I’ve gone to the fields to run barefoot through grass and pick daisies, to sing and be silent. Where will you run off to this summer day? -Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts
-Christine Valters Paintner@ Abbey of the Arts (doors from top to bottom: Rock of Cashel, Strokestown Museum Gardens, “Out of the Blue” in Dingle, Cottage in Dingle, Church on Dingle Peninsula)
We hit a record 98 degrees yesterday, but thankfully this morning is cool and delightful. Tune and I went for our usual walk and I fell in love with a vine blossom -Christine Valters Paintner @Abbey of the Arts
I have a deep affinity for crows and ravens as they seem to connect two important parts of my life together. Ravens and crows are a part of the same Corvidae or Crow family with ravens being larger and perferring wilder places. Saint Benedict (whose Feast Day is today) is often depicted with a raven by his side because legend has it that a raven saved him from eating poisoned bread. Special connections and relationships to animals were once a sign of holiness. Thomas Merton wrote in one of his letters that this is what the monastic life is ideally all about: “the
Before I left for Ireland I had a dream in which my husband and I return to our old apartment building in San Francisco which was going to be demolished and help to save an old clock tower that rests on top of it (the clock tower is not there in waking life). I brought this dream to my spiritual director who pointed out that clock towers rest at the junction between chronos time and kairos time. For those of you not familiar with those terms, chronos time refers to everyday time, the time we measure out
This laboring through what is still undone, as though, legs bound, we hobbled along the way, is like the awkward walking of the swan. And dying-to let go, no longer feel the solid ground we stand on every day- is like anxious letting himself fall into waters, which receive him gently and which, as though with reverence and joy, draw back past him in streams on either side; while, infinitely silent and aware, in his full majesty and ever more indifferent, he condescends to glide. -Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. Stephen Mitchell) Rilke is one of my many favorite poets. We
I have been having problems with my online access all day so I offer above a wordless meditation. -Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts (photo taken at Glendalough in Ireland)
