***** 
Blessings to you dear readers in these winter days when the trees invite us to contemplate our essence and the faint light traveling low across the sky beckons us to rest.  The Winter Solstice is tomorrow, when the earth begins her slow tilt to welcome back the light. 
The Abbey is on sabbatical until the New Year.  Christine, John, and Tune […]

Posted in Photos, Visual Meditation | 21 Comments »

Shoveling Snow With Buddha 
 
In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok
you would never see him doing such a thing,
tossing the dry snow over a mountain
of his bare, round shoulder,
his hair tied in a knot,
a model of concentration.
Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word
for what he does, or does not […]

Posted in Photos, Poetry | 9 Comments »

I thought some of you might be interested to see the original photos I cropped to make the art piece for Monday’s Poetry Party.  The woman on the top was my paternal grandmother Erika who died when I was one year old.  The middle woman I actually don’t know, I found her photo among the […]

Posted in Photos | 9 Comments »

Yesterday morning I awoke at my hermitage and stood in the kitchen to make some breakfast with my back to the window.  I eventually turned around and saw a small rainbow across the waters of the Hood Canal over the Olympics.  Leaving behind my food, I grabbed my camera and hurried down the steps to the […]

Posted in Photos, Advent Christmas Epiphany | 11 Comments »

The Storm
Now through the white orchard my little dog
romps, breaking the new snow
with wild feet.
Running here running there, excited,
hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins
until the white snow is written upon
in large, exuberant letters,
a long sentence, expressing
the pleasures of the body in this world.
Oh, I could not have said it better
myself.
-Mary Oliver

Yesterday afternoon it […]

Posted in Photos, Poetry | 8 Comments »

    
 
    
Looking, Walking, Being
“The World is not something to
look at, it is something to be in.” -Mark Rudman
I look and look.
Looking’s a way of being: one becomes,
sometimes, a pair of eyes walking.
Walking wherever looking takes one.
The eyes
dig and burrow into the world.
They touch
fanfare, howl, madrigal, clamor.
World and the past of it,
not only
visible present, solid and […]

Posted in Photos | 4 Comments »

Remember to come back on Monday for our next Poetry Party!

 
(Leaves discovered on the ground outside my hermitage this morning.)
May your weekend bring you the still gifts of winter’s release and rest.
-Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts

Posted in Photos, Cycles and Seasons | 13 Comments »

 
11 a.m. late November shadows
  

(photos from a late autumn walk through my Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle)
-Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts

Posted in Photos | 4 Comments »

(taken from the cottage at the retreat center where we taught our intensive last week)
-Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts

Posted in Photos | 3 Comments »

***Make sure you go visit this week’s Poetry Party*** 

Get up from your bed,
go out from your house,
follow the path you know so well,
so well that you now see nothing
and hear nothing
unless something can cry loudly to you,
and for you it seems
even then
no cry is louder than yours
and in your own darkness
cries have gone unheard
as long […]

Posted in Photos, Poetry | 6 Comments »