Art and The Things You Love

"Your art is to be the praise of something that you love." John Ruskin

Here are three small watercolors of mine painted within the last 2-3 years and are of things that I love; the ocean, a Paris street scene, and a country cottage. I know that I'm not a very good painter, but I derive an extreme amount of pleasure from trying to capture with paint and paper the world I see.

Madeleine L'Engle Jackpot

Look what I found at Goodwill; three Madeleine L'Engle books. Not only that but two of them are signed by the author! How exciting is that? I wonder if that greatly adds to the value? It makes them more valuable to me! I love Goodwill! Sorry for the image that didn't quite finish loading. I must have clicked too soon. You can still see the signature, and that's what's important!

Thomas Merton and Solitude

I've long been interested in the works of the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton. I've read Thoughts in Solitude and have in my library but haven't read The Seven Storey Mountain and The Secular Journal of Thomas Merton. I hope to read them both soon. Now I'm reading The Value of Solitude, The Ethics and Spirituality of Aloneness in Autobiography by John D. Barbour, and he devotes a chapter to Thomas Merton. The above image is from this book. There are an amazing number of opinions on solitude held by as many people. Some crave it and some are repulsed by it calling it the utmost in selfishness. I fall into the first camp. How about you?

"Harmony happens when behavior and belief come together-when we are living our highest truth." Jean Shinoda Bolen

October...Don't Leave

“I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.” ~ L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

Solitude

"When from our better selves we have too long Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop, Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, How gracious how benign, is Solitude." William Wordsworth

Innocence

Children lose their innocence piece by piece. The layers are carved away until our hearts have been exposed and polished into an unnatural gloss. We spend the rest of our lives trying to remember why we ever loved so passionately and how we dreamed so simply, before life chiseled us down

to the core. From The Stone Flower Garden by Deborah Smith.