Blog

I don’t want to write.

And it’s been a long time since I’ve enjoyed doing so.

Actually there are only two things bringing me life right now. I am reading Kevin O’brien’s book about you and I am being near my wife as she paints plein air. Often she feels as though she has lost her way – wiping her canvas clean after a third attempt. It’s amazing to me that she doesn’t chuck it into the creek. Instead, after a deep breath, a hairy stick comes to her right hand somehow, and she goes at it again.

“It’s hard to ignore beauty when it happens”, she says to no one in particular. Today is an early November Saturday, and I am sitting in the midst of Cades Cove while she works oils into a 10x20 piece of linen. For a long time now I’ve thought her to be the most quotable yet unassuming creature walking the earth. Again, this time with a brush clinched between her teeth like a pirate, “Dares jus no way to kakur all dis!”

You understand this, Inigo, don't you? It takes time to see. It takes a long stillness and looking to receive. And then the exclamation comes: There’s just no way to capture all this!

Painters know it. Farmers know it. And Poets. But none naturally. They too must close the door to all the wild animals. They too must push beyond desire and pleasure. And they too must look the reality of their “importance” in the eye, and deny it.

So I write.

But first I look to see.

He who goes about to reform the world must begin with himself, or he loses his labor.

St. Ignatius of Loyola

Thanks for the quote... you deserve the name change.