"The man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way."
~Henry David Thoreau
I walked down this moring, to the post box to leave my letters and retrieve what had been left. The sun was rising above the trees - not quite clearing the tall pines - the clouds were small, scattered pink strips of cotton, the red and yellow leaves glowed with life. My boots sounded so loud on the road. It was a glorious walk.
I like walking in the early morning. I like seeing the moon in its last moments above the horizen, I like the clean air scent, and the early chill. I like the feeling of being alone and yet not alone as I walk down the road.
These past few nights I've been waking up often at night, to build up the fire, to watch the stars, to feel the cold night air on my skin. If this keeps up, I may add night prayer to my routine, I might as well, being awake already. We begin the day with the Angelus now, and it's such a joyful way to greet the dawn, perhaps I should join the stars as well, they are such lovely companions at night. I feel so lost without them, there is nothing like looking up to see Orion hovering above the pine, or the Big Dipper scooping up the darkness.
Moja siostra asked a while ago if I would describe a certain popular author as a non-artist or a bad artist. It took me a bit of thought, but I would describe him as a non-artist. I would put him in this catagory because I think that to be a "bad artist," one must first be an artist, with the potential to be a good artist. A "bad artist" has corrupted his gifts, but a non-artists has no gifts to corrupt. In this case the author seems to fully believe that he is an artist, and tries desperately to pass off his writing as clever literature. The fact that some people have fallen into his mistake is a sad testimony to the current state of Art.
Bad art falls under a similar definition. Bad art must first be art - it is art that falls short in some essential way, of goodness and Truth. A very few of Picasso's works fit this discription, as do some of Joyce's stories. Picasso and Joyce are artists: they make beauty, occassionally they fall short, especially when they abandon art in favour of a message: "art is wholly concerned with the good of that which is made; it has no utilitarian end. If you do manage to use it successfully for social, religious, or other purposes, it is because you made it art first..." (Flannery O' Connor).
The lovely woodstove and the sticks we're currently using, while we chop
My earrings. They are actually in my ears, though you can't really see
