Christmas in Larkrise to Candleford

Quite fun to watch this
Christmas episode of
Larkrise to Candleford.'
The BBC did a delightful
holiday episode with the
main characters altogether
as the holidays approach.
There's a twist of ghostliness
to it which makes you look
at the person next to you in
wonder at WHAT is happening.
It's just like those in the hamlet
and town.

It felt a bit cold outside in
June!

Beauty

"Beauty is there to be noticed. Too often it is taken for granted because we are moving too fast to let it in and allow it to deliver its message in us. We need to pay attention. To show indifference to beauty is an insult to its Creator." Luci Shaw, from The Christian Imagination

Great ART

The best artists are worth a trip
to see. That is what happened today.
We went in the rain down to
Columbia Museum of Art in SC
to see the Turner to Cezanne exhibit
that is there until Sunday from
Wales. Extraordinary what two
wealthy women, the Davies Sisters,
bought from the artists and then
gave to the Museum of Wales. Three
Monets at the end were stunning.
The colors stopped you and you had
to stare and walk close and stand back.
I've seen The Water Lilies in France
and one of his many, many were there.
The Van Gogh was the same. Much
prettier in person. Millet and Turner
were excellent and a few unknowns
to me that I will blog on later. Down-
stairs in their permanent collection
was Boticelli and one near it of
Jesus' Immaculate Conception.
That one is one to study more and
blog on. A morning in Florence,
well, almost, just over the border
to a neighboring state!

What I will see tomorrow

Van Gogh painted Rain Auvers a few
weeks before his suicide.



La Parrisienne, Renoir



Claude Monet, Waterlilies, 1906,



Winter, the Faggot Gatherers
Jean Francoise Millet



Seated Shephardess, Millet

The Goose Girl at Gruchy
(1854-6), Millet

The Gust of Wind, MIllet

The Good Samaritan, Millet
(1846)

The Sower
(1847-8), Millet

The Palazzo Dario, MOnet

Charing Cross Bridge, Monet

Woman and Child in a Meadow at Bougival

Morisot, Berthe

Conversation

Renoir, ~~ done when his
arthritis was severe.

Henri Morot

Village in Clohars

COLLECTION is from the Museum

of Art in Wales: Turner to Cezanne

William Turner
The Morning after the Wreck

Paul Cezanne

Still Life with Teapot

Stones of Marriage

"It was as though grace and peace
were bestowed on them out of the
sanctity of marriage itself, which
simply furnished them to one
another, free and sufficient, as
rain to leaf. It was as if they were
not making marriage but being
made by it, and, while it held them,
time and their lives flowed over them,
like swift water over stones,
rubbing them together,
grinding off their edges,
making them fit together,
in the only way that fragments
can be rejoined.

From Remembering by Wendell
Berry

FIDELITY - Five Stories by Wendell Berry

Fidelity : Loyalty, faithfulness, adherence to
truth observance of the marriage contract.

Five stories on the subject. Wendell Berry
does what Flannery O'Connor said when
asked about the meaning of her stories, she
answered " If I could tell you the meaning,
I wouldn't have written the story." Berry
never uses the title in any of the 5 short
stories, but those synonyms are all over the
characters and the themes. I finished the
book this morning.

"Josie Tom was a plumb, pretty, happy
woman, childless but the mother of any
child in reach. Mary Penn loved her the
best, perhaps, she loved them all. They
were only in their late thirties or early
forties,but to Mary they seemed to belong
to the ageless, eternal generation of mothers,
unimaginably older and more
experienced than herself. She called them
Miss Josie, Miss Daisy, and Miss Thelma.
They warmed and sheltered her. Sometimes
she could have tossed herself at them like
a girl to be hugged. "

"She and Elton has married a year and
a half earlier, when she was seventeen
and he eighteen. She had never seen anyone
like him. He had a wild way of rejoicing,
like a healthy child, singing songs, joking,
driving his old car as if he were
drunk and the road not wide enough.
He could make her weak with laughing at
him. And yet, he was already a man as few
men were. He had been making his own
living since he was fourteen,
when he quit school............He wanted,
he said, to say thank you to nobody. Or,
to nobody but her. He would be glad, he
said with a large grin, to say thank you
to her. It was wonderful what he could
accomplish with those enormous hands
of his. She could have put her hand into
his and walked off the edge of the world.
Which, in a way, is what she did."

From A Jonquil for Mary Penn, one of the stories.

June's Morning

Just from Gen 1:5 ,Spurgeon took
and pierced my heart:

"The evening and the morning were the first day."

WAS it so even in the beginning? Did light and darkness divide the realm of time in the first day? Then little wonder is it if I have also changes in my circumstances from the sunshine of prosperity to the midnight of adversity. It will not always be the blaze of noon even in my soul concerns; I must expect at seasons to mourn the absence of my former joys, and seek my Beloved in the night. Nor am I alone in this, for all the Lord’s beloved ones have had to sing the mingled song of judgment and of mercy, of trial and deliverance, of mourning and of delight. It is one of the arrangements of divine Providence that day and night shall not cease, either in the spiritual or natural creation, till we reach the land of which it is written, “There is no night there.” What our heavenly Father ordains is wise and good.

What then, my soul, is it best for thee to do?

Learn first to be content with his divine order, and be willing with Job to receive evil from the hand of the Lord as well as good.

Study next to make the outgoings of the morning and the evening to rejoice.

Praise the Lord for the sun of joy when it rises, and for the gloom of evening as it falls. There is beauty both in sunrise and sunset; sing of it, and glorify the Lord. Like the nightingale, pour forth thy notes at all hours. Believe that the night is as useful as the day. The dews of grace fall heavily in the night of sorrow. The stars of promise shine forth gloriously amid the darkness of grief. Continue thy service under all changes. If in the day thy watchword be labor, at night exchange it for watch. Every hour has its duty; do thou continue in thy calling as the Lord’s servant until He shall suddenly appear in his glory. My soul, thine evening of old age and death is drawing near; dread it not, for it is part of the day; and the Lord has said, “I will cover him all the day long.”