Available Light

We humans, we love to order things. We lay out our patterns, shape, and trim and weed and water, to make the miracles of the universe, present at every hand, all around us, fit into our ideas of what is decent and seemly. We do it with plants. We do it with the events of our own lives, to make for ourselves a personal history. We do it with the people we encounter. We do it with the  deepest knowings of our souls, shaping and forming our encounters with the universe and with ourselves and with the dimly perceived presence which seeks us in everything, fitting the working of our inner lives into an ordered structure: a religion; a gospel. I look at the church and at what we teach and wonder, sometimes, what Jesus would make of it all. In Mark's Gospel we have a record of Jesus' first appearance as a teacher in his own right, away from the now unknown influences which formed him. And we have a record of his first proclamation: Repent and believe the Gospel, which raise...

Self portrait, St. Mary's Diocesan School chapel  Anthony DeMello says the three rules of spiritual practice are  Awareness, Awareness, and Awareness.  Which is, I guess, his smart alec way of saying that the spiritual life is the process of moving ever closer to what is real. Nobody much has a problem with that, as all of us, even those subject to outrageous psychoses, think we know what is real, and the way we hear an injunction to get in touch with reality is as a suggestion that everyone else needs to open their eyes and see the world as it is; that is as I see it. It's not what DeMello meant. Kind of the opposite of what he meant, as a matter of fact. The world is hidden from each of us, behind the thick curtain of our own preconceptions. The spiritual life is about lifting the curtain. Or curtains. It's a dance of the seventy seven thousand seven hundred and seventy seven  veils, a gradual striptease in which our own illusions are recognised fo...

It's the last day and the clouds have cleared, at least for a while. The sky warns the shepherds, so I stop on the way to breakfast to take a picture.  Just what the world needs, right? Another photo of a sunrise? See it now, while you can. Don't bother trying to capture it: even the attempt sort of misses the point. But here's the picture - I've missed the point. Again.  But wait! There's more! The netball court catches the sky's colours and flicks them on. Right back at you, babe. My God. How beautiful.  Who laid out these cracks? Who was the genius who overlaid the vertical lines of the reflected lamp posts? Mondrian? Picasso? This is all going to last about three minutes and then it will be replaced by another creation entirely. It will be less gaudily obvious, and I for one will have more trouble seeing it, but it will be no less beautiful. The fog lifts from the mountain. Some guys are in a shed doing something with an arc welder. The mount...

I like this photo, though I could understand why a lot of other people might not. My own favourites of my pictures are often the ones which other people don't greatly warm to. This is the back of an old house in Clyde. I like the hopefulness of the ridiculously red poppies, and the signs of long age in the cracks and blotches of the wall. Beauty is everywhere. Absolutely everywhere.  I fail to see it because, in order to survive in the maelstrom of sensory input which perpetually surrounds me, my mind has, over the years, produced little shortcuts and interpretive programs to screen out all that is unnecessary. I walk around on autopilot most of the time, missing out on the ingenuity of the universe and the miraculous beauty which is just lying about, completely unperturbed about whether I notice it or not. Which is why, for decades now, I have carried a camera around. Cameras are not very bright. They record what they are plonked in front of, nothing more, nothing less....

I've made a start on the drawing. For a long time the pad and pencils sat on my desk, eyeing me accusingly. I wanted to do it, but it was one more thing to take up the precious hours in the day. One more ancient fear to face. It was a sort of deadlock, broken by the arrival of the text book that Audrey had recommended, Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain . One of the first things to do, said the book, was to draw a few pictures as a reference point, to see how far you progress from this point onwards as you go on with the lessons. In the book were some examples of the self portraits people had done at the start of the five day courses tutored by the author, Betty Edwards, along with the ones they had done at the end. Such as these ones: I thought that if she could teach someone to make that sort of progress in 5 days, she was probably worth listening to. And so far, so good. I've done the before self portrait (the answer is NO) and a few other little bits and pieces, and lea...

I bought some stuff at the Warehouse Stationery the other day, which I have been meaning to buy for a while. About 40 years. I bought a block of drawing paper, some pencils and a rubber. When I was very small I drew a lot. I covered the backs and blank pages of exercise books and those little newsprint jotter pads with all the stuff little boys draw, which usually involved fighter planes with circles on them shooting down other fighter planes with crosses on them. It wasn't exactly the early Leonardo, but my teacher in Standard 4 told my mother that my future lay in art. Well it didn't, obviously. In fact with the encouragement of my art teacher,I gave up the drawing in High School, and haven't done any since, except for cartoon illustrations in letters to girls - which obviously worked because one of them married me. There's always been a niggling sense of loss though, in the place where paper and pencil used to be. In my twenties I even joined an art class but the ...