Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Book of Hours



Dear darkening ground
you've endured so patiently the walls we've built
please give the cities one more hour
and the churches and cloisters two
and let those who labor
let their toils still hold them for another five or seven
before that hour of inconsolable terror
when you take back your name from all things.
Just give me a little more time
I just need a little more time
because I am going to love things as no one has thought to love them
till there real and worthy of you.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Monday, December 27, 2010

Gifts


"Every culture offers its citizens an image of what it is to be a man or woman of substance. There have been times and places in which a person came into his or her social being through the dispersal of his gifts, the "big man" or "big woman" being that one through whom the most gifts flowed. The mythology of a market society reverses the picture: getting rather than giving is the mark of a substantial person, and the hero is "self-possessed," "self-made." So long as these assumptions rule, a disquieting sense of triviality, of worthlessness even, will nag the man or woman who labors in the service of a gift and whose products are not adequately described as commodities. Where we reckon our substance by our acquisitions, the gifts of the gifted man are powerless to make him substantial." Lewis Hyde


"The human gaze is not the closed, fixed view of a camera but is creative and constructive. Both the gaze that sees and the object that is seen construct themselves simultaneously in the one act of vision." John O'Donohue