How absent-mindedly they hold the light
that bathes them, the light chilled
against the air before it warms to their skins,
before it enters their calm bodies and
tenderly occupies their faces.
And poised in their faces a completeness
of the self, a sturdy radiance.
How is it the world can be so utterly forgotten
that all the hubbub of horses, vendors,
servant banter, waterwheels, and roosters
fades into the stillness of a gesture?
The impasto of colours thickens them,
the damp Delft weather rubs their cheeks
with a soft vermeil rag, and even the details
of their lives - maps, loaves of bread, dogs -
grow lustrous as if such things
gain substance only in the presence
of such women. Spellbound, the world recedes.
And they, with their beauty lost
to themselves by the dailiness of their lives,
pause between centuries,
and by pausing, blaze momentarily
and always.
‘Vermeer’s Women’
Maurya Simon
I hadn’t come across Maurya Simon’s poetry until preparing for this series, but the poem above has so many exquisite moments and images in it. It aptly describes the kind of silence I’ve been exploring this week: the women are stilled (but not frozen) amidst their daily lives with all the hustle and bustle around them. It also encapsulates a quality of attention (from the woman in the painting, the painter, and the viewer, from the poet and the reader) that I will need to emulate, if I am to keep going on this journey of finding the holy in every single one of the mundane minutes of my life.
Listening to BBC Radio 4 the other day the phrase ‘the attention economy’ jumped out at me. A reviewer was describing the cultural trend of the use of images in western societies: the more beautiful and perfect the image, the more valued it seems to become, when judged by the ‘income’ streams of likes and clicks on social media. Society is becoming so inured to the explosion of images everywhere, that we are ceasing to see any of them. My images can become cultural commodities which are quickly dismissed or discarded in the hunt for the next sensational something.
This way of seeing is utterly different from the ‘pause’ I hope to engender by my work, which is designed to point beyond me to the presence of my co-Creator (whether iI succeed or not is dependent on the viewer/reader). It is light years away from the quality of ‘pause’ an Old Master’s painting might demand of me.
Wherever, on whatever, my eyes rest this day, I am being offered a continual invitation to look again and beyond; an invitation to see the Presence that waits for me behind my present.
Pre-diction, before the Word was spoken,
The Word was in a void of unknowingness,
Present, immutable, Pre-sentient
Of the Word made flesh. Then,
Life danced into creation,
Gifting infinite possibilities
Into a matrix of connectivity.
pre-nuptial, the Word
Stilled to a point whilst the Divine
Gently breathed out hopeful expectancy.
Pre-scribed by Love, the Holy Sacrament
Of a heart’s melding embrace
With the Eternal.
Pre-ordained,
Life grew, took form. Pre-sented
To a world Pre-occupied, now filled
With busyness and haste.
The wonderment of the gifting
Witnessed only by the few there present -
The humble, the lowly, the far-travelled.
Yet the angels’ voices rang,
A multitudinous throng of thankful praise
For Pre-sent gifting, Heaven’s present,
The very Presence of the Divine.
‘Pre-‘
Kathy Marsh
a sturdy radiance. Canon 7D. f8. 1/1000. ISO 200.
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