Praytell

Friday, September 3, 2010

Minneapolis, Minnesota

The paintings must wait.

They are lying flat on a small table, waiting for my computer to be repaired, which will not happen until Tuesday.  Like you, I realize just how much of a life-cord it has become.  Can the day begin without having perused the New York Times, Washington Post, perhaps the Dawn (Pakistan) or the Mail Guardian (Johannesburg).  Of course it can.  And, who has written?  What letters are on my heart waiting to be sent?

And so, the paintings wait.

I’m sorry about that because this post is all about painting.

I have no teacher, but have taken a few classes.  At the end of one of them, there was a comment that has stayed with me.

“Larry,” the teacher said.  “Not all skies have to be blue.”

I knew that.  Sunsets are not blue, neither are dawns.  But his comment wasn’t about the exact color of the sky.  The comment was about the color of my heart, my hope, my impression, and, most important of all, my curiosity.

Sure, the white thunder cloud has a dark bottom, and as its billows explode into deep blue.  There you go . . . three colors, white, blue, and deep grey with a bluish, redish tinge.  That’s simple.

But then . . . what happens if the colors change.

It turns out that emerald green and cobalt violet make for an atmosphere that has more depth than sky, more passion than sharp blue, more distance than a simple blue.

Same with turquoise and cadmium red.  Incredibly, they make for a sky.

Orange and blue, they make for a sky.

Scarelt and ceruliam blue make for a sky.

Let’s try it this way.

The lesson is not about painting.  It’s about life.

So, the same old problems return once again, always asking for some sense of predictable resolution.  “Make it blue,” they scream.

“That’s too blue.  That’s not blue enough.  MAKE IT BLUE.”

And so on.

Tonight, in Washington, DC, the problems several thousand years old demand the same kind of certainty.  “MAKE PEACE ONLY IF WE “WIN.”  “IT”S OUR LAND.”  And so on. 

To go for the violet and deep green sky, I realize there is some loss.  Maybe I couldn’t have done a deep blue sky, a dark-bottomed cloud, anyway.  Could be.

But the line has stayed with me.

“Not all skies have to be blue.”

What’s true for the sky, is true for me.  And, who knows, perhaps even for you.

I'm In

Minneapolis, Minnesota

It always appears as though the world will never quite find its way.

The oil spill vexes us.

The challenges of government seem impossibly difficult.

The earth is spent, the ice caps melting, one species after another simply disappears.

And so on.

I am grateful that, one day walking through the library at Beloit College in perhaps 1966, I chanced upon a book of Egyptian writings.  Someone had inscribed their thoughts on a wall.  “What is going to happen?” he or she asked.  “The young have no wisdom.  The old trusted ways are disappearing.  It’s over.  We’ve lost our way.”

“You too?” I thought at the time.

And then, years later, I found myself moving into a river of faith, not quite sure where it would take me.  I knew the prepared prayers.  “He is risen.”  “He is risen indeed.”  “Peace be with you.”  “And with you also.”  But knowing them doesn’t mean taking them to heart.

In the last month or so, I find myself moving towards a new appreciation of resurrection.  A physician says, “There is nothing more we can do.”

There are no arrows in the medical quiver.  The problems are too great to solve.  My father’s healings are more of story of setbacks than healing.  Endurance is a word we’ve come to know all too well.  Nobody knows quite what to do.

“I’m out,” the world says.

“I know,” says God.  “But I’m not.”

We fold our hands so many times when despair, or futility come our way, when the traps of life define life itself.  “I’m out,” we’re tempted to say.  Indeed, that’s exactly what we say.  “I’m out.”

It is a Good Friday moment repeated not once, not twice, but many times.  We aren’t the first to have said it.  Neither are you.

“I’m out,” Jesus said from the cross.

“I’m not,” said God three days later.

To live in the hope that there is someone, somewhere, who is deeply aware, and says, “I’m in” is more meaningful now than it ever was when I rehearsed the words in hope and in care.  “If Christ is with us, who can be against us,” always made logical sense.  But it was a construction.

In these days I need no constructions.

I search for authenticity.

“You out?” God asks.

“I hope not.”

“Well, I’m in.”

I’m in it for life.

Carry on.

And suddenly, the resurrection itself springs to life.

ps:  With thanks to Mike Koch for the photograph taken in his trek of the Pyranees, a place I’ve never been but thanks to him, have travelled.

Friday, June 4, 2010

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Today, I move into the word and find it full of color.  In poetry, the change of a single word here, a line or two there, and a new creation appears.  In paintings, a bit more water, a dry brush stroke, the mixture of colors that don’t seem like friends but are, the same thing happens as new creations spring to life.

Maybe.

And so I share them with you to see if they do.

Looking East

Looking the Other Way

Most of the time we look west.
The steps lead that way.
It’s hard to miss the setting sun
over there in the west.

But sometimes,
before breakfast,
a sneak walk to the beach
prompts us to look east.

The day hasn’t quite decided
what hue it will be.
It takes an hour or two
to make up its mind.

That’s good.
It takes me a long time too
to do something new.

Storms Like This

We were way up there,
maybe near Long’s Peak,
maybe Mt. Massive
when the storm came in.

We put down
the metal fishing rods
and took cover
listening to the thunder.

Ever since then,
I’ve loved both the storm
and the finding of shelter.

Tim was three when
a storm arrived in
Manitou Springs
and gave lightening that hit not far
from us.

I took him outside,
held him in my arms,
letting him feel
both storm and safety.

Maybe the clouds that day
felt something like this.

Nightlight

Nightlight

The band of orange
at water’s edge
is not unexpected.

It’s been there before,
squeezed light
beneath the deepening night.

For a few minutes,
it thinks it might
not have to go away.

It might win.
But then it fades.
And we learn again

night and day
both carry blessings
we were lucky enough

to share.

Job Said It First

This Far, and No Farther

After Job had 38 chapters
to make his point,

God decided to say something.
He wasn’t sure exactly what the words should be.

So he went to Squaw Bay
to mull it over.

Down on the beach,
he looked over the waves

as they spread over the sand
and then fell away.

And then he said:

Hey Job, were you there when I wrapped the lake in clouds and swallowed its water in shadows,
when I closed it in with barriers
and set is boundary, saying,
“Here you may come, but no farther;
here shall your proud waves break.”

Those are the words that brought Job home.
Look at the lake, and we see they’re still in play.

Always have been.
Always will be.

Square Butte

The Offering

The Blackfeet
considered this
a sacred place.

Ranches
“civilized” it.

But that’s okay.
I consider the
wheat fields
to be offerings,
Square Butte the altar

that reminds us
where we’ve been,
and who we are.

Thursday, June 2, 2010

Minneapolis, Minnesota

The German philosopher Martin Schopenhauer had a perception that passed me by during my formative years.  It was only after my strokes, as I began to read philosophy and theological texts as though my life depended upon it that I came across his perceptions.

I paraphrase, here. but no matter.  Looked at carefully, life turns out to be brutal he noted.  It takes but a second to see how true this is.  Nobody asks for a war, but they come anyway.  Suddenly half a million Iraqis need to find a new home, billions of dollars and all too many lives are expended on a war, or actually two, half a world away.  Hamlet wonders why on earth the Danes fought over a patch of earth nobody actually wanted.  And so on.

Disease, and the implications of disease, can’t help but haunt our age.  The first time I heard the expression, “Old age is not for sissies,” I laughed.  With two parents, now in nursing homes, and living out the implications of disability in our own lives, I realize how very true those words are.  It takes an incredible amount of “Moxie” just to put one foot in front of the other day after day.

Now Schopenhauer did have an “answer.”  He could not change reality, but he found glimpses of serene and even divine hope in art.  In music, and in art, he noted, the all-to-real world suddenly gives way to something else.

Tree Huggers

I find this is true every time I see a set of trees, a northern Wisconsin landscape.  At that moment, despite all the “facts” that conspire against us all, I am so glad to be alive for that moment of exuberant compassion.  This afternoon, brush in hand, three paintings came my way.

They looked like this:

The brush is slanted.  Half of it is ultramarine blue, the other half burnt sienna.  I think of the forests I’ve walked through, those that have somehow survived.  I give thanks for them, for their companionship.  “Are you a tree-hugger?” a parishioner once asked me.  I wasn’t sure how to answer.  Turns out the answer is an unqualified yes.    To have seen forests in all their beauty, is a blessing that should not belong to a few, but to entire generations.

Wisconsin Fields at Sunset, Early June 2010

I have yet to drive from Minneapolis to Madison, Wisconsin, without being amazed, touched, and inspired by the hills, the skies, the landscape.  Nebraska is corn, all corn, nothing but corn.  Iowa has its hills but they are corn or soybeans, and nothing but corn and soybeans.  The dark soil is rarely seen.  But around Eau Claire, and Menominee, Wisconsin, it seems corporate farming has yet to make its mark.  And, for some reason, the skies are alive, the soils fraught with color.

I do not know how to paint as I’d like to.  But I can feel my soul say, “This needs to make it to a piece of paper.”  In that moment, cares of despair take flight, and the beauty of life that Schpenhauer surmised take wing.

I am grateful to be alive.

Civilized Fields and Sky, June 2010

Once again, alive.

I drive on the Interstate, eager to get to Osseo when I can turn onto a local road.  I have lived most of my life twenty miles or so away from the nearest Interstate intersection.  I’ve like that.

And I’ve never understood how it is that the Interstate invariably misses the most beautiful, the most appealing, the most sensual parts of the planet in their unfailing attempt to “Get us there quickly.”

I love the roofs of barns that say, “Don’t paint me.  Light’s reflection will do.”  I love the fields that say, “I’m not one color.”  I love trees that can’t quite decide if they are yellow, blue, or green.  I love the small lines of red that tack us to reality.

Which is to say,

I love life.  Every inch of it, especially when it removes me from the brutality Schopenhauer so clearly saw.

I trust, and I know, your heart leaps too when beauty surround you from the most unexpected places.  Love it.  Savor it.

With love,

Larry

Saturday, November 19, 2009

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Saxine Creek

I wondered if I could find a watercolor class that had but one topic:  Shadows.  But then I realized painting is nothing but shadows, the play of pure light, reflected light, filtered light, colorful light, less light, no light in the shadow of absolute night.  Sometimes the sand shows right though the water, whose ripples send their own kind of shadows.  Somtimes the trees shadow the creek.  It’s all shadows.  Charlie Saxine died long ago.  But when he walked the Lake, he saw the same thing.  Shadows.

Home

I tend to resist calendar pictures.  And I don’t know if this came from a calendar or not.  My wife reads magazines with a pair of scissors.  Some of the scenes she passes on to me.  Others she sends to our daughter in Kalispell, Montana, where they soon find their way to a collage.  Sometimes, though, I’ll see one of her clippings and it reminds me of home.  We love, Minneapolis, there’s no doubt about it.  But there lurks in my soul a desire to breathe thin air again, to follow fencelines again, to watch shadows move all day long again.  And so, when that makes itself know, it’s time to paint again.

The Draw, the Slope and the Trees

I once thought of South Dakota as mostly empty.  But then, one day, while driving across its empty spaces, I noticed the way trees cluster together.  Seeking each other’s company, they huddle together wherever there is just a bit of water.  They are far away from their companions who decided to stay behind in safer places.  For the most part, the plains are indeed empty.  And then, there they are:  A small circle of trees that decided to take a stand, to resist the wind, to find whatever water they need, and to stay together for the duration.

When they line up, they do so following a crick.  Even the pine on the slope have an affinity for each other, they’re just not as social as the cottonwood, the sumac, the oak.

Trees can’t help but compliment each other.  And so I painted this using complimentary colors:  Scarlet orange and blue green/turquoise.

No.  The colors in the photograph weren’t exactly like that.  But I like these trees.  And I hope you do too.

The Heart's Sky

Saturday, November 19, 2009

Minneapolis, Minnesota

There are lessons we must learn not once, or twice, but thousands of times.

They are so simple one would think learning them twice or thrice is unnecessary.

Here’s one:

Painting is not photography.

When I look at the sky, and want to get everything exactly right, cloud,  every shadow, every tree, every forest, it is time to reach for a camera, not a brush.

A picture inspires a painting.  I can feel within the first moments of touching a wet brush to dry paper and pools of color whether or not I have succumbed to the temptation of perfection, or embraced the patters of light and shadow that made me say, “That’s a painting.”

Words can do the same thing.  Sometimes, walking down the sidewalk, poems appear.  Just two or three words is enough for the poem to say, “I’m here.”  Poems do not need the explanation of an essay.

Paintings must reach for essence.  The “things” must be de-noised.  They must turn into shapes.  And “must” must find its own way that has nothing to do with “must.”

I keep forgetting this.

As one author wrote, there is an attention defecit disorder of the soul.  First thing you know we become cluttered.

It’s amazing how freeing it is to get rid of clutter.

My parents have just moved into a nursing home.  The paintings, the pictures, were left behind.  My mother, the artist, said, “Look at these beautiful white walls.”  She did not want to bring all the paintings she knew.  She did not want clutter, meaningful and beautiful as it can be.  Instead, the walls were as open as a sheet of watercolor paper.

The paper always begins uncluttered.

Sometimes, even after applying brush, water, and color, it still is.

Edges

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Minneapolis, Minnesota

We live in the edges.

Sometimes, it is tempting to seek center.  This is a good temptation.  It leads to family, church, community, profession, and the gift of call through which we order creation itself.

But we actually live in the edges.  The word “edges” has a sharp connotation .  I do not mean it that way.  I mean it in the way the lake waters meet the sand.  For just a second or two, the sand holds the water.  And then, the wave receeds and the water leaves the sand.  I mean it in the way alder creeps from the forest’s edge and keeps trying to take over the beach, not knowing it will never work, but trying anyway.

When I paint it is tempting to seek a center known as “accuracy.”  When I succomb, painting soon tries to become something it is not–photography.  But sometimes, when I do not even seem to be thinking at all but just trying to love the edge, the “water” of watercolor says, “Trust me.  Let me move.”

When that happens I am surprised.  I often say, “How’d that happen?”  It is a life-centered question.  After all, isn’t, “How’d that happen?” the question that leads us to the edges and then quietly brings us back home?

Sharp Nuance

My camera fails me.  I bought a new battery, somehow thinking that is why it would no longer pick up colors, especially reflective transparent ones.  Those luminous skies turn out bleached and drab.  I look at the painting and say, “It almost worked.”  But I look at the photo of it and see not much at all.  Isn’t it odd that photography and painting need each other.  At the Uptown Art Show a month or so ago, there were hundreds of exhibitors from all over the country.  To my astonishment, only two were watercolorists.  There were photography booths everywhere, pottery booths around every corner, jewelery displays all over the place.  Many of the photographs were made with filters that enhanced the subject.  On my “iPhoto” there is an automatic “enhance” button.  Why is that? I wonder.

Maybe photography and painting are the same thing.  We can’t help but filter what we see.  But to me they are different.  One uses digital technology.  The other a jar of water, some squeezed paints, a brush, and the movement of hand, arm, and body.

Of course . . . if I had a camera that worked, I might look at it completely differently!

Weld, Maine in March

Shadows intrigue me.  By the laws of physics they should be predictable.  When something gets in the way of the light you’ve got a shadow.  The shadow can’t help but follow its form.  But as all kids know this isn’t true.  Remember when the light was right and your shadow made you ten feet tall?  Remember those evenings when it was time to watch slides, and you couldn’t help but stick your hand in that bright light and make a fox, a goose, a rabbit or even a devil’s face complete with horns?  And so shadows are full of imagination.

I have yet to learn how to make them cross the road.  Part of me looks at the top of the Weld snow bank and says, “Shouldn’t there be a sharp edge there?”  But there isn’t.  The snow is uneven enough, ruffled enough, confused enough in March to follow the lines of intrigue and imagination.

This photo that spawned this picture was taken by Dave Alexander, who has a place in Weld, a town I know well but haven’t been able to visit for over 30 years.  Imagination will have to do.

It does.

When Clouds Cross the Sky

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Minneapolis, Minnesota

And so the hoped-for consensus on health care didn’t happen.

This morning’s New York Times announces that the hoped-for peace plan between Israel and Palestine also hasn’t happened.  Hope is once again delayed.  Shadows have covered the mountain.

What then is to be done?

I want to be careful in asking the question, because we live in an age of easy pontification.  Everybody has a blog, even me.  We write as if we had the power to produce change.  Preachers are especially adept at this.  A sermon about what Israel and Palestine should, must, and could do would sound convincing unless George Mitchell was in the third pew with a glance that said, “If it were only so easy.”  If I could read his mind he might also be saying, “You’re a pastor, not the Middle East Envoy reporting to the Secretary of State.  There is a difference.”

But still the questions emerge.  In spite of reality, what good can be done?  Perhaps a review of what my son Andy calls the “A-ha” moments of change and inspiration could help.  We all have them.  We thought one thing, and then realized something else was true.  And so we changed course, or tried to.

Studs Terkel is one of my favorite writers.  He just “went out” and found the dignity, and beauty, of life on all sides.  In one of his books he interviewed a member of the Ku Klux Klan member who had been vociferously spewing the toxic ideology of that group.  The Klan member had a cause.  The cause defined him by separating him from others.  That’s what causes can’t help but do.

Well, one day, somebody said that if he really believed all that stuff, he should run for school board.  (Talk about toxic!)  And so he did.   He was going to make sure the town, its kids, its school, its freedom and his White race wasn’t going to be sold out.  He was elected.  (I believe this story took place in South Carolina . . . sorry! . . . )

But a Black woman was also elected to the very same school board.  And she had a vote.  He realized that he couldn’t do much of anything if he didn’t have her vote.  And so they began to work together if anybody was to accomplish anything.

That’s no big deal.  It is exactly that sentiment that brought Mitchell to Rahmah and Jerusalem, that caused Max to create a gang of six–three Democrats and three Republicans.

But . . . and here’s the point.

The Ku Klux Klaner realized that unless he gave up his antipathy towards anyone who wasn’t White, nothing could happen.   Somewhere in his heart he needed to repent.  In Hebrew, the word for repent means “turn.”  Only then could something happen.  I don’t need to share with you that he and his “opponents” became friends on behalf of a larger cause–the children of their community. The two began to work together, and to appreciate each other.  Both had the much-fabled “change of heart.”

What changed?  Fear met its match.  And so, agendas  had to change.

We do not need violins to serenade the moment.  But we sure could use some music and a change of heart.  If it can happen at a school board meeting, who knows . . . maybe there could be an “A-ha” moment somewhere else as well.

September 6, 2009

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Fall Back Home

We know color comes from the sky.

Until we find that’s not true.

Color comes from cottonwoods.

Color comes from aspen.

Color comes from grasses and maple leaves.

It does no good to paint the sun.

And there is no need to when we can go to the leaves.

Isn’t this the way we heal?  We expect healing to come from one place.  We find it comes from many.  The sun itself, after all, can only burn us up.  So do hospital bills, insurance companies, and an industry that heals us while knowing it simultaneously breaks our backs.  And so we look for the leaves.  We listen to each other’s experiences, we find safety in numbers, in kind and encouraging words, in the stories that bless all of our lives.

They are the leaves of our lives.

And each one has its fair share of light.

Always has.

Always will.

I often wonder what the little splotches of white signify.  I do not put them in intentionally.  They just seem to happen.  When they do, they seem to say, “Don’t cover me.”  The trees are open to shadows.  So are the fields.  But these white places want to be left alone.

I wonder if that isn’t the way it is with healing.  In our age we always want to heal everything.  Words like acceptance and accomodation are left out of the healing industry because they seem like failure.  But there are parts of our lives that do not even want to be healed:  streaks of stubborness that do not wish to relinquish, clots in our veins that want to travel instead of being disolved away, memories that resist healing but do let us move along.  Without the white spaces that reflect all light, how could the painting breathe?  Without those white spaces in our lives, could we breathe?

I don’t know.

I want the painting to breath.

And I’ll take a breath or two myself, as well.

Sunday, September 6, 2009

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Light and Shadows

One, crisp clear thought no longer works for me.  Yes, I’ll take hope, I’ll take life, I’ll take grace, I’ll take love.  But these words are full of many thoughts, many hopes, many lives, many needings of forgiveness, many understandings.  Only ideology has hard lines that always need to be purfied, purged, and taken as absolutes.  And so it is that I love shadows, and the uncanny ability of a freshly plowed field to take on a purple hue which then demands and receives a bit of attention from the sky.  I know fields do not look this way.

That’s okay.

To me they are this way, or were one afternoon not all that long ago.

Home Again

For a second, one day, the clouds looked this way.

They they changed.

For a second, one day, I thought something might happen.

Then it changed.

The sky had to clear once again.  So did I.  We have these days to begin again.  And the next day too.  Every day, we’re coming home again to a place we both know and have never seen.  This is good.  In fact, it is gospel.