A friend of mine recently said that my paintings were very vaudevillian, what say of nature?

Mary Oliver

White Heron Rises Over Blackwater

Mary Oliver

I wonder what it is that I will accomplish today

If anything can be called that marvelous word.

It won't be

My kind of work, which is only putting words on a page,

The pencil

Haltingly calling up

The light of the world,

Yet nothing appearing on paper half as bright

As the mockingbird's verbal hilarity

In the still unleafed shrub in the churchyard-

Or the white heron rising over the swamp and the darkness,

His yellow eyes and broad wings wearing

The light of the world in the light of the world-

Ah yes, I see him.

He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.

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

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

Ben White and Co.

Ben White - Salvation from PilgrimTreehouse on Vimeo.