Reifyn: April 2013

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Christine de Pizan: Temperance Winding Her Clock, et al.

HERE ARE PIECES from another new favourite artist I just discovered by the name of Christine de Pizan. She was both a writer and an artist and an illuminated manuscripter: a woman well ahead of her time. I adore her depictions, that are unlike anything I've seen from the period. They have a real human warmth to them, as well as a mystical, otherworldly quality, both of which I deeply appreciate.

Thankfulness

I think we expect some sort of definitive resolve or outcome to things in life. I'm not sure progress is about that...at least not for me. The spiritual being that has chosen to inhabit these days I call my life chose a very strange path: one where the cards are some of the poorest possible; and where, no matter what happens, there is no obvious resolve. I have only just begun realising what a great gift not having things work out in a certain way is. Not to mention getting handed sometimes terrible things & trying to understand what to do with them. I am thankful that things are complex & difficult, because it makes me know that I must be rare enough to stay in the game with such dreadful cards, and where life is never ever easy & the dice only come up 1s or 2s. So my hope for anyone (as strange as it sounds) is that life will not have easy choices or paths: I find this is the way to powerful change—& that those changes are from Within, & the Without is not as important. -Reifyn

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language, not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book that is written in that tongue.

Man...is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.