![Edgar Degas - Ballet dancers - Tutt'Art@[1]](https://i2.wp.com/synkroniciti.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/edgar-degas-ballet-dancers-tuttart401.jpg?resize=676%2C552&ssl=1)
A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.
― Edgar Degas
mystery
Quote for Today: Chaim Potok
For all the pain you suffered, my mama. For all the torment of your past and future years, my mama. For all the anguish this picture of pain will cause you. For the unspeakable mystery that brings good fathers and sons into the world and lets a mother watch them tear at each other’s throats. For the Master of the Universe, whose suffering world I do not comprehend. For dreams of horror, for nights of waiting, for memories of death, for the love I have for you, for all the things I remember, and for all the things I should remember but have forgotten, for all these I created this painting—an observant Jew working on a crucifixion because there was no aesthetic mold in his own religious tradition into which he could pour a painting of ultimate anguish and torment.
― Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev
Image: Graham Sutherland, The Crucifixion. Photo by Mark Heybo.
Quote for Today: Melody Lee
There is a beast
within my heart.
She plays immaculately
with the beauty in my soul.
― Melody Lee, Moon Gypsy
Photo by Aldo Picaso from Pexels
Quote for Today: Billy Collins
Introduction to Poetry
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
― Billy Collins, The Apple that Astonished Paris
Public Domain Image via MaxPixel
Quote for Today: Pat Conroy
The sea rose invisibly beneath us and the moon shone smooth and bright. A glossy flute of light, like velvet down a bridal aisle, lit the marlin scales and the backs of whales migrating a hundred miles at sea. The tides surged through the marsh and each wave that hit the beach came light-struck and broad-shouldered, with all the raw power the moon could bestow. Magically, an hour passed and we, ocean dancers and tide challengers, found ourselves listening to the sea directly beneath us as the waves began to crash in earnest against the house.
—Pat Conroy, Beach Music
Public Domain Image via PxHere
Quote for Today: Amy Lowell
The Camellia Tree of Matsue
At Matsue,
There was a Camellia Tree of great beauty
Whose blossoms were white as honey wax
Splashed and streaked with the pink of fair coral.
At night,
When the moon rose in the sky,
The Camellia Tree would leave its place
By the gateway,
And wander up and down the garden,
Trailing its roots behind it
Like a train of rustling silk.
The people in the house,
Hearing the scrape of them upon the gravel,
Looked into the garden
And saw the tree,
With its flowers erect and peering,
Pressed against the shoji.
Many nights the tree walked about the garden,
Until the women and children
Became frightened,
And the Master of the house
Ordered that it be cut down.
But when the gardener brought his axe
And struck the trunk of the tree,
There spouted forth a stream of dark blood;
And when the stump was torn up,
The hole quivered like an open wound.
Public Domain Image via MaxPixel
Quote for Today: Paulette Jiles
Outside, as she passed the kitchen window, she watched her breath appear before her in the lamplight and then it died away in moist clouds. This was the smoke of her internal fire and her soul. Every breath was a letter to the world. These she mailed into the cold air leaning back with pursed lips to send it upward.
― Paulette Jiles, Enemy Women
Public Domain Image via U.S. National Archives
Quote for Today: Rick Bass
How we fall into grace. You can’t work or earn your way into it. You just fall. It lies below, it lies beyond.
― Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had
Public Domain Image via PxHere
Quote for Today: Mehmet Murat Ildan
If you feel you have to open a particular door, open it, otherwise all your life that door will haunt your mind!
Public Domain Image via Pixnio
Quote for Today: Walter Brueggemann
The alternative to the free market consumer culture is a set of covenants that supports neighborly disciplines, rather than market disciplines, as a producer of culture. These non-market disciplines have to do with the common good and abundance as opposed to self-interest and scarcity. This neighborly culture is held together by its depth of relatedness, its capacity to hold mystery, its willingness to stretch time and endure silence.
―Walter Brueggemann, An Other Kingdom: Departing the Consumer Culture