness” Acrylic on Canvas, DS

. . .

In my youth I avidly read books required by courses. I joined into class discussions, my hand always in the air. Debates fascinated. Once upon a time, in a flurry of defences, I argued against free will. When I listened, I became convinced of the other side, for a lifetime. Mrs. Krueger was the freedom fighter. I wonder now at her background. Were her arguments from experience?

I was more to be found on the dance floor than at the library door. I married young and had my children. It was then, in the hours after bedtime, and during naps, that I read as if my life depended on it. The first tome was Gone With the Wind. I began university and was interrupted by life many times. This became my pattern. 

The Gleanings Project, began in the New Year, will be part of one of those interruptions. I will glean books for glimpses of knowledge and wisdom, fun and study, using fewer than 500 words. Later, I will get down to serious work again. Thank you for being companions on the way. 

Your likes and comments are awesome.

O’Donohue, John. Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom. New York: NY, HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 1997.

501 words

Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits . . . Everyone is an artist. Each person brings sound out of silence and coaxes the invisible to become visible. (O’Donohue, xv)

Friendship is the sweet grace that liberates us to approach, recognize and inhabit this adventure . . . The Celtic imagination articulates the inner friendship . . . (xvii)

This book attempts a phenomenology of friendship in a lyrical-speculative form. (xx)

The darkest time of night is immediately before dawn. (1)

Darkness is the ancient womb. Nighttime is womb-time. Our souls come out to play . . . We rest in the night. The dawn is a refreshing time, a time of possibility and promise. (2)

I arise today

Through the strength of heaven, light of sun,

Radiance of moon, 

Splendor of fire,

Speed of lightning

Swiftness of wind,

Depth of sea,

Firmness of rock. (3)

The mystery of love . . . (4)

In the Christian tradition one of the most beautiful sacraments is baptism. (6)

Our feelings towards our friends reflect our feelings towards ourselves. (9)

We do not need to go out to find love; rather, we need to be still and let love discover us. Some of the most beautiful writing on love is in the Bible. (11)

In the early Celtic church, a person who acted as a teacher, companion, or spiritual guide was called an anam cara. (13)

Where you are understood you are at home. Understanding nourishes belonging. (14)

Friendship is the nature of God. (15)

A friend is a loved one who awakens your life in order to free the wild possibilities within you . . .  Love does not remain within the heart; it flows out to build secret tabernacles in a landscape. (19)

The Buddhist tradition has a lovely concept of friendship, the notion of the Kalyana-mitra, the “noble friend” [who] will not accept pretension but will gently and very firmly confront you with your own blindness. (25)

The face is the icon of creation. (37)

The human person is a threshold where many infinities meet. (41)

The Holy Spirit holds the intimacy and distance of the trinity alert and personified. (48)

Each part of the body hods the memory of its own experience. (49)

The imagination is the faculty that bridges, co-represents, and co-articulates the visible and the invisible. (51)

If you work with a different rhythm, you will come easily and naturally home to yourself. (57) 

When you really look deeply at something, it becomes part of you . . . People are constantly looking at empty and false images; these impoverished images are filling up the inner world of the heart . . . To look at something that can gaze back at you, or that has a reserve and depth, can heal your eyes and deepen your sense of vision . . . The Irish painter Tony O’Malley is a wonderful artist of the invisible . . . (61)

The Gleanings Project: A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming.

“Floribunda Rose Sentimental, (the painter’s flower)” Phone Photo, DS

. . .

McFague, Sallie. A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008.

445 Words

We are approaching the tipping point in global temperature that will change the basic condition for the flourishing of life . . . demand[s] a conversion from our greedy consumer-oriented culture . . . (1)

I want to suggest that theology within the context of climate change must focus on deconstructing and reconstructing two key doctrines: who we are and who God is. (2)

What would the worship of God and service to our neighbour look like in a postmodern, climate-change context? (4)

Every Christian is a theologian . . . unconscious or implicit theologies are very powerful. They control many of our decisions and actions . . . (5)

The best science is telling us that climate unpredictability, runaway heat, uncontrolled melting, and other dire events lie in our future . . this is the truth we must face up to. (17)

People like us, must find abundant life without consuming too much. (19)

The northern richer countries will suffer fewer adverse consequences . . . (20)

There is no permanent escape from our common fate –– we all must breathe the same air. (22)

We are the enemy: our beliefs about who we are and what we are entitled to are as much at fault as institutions that control trade and make war . . . We need to suggest a radically different paradigm for our place. (25)

“A different world is possible.” Many things were meant by that slogan, but one important thread was an embrace of a communitarian rather than an individualistic view of humanity. (29)

Creation is allowed to take center state a few times a year. But the well-being of the whole of God’s creation is not seen as part and parcel of the gospel message. (32)

We must live a limitation of “enoughness,” indeed, of sacrifice. Discipleship for well-off contemporary Christians means cruciform living: living in solidarity with those who are oppressed and suffering. (35)

[Jesus’] suffering was in order to open our eyes to the way of the cross, the way in which we all must live so that creation may flourish. (39)

We have the ability to be either for or against the rest of nature. (47)

Everything is related to everything else. (50)

[If] we would feel awe and care about our planet, it would be similar to the difference between imagining the world as a hotel and imagining as a home . . . Ecological literacy is basic survival knowledge. (53)

It is a vision of just, sustainable abundance. (57)

This strange reversal –– losing one’s life to save it –– is also the sensibility that is needed if our planet is to survive and prosper. (138)

The Gleanings Project: Outside of the Ordinary: Women’s Travel Stories

“Walking on Water” Acrylic on Watercolour Paper, DS

. . .

Cecil, Lynn and Catherine Bancroft, eds. Outside of the Ordinary: Women’s Travel Stories. Toronto: ON, Second Story Press, 2006.

498 Words

From as early as the seventeenth century, women’s travel writing, often recorded in letters back home, focused on observations of other women, the environment, the people and culture, the customs observed, and travelling tips. 

Release from daily routine often accompanies the lure of travel, and being separated from home, careers, even family, means that sometimes inhibitions are ignored, fears overcome, challenges met and conquered. (ix)

She looks back to grin at me over her shoulder and calls out, “Have fun, Mom!” (1)

We’ll enjoy the visit as friends, a new development since the days when we clashed over her concept of motherhood and mine. I am reaching the age when I’m learning to appreciate older women. (3)

My fingers cramp and my hand begins to ache. (5)

I went to Italy once and fell in love with my sister’s brother-in-law, fifteen years younger than me, who couldn’t speak a word of English . . . (9)

I began to desire to see certain things in the world  and to be a woman of the world . . . (11)

The lung-penetrating damp and cold of Venice . . . I had to find a gift that was also a message to this man I could not speak to and whom I would never again see. (15)

She is made almost entirely of air and floats in my arms as easily as a balloon. (19)

The space where her breast once was is still a sore, raised, red scar. (23)

They owe me a favor, so I’ll see what I can do. (29)

Every possibility in the world, every adventure and dream, suddenly and wonderfully opened up to my family and me. (31)

My mother’s stories of her childhood became part of the fabric of my own childhood . . . (33)

An answering joy rose inside me. (35)

There had always been a tornado somewhere. (37)

The weekend poetry workshop was held at the University of Iowa. My friend and I found the sessions inspiring, intense, and far too short . . . My friend shook her head. “Jasmine,” she pronounced. (39)

One must fully depart from home to understand it . . . and ultimately arrives at a concept of home as movement, rather than a fixed geographical point. (42)

It is a physical accomplishment in a life marked primarily by intellectual ones . . . (49)

A particular charm of the trip was the sameness of the routine –– eat, ride, eat, ride, eat, sleep . . . (51)

We loved the Texan whose reaction to our story whose reaction to our story, “Well, dang!,” gave us a leitmotif for the rest of the trip . . . I know we laughed every day, laughed a lot, and I have no idea what was so funny. (55)

What I felt was a call that originated in a deep within me, a call to begin a search for something that is very difficult to name or explain. (59)

Life Poiesis Collection: Things that Give Me Peace

“Hot Pink Love Scarf” Mixed Textiles, DS

The Blog Name

So the collection of birds grows.  It is a practice, perhaps a contemplative practice, that found me at 10 years old. I had to create a project for school with coloured pencil drawings and original research.  I chose birds of Ontario.  I had just moved back to Canada after 5 years in Scotland.  The woman across the street helped me.  I do not remember how I met her but I recall her name: Mrs. Beaton.  This photo of one of my favourite birds, the pink one in my collection, is a shout out to her, thank you, you helped me form a lifelong practice.

. . .

Things that Give me Peace

A poem of early morning prayers complete

A bedside exercise remembered

Opening the door for a cool breath

Coffee strong with microwaved milk

Viewing email over the forested mountains

Cedars with cones swaying

Multi-layered birdsong

The first kiss

Caesar salad with prawns

Forbidden reading while eating

A painted idea

An invitation to meet

Coloured lanterns by the sea

A talk with just you and me

Watching Crown on TV

Local gallery hopping

Purging abundant art files

Divesting the studio of heaps

A gathering of thinkers

A party of prayers

A class expected

A sleeping child

Research in progress

Writing as process

Words on a page

Violet celadon crimson

Poems published

Paintings juried in

Music rising inside and

Escaping as joy.

The Gleanings Project: The Poet, The Warrior, The Prophet

“Walking on Water” Acrylic on Paper, DS

. . .

Alves, Rubem A. The Poet, The Warrior, The Prophet. London: UK, SCM Press, 1990.

Words 505

It is not the sort of book that you read once and never read again. That is what you do with books you understand . . . We would sometimes use passages from it as part of our prayers. (ix)

It is very difficult to categorize . . . The whole book is about how to read the book. Be prepared to be patient. Be ready to unlearn. (x)

But God chose what is foolish in this world, even things which are not, to bring to nothing things that are . . .  I Cor. 1:27––28 (1)

The human world is made with words. ‘In the beginning, the Word . . . ‘ (3)

As I went through the looking glass, however, I realized that inside the mirror words refused to march. (6)

The teacher reads a written text, he gives a lesson, he delivers a lecture. The text: the words are immobilized on the paper by the chemistry of ink. When they made their first appearance, they were not like that: they were wild birds, flapping their wings . . . The Teacher set his traps, caught some of them and selected those which should be locked with ink on the paper cage. Poor words they have lost their freedom . . . ink keeps words chained to the paper . . . different birds pass by flapping their wings . . . wisdom of the sacred texts . . .  ‘for the letter killeth, but the Wind giveth life’ I Cor. 3:6 . . . I fell in love with the flying words. (7)

A good teacher is a luminous creature. Wherever he goes darkness disappears. (8)

Words to be eaten . . . Every lecture is a dinner party, a eucharistic meal. (10)

The tastes, the spices, the smell, the colours –– everything must be artfully combined for the pleasure of all . . .  Its purpose is to realize the dream of the alchemist: the universal transubstantiation of things. (11)

The reversal: we are eaten by the  food . . .  The eucharist: if the body and the blood were assimilated into our bodies, they would become what we are. But the eucharist is the reversal of normality . . . [It is] the bread and wine which eat us . . . We are to become what they are: the body and blood of Christ . . . The ego suddenly realized that he is unable to keep his birds inside the cages. (15)

Life demands forgetting. (18)

Sapienta: no power, a bit of knowledge, a bit of wisdom, and the most savor possible . . . L 45–46 (19)

And the weaving begins . . . Mystics and poets have known that silence is our original home . . .  (25)

Being lies submerged. Where? Hidden by the reflecting surface of the lake, in the depths of the water. Overspoken by the rattling of ten thousand words, in the spaces of forgetfulness, where they cannot be heard. (27)