We are presented with rough stones in life. Can we find anything of beauty in them if we chip away and see what emerges?
A seventeen-foot-tall, 12,000-pound statue of a beautiful man was unveiled in Florence in 1504. I recently discovered that this statue started 40 years earlier as a big misshapen unwieldy chunk of marble, 19 feet high. It was delivered to various sculptors with commissions to make a figure from it and they just could not make anything of it. Eventually it lay in a field for 30 years until Michelangelo was given the commission. He built a shed around it, and rather than working against the irregularities in the stone, he used them to create an elegant beautiful statue. He worked with the poor quality and brittleness of the marble, the veins and pinholes. The final pose came out of the irregular shape of the stone. When a friend of mine recently visited it, its beauty and majesty blew her away.
Michelangelo later said, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” And again: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”
I know I have been handed circumstances that look ugly. I want to just push them away. But maybe if I chip away at them, there is beauty to be found under the rough edges and in the imperfections. What about you? Are there any big ugly chunks in your current circumstances? Can you set any good things free from within them? Have you ever been able to do that in the past? That might encourage you to do that now.
What art fuels your ability to love? Fans the flames of love in you? In a lecture at the Chautauqua Institute in New York on compassionate love, I shared some arts resources that do that for me. One of them was the film, 
Here are some web-links to poetry and music from the Spiritual Connection book that I gathered up to post. I hope some of them can help to provide fuel for you in these days.
Recently I have developed a passion for mending. I was invigorated by reading the books 
One of the reasons I go to our local farmers market is to get lost in the visual beauty of the fruits and vegetables and flowers. I take in all the smells too. It is a high spot of summer for me. I bought these beets even though they looked rather unattractive. When I got home, I decided to sketch them. At first, they just looked brown and muddy, but as I drew them, I detected subtleties. I thought about how things in our lives that do not look great on the outside, can reveal beauty and goodness nevertheless. And I haven’t even cooked them yet.
When we have experienced emotional or physical or relationship damage in the past, it can continue to feel frustrating at best and irreparably harmful at worst. I so often look at the broken places as problems, limitations, and inadequacies. Or I try to ignore them. But the kintsugi approach actually highlights the beauty in repairs.
The poet WH Auden said that the artist feels the impulse to create a work of art when the passive awe provoked is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship. To be fit homage, he said, this rite must be beautiful. We do not always achieve our goal to create something beautiful, but our desire to do so is good in itself.
I ‘listen’ to poetry to hear what speaks to me. Each of us hears a poem in a different way. I have been finding nourishment in these lines from the poem “Somewhere” (from Laboratories of the Spirit, Macmillan 1975) by the Welsh poet R.S.Thomas.
One of the things that holds me back from creating things is the fear of making mistakes. When doing this drawing, my reddish pen ran out of ink, and then the yellowish ink i changed to ran unexpectedly. But in the end, something unfolded that I could not have imagined from the start. Life can be like that too. Things we think are bad mistakes can lead to unexpected and good outcomes.
I do not like conflict. But we just cannot avoid some of it in life. Others can be aggressive, we can feel outraged, or we can just have strong disagreements. The words in this drawing of mine are from a set of translations/interpretations from The Way of Chuang Tzu by Thomas Merton.
I have always loved to dance, and to watch others dancing. There is something about dancing that can express joy in fantastic ways, connecting our feelings of joy to how we feel in our bodies. I have enjoyed a video recently, of the TU Dance Company in a collaboration with the singer Bon Iver, and I enjoyed sketching the dancers, entering into their experience while doing so (
In so much of life I see words obscuring truth. Here is something that reminds me that words don’t necessarily hide the truth, but can liberate it.
Flowers grow out of dark moments.
Therefore, each moment is vital. It affects
the whole. Life is a succession of moments and to live each, is to succeed.
As I reflected on the days here in the northern hemisphere getting darker and darker, this quote from Merton seemed just right. This is from my advent calendar.
…Humbly,
“People who place their small time into the heart of eternity, which they already carry within, will suddenly realize that even small things, have inexpressible depths, are messengers of eternity, are always more than they appear to be, are like drops of water in which is reflected the entire sky, like signs pointing beyond themselves, like messengers running ahead of the message they are carrying and announcing the coming of eternity, like shadows of true reality that are cast over us because the real is already very near.”—Karl Rahner (trans. Annemarie Kidder)
I have been part of a group of scholars these past few months, discussing suffering from the perspectives of literature, philosophy, theology and psychology. During our weekly conversations I have found that drawing people in the group, as always, helps me to focus. Although ideas are so often the center of academic discussions, it is the human beings that speak to me. Each person has a depth of being, a fullness of life, that I want to capture somehow. Doing this brings me to appreciate them more.
My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other’s presence, each other’s wonder, each other’s human plight.
There is always
As I feel the first nip in the air, summer is coming to a close, but there are still memories of many things that made this summer wonderful – including the farmers’ markets and the Lake Michigan beach. And opportunities to draw them, from life and from memory and imagination.
I have spent a lot of time in various meetings over the last couple of months. When I am not speaking, there is lots of time for listening. I find that by drawing people, it helps me to focus, and also to ‘get’ people in a more 
complex way, to hear them beyond their words or silences. Here are a few sketches of lovely people from a recent meeting.
The world both vivid and lit, each element