Art, Poetry, Music, and Nature for the New Year
Tuesday, February 2 2021

The Reverend Dr. Katie Snipes Lancaster

Word
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 1 Corinthians 13:11

Art

https://kuc.org/wp-content/uploads/Feb-02-e1612264699355.jpg

Winter Road I: 1963 by Georgia O’Keeffe

You awaken in the morning. You pull back the blinds. The sun is up. The view is stunning. The small details of this and that awaken your senses. It’s a view that you can remake in your mind without even standing there at the bedroom window. You know it so intimately because it is there, every morning, without fail.

But if you could take the view from your bedroom window, and refine it to just it’s forms, an abstraction with no fine details, but only lines and shapes, what would you see? Winter Road I is exactly that: the view from Georgia O’Keeffe’s bedroom, the view from her window that greeted her, as unceasing as the sun. Seeing it over and over again, she was able to reduce it to its most simple: monochrome and elegant.

And, that abstraction does not reduce her view to nothingness: you and I can easily imagine driving up that road in mid-winter, taking the curves just that much more carefully not knowing if ice hides slick on the dark asphalt. Of the New Mexican desert view from her bedroom window, she was remembered saying, “This is my private mountain. God told me if I painted enough, I could have it!” And, in having it, she has brought it to us. What a divine gift. Somehow the things we most take for granted—like the view from our bedroom window—can in return, become the most beautiful, refined, simple, holy invitations to be present, to ponder, to live fully embodied and resting within our very selves, God-right-there as we notice ourselves, the world and the divine dance that sings our morning into existence.

Blessing
God-right-here-within-us, let your presence be made known in breath and body, even the ache of our shoulder, our back, our wrist, our hip a reminder of our own presence in the world which echoes your presence within us. May we see you today. Amen.