“When you really look at nature like I have been doing … I mean really look, then you quickly realise we are just insects, stupid little creatures. And you do get a bit of humility. They chopped down some of the trees I had been drawing. I was angry at first, but you then realise that you have another subject: is it dead, is it not? The wood is always alive if you look.”
David Hockney (on painting Woldgate Woods, Yorkshire)
(‘The wood is always alive if you look’. I want to look at the biblical events of Holy week from a rather different slant this week: allowing physical elements to tell stories,
make connections, pose questions, since I believe God uses the ordinary materials of our world to make the Divine known to us. The elements we take for granted are wondrously alive to tell of the wonder of God, if only we will look and listen to them.)
A branch laid down.
A trunk lifted up.
The Gardener calling my name.
The wood that went to make the cross was taken from a living tree, but a tree that has been cut, shaped, transformed. The process of cutting, stripping and reshaping is never easy or comfortable; it is protracted and painful. Then the cross itself stands there, its main thrust downwards into the ground, its arms stretching outwards, a balance of two opposing forces, vertical and horizontal held together in a dynamic tension. Only so can it be life-giving. In that tension lies a most powerful image for what is at work in my own life. In that transformation I must expect to be shaped, formed and re-formed; nor can I ever hope to escape the tension that lies at the centre and makes possible the holding together of the whole.
Esther de Waal, Living with Contradiction
always alive. (iPhone image)
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