Heather King's Blog, page 53

HORACE PIPPIN

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

I first came upon the painter Horace Pippin on a trip several years ago to Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation, an art collection and educational institution boasting one of the world’s greatest collections of impressionist, post-impressionist, and early modernist paintings.

Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951), a wealthy businessman with cash to burn, in his 40s started traveling to Europe to study and collect art.

Barnes was irascible, eccentric and passionate. He hung his collection according to his own idiosyncratic tastes, and left strict instructions in his will that the works were to be left exactly as he had arranged them upon his death.

The subsequent lawsuits, the 2012 moving of the collection to its current site on Benjamin Franklin Parkway (critic Jed Perl observed “The Barnes Foundation, that grand old curmudgeonly lion of a museum, has been turned into what may be the world’s most elegant petting zoo”), and ongoing squabbles make for fascinating reading.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

WHAT WE’RE OBLIGATED TO SEE

“His were hard sayings, so that even his own followers did not know what he was saying, did not understand him. It was not until after he died on the cross, it was not until he had suffered utter defeat, it would seem, and they thought their cause was lost entirely; it was not until they had persevered and prayed with all the fervor and desperation of their poor loving hearts, that they were enlightened by the Holy Spirit, and knew the truth with a strength that enabled them to suffer defeat and martyrdom in their turn. They knew then that not by force of arms, by the bullet or the ballot, would they conquer. They knew and were ready to suffer defeat–to show that great love which enabled them to lay down their lives for their friends.”

–Servant of God Dorothy Day, from The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus, ed. Carolyn Kurtz

I just started another Writing Workshop–we had our first meeting Saturday. Fantastic group. Utterly encouraged and inspired.

I’ve also been working on getting my next book, HARROWED: LIFE LESSONS FROM THE GARDEN, in publishable shape. And getting the dox together to apply for Irish citizenship. And writing my weekly column. And having many conversations per week with the many people of prayer, thought and heart who keep me afloat.

And I think suffering delayed PTSD from COVID, the wildfires (the whole city of Pasadena rec’d an amber alert Evacuation Warning last week), and most of all, the hateful and self-hating ideologies, from all corners, that I am doing my best to avoid, but that it’s almost impossible in this culture not to feel as an oppressive weight. Friends are throwing friends under the bus, families are being divided, time and energy that could be put to creative, healing, loving use is being dribbled away like so many drops of Christ’s Precious Blood on bullying, spying and accusing.

In the middle of all this, a new months-long construction project is taking shape in the compound where I live. This time, I’m renting an office/writing space that if all goes well I’ll start using October 1. Already my sense is that the space will first and foremost be for praying.

I spent a lot of time earlier in the year visualizing, planning, and reflecting upon my Desire Lines project, which is to start with a half-day workshop. I’ve joined a writers’ group in which my goal will be to get the format more firmly in place and also to begin shaping a book I hope will go along with it. A lot of this will consist in culling and gathering together some of the voluminous material I’ve amassed over the years, especially profiles of artists, prayers, thinkers, dancers, gardeners etc who have carved out and followed their own Desire Lines and who I’ve wanted to celebrate.

Interestingly, at this exact juncture, I feel my energy waning. Not my interest or my desire, but my energy. It may be that I should simply take a week off, insofar as my work and prayer obligations allow (which is quite a bit if I put my mind to it).

I may just be slightly burnt out, as we all are, from the year. But I think there’s something deeper at work: a resistance, a fear of vulnerability, risk, failure, yet another gigantic push of offering what I dearly want to give and am not at all sure I have it in me to give! Am I even sure what the “gift” IS??

“Anyone who takes seriously a vision has battles to do with opposing forces in the world, but the only battles of any significance are those he fights within his own life. To be in earnest about a vision is to think about strategy–how to take what is out in the distance and bring it into the here and now where it can be perceived by ordinary sight. Whenever a person struggles with that question, his understanding of the cost grows until a far more exactly question confronts him: ‘Am I willing to pay that cost?’ And once again another man is led by the Spirit into the wilderness where there are dangled before him all the satisfactions and rewards that will come to him simply by keeping on with his life as it is. All that belongs to one level of understanding in him makes war on the light which has broken through from a higher level.”
–Elizabeth O’Connor, Search for Silence

And with that, I am going to take a nap!

Blessed Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows. I went to morning Mass. All will be well.

BIRDS AT THE BASIN

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture piece begins:

I am not a birder but I have a mystical, poetic affinity with birds.

So for my first real foray into the world since COVID, I recently made a field trip to the Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Reserve.

Heading out to the San Fernando Valley that day, the thermostat in my car read 108.

The Reserve is in Encino and is part of, but not to be confused with, the Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area, a 2000-acre flood control basin near the intersection of the 101 and 405 freeways comprising, among other features, two parks, a sports field, an archery range, two 18-hole golf courses, a Japanese garden, Balboa Lake, and the only unpaved stretch of the LA River.

The entrance to the Recreation Area is on Burbank Boulevard, East of Balboa.

The Wildlife Reserve is closer to the 405, off Burbank down Woodley Avene a half-mile, then another half-mile to the parking lot.

“Follow the trail leading from the ‘stonehenge’ restroom/amphitheatre area south,” the directions run. “You can walk all the way down to the LA River, but if you do (the trail leads through a tunnel under Burbank Blvd.) be sure to go with another person.”

Naturally, I skipped over that last part. I also, at the first sign on open grassland on Woodley, became so excited that I wheeled over, parked, clamped a sunhat on my mind, grabbed my water, and gaily set out on foot vaguely intuiting that I was headed in the right direction.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

TIME TO THINK

Here’s the beginning of a thought-provoking piece entitled “Violence and Contemplation” by Ed Burns in the August/September issue of Today’s American Catholic:

“In a passage that appears in the book of the prophet Habakkuk, the author speaks very clearly and in contemporary terms about violence, the violence being experienced and suffered by certain segments of the Israelites at the time:

O Lord, how long will I cry for help and you will not listen? Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save? Why do you make me see wrongdoing and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before me: strife and contention arise. So the law becomes slack, and justice never prevails (Hab. 1:2–3).

We can readily read these words about violence in the context of our own time and experience. Violence—severe and death dealing—is a part of our contemporary global scene and seems to be increasingly so. Yet violence has been, sad to say, a destructive element of our world since time immemorial. The Old and New Testaments are filled with stories of violence. Saint Paul himself, by his own admission, was a violent man before his conversion. The crucifixion of Jesus was just one of many thousands of acts of brutal violence that were all too commonplace before and after the death of Christ.

What are we to make of all this violence and brutality and destruction that we continue to encounter every day in our headlines and on our TV screens? Will it ever end, or is violence, like the poor, something we will always have with us?

I don’t know if we will always have violence with us, or if it will ever end. But if it ever is to end, I do know—or at least I am convinced—of something that must happen. We must learn to regain an essential element of our humanity that seems to have been lost, or if not completely lost, then surely something we seem to be losing. This is the practice of contemplation. If contemplation is too strong or misleading a word, perhaps we could call it the practice of quiet, concentrated prayer and reflection. Putting it even more simply: We need time to think!”

No accident, perhaps, that Burns is a licensed marital and family therapist. Because isn’t the family where we first learn to develop the unhealthy patterns, defense mechanisms, and violently resentful projections that tend to underlie our human interactions in adulthood, no matter how much we wish they wouldn’t?

To that end, I’ve bone back to a book I chanced upon over a decade ago, when I was struggling through a dark night of the soul that went on, and on, and ON…The Search for Silence, by Elizabeth O’Connor.

The above link gives a bit of background on the book and on O’Connor. There’s nothing new under the sun, of course. Still, any course of action that combines examination of conscience, the reminder of our tendency to transfer our shadow upon others, and most to the point here, the encouragement to seek silence and to sincerely pray, throughout the day, carving out the necessary time and space, instead of “performing”: checking off one more item on a list of multi-tasks, none of which are done with 100% presence, attention and therefore love, as I am wont to do.

That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but not much.

Section I of The Search for Silence is called “Confessing Our Humanity.” The first week of reflection and writing is dedicated to “Acknowledging and Accepting Our Dark Side.” Well, thank you! No matter how much work I always feel I’ve done in this area, every time I dip in again I see I’ve barely scratched the surface.

Here in Pasadena, it was 110 degrees both Saturday and Sunday of Labor Day weekend. Late night and early morning are usually coolish here even in summer, but at 3 am, the temp was still in the 90s. In other words it was freakishly, frighteningly hot, plus the air quality is abysmal.

Therefore I enjoyed a couple of days indoors of reading, resting, pondering, and writing in my journal–and in the process learned some unsavory but nonetheless quite welcome things about myself!

Last week I got to write about the qualities in myself that I would not want known by others (though I always feel my worst qualities are on full display; the operative point may be more that I got to see maybe a little more clearly what the world has known all along). This week I’m going to Acknowledge and Accept My Light Side.

Let’s see…I make my bed every morning? Of course in this kind of heat I don’t even get under the covers…is that cheating?

I will delve further into silence and report back!

ART WORTH DYING FOR: JAMES DICKSON INNES

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture piece begins:

James Dickson Innes (1887-1914) was a British landscape painter of whom I learnedwhile thumbing through “Pastures Green and Satanic Mills: The British Passion for Landscape” by Tim Barringer and Oliver Fairclough. All the landscapes spoke to me, but Innes’s, of a mountain in North Wales, made my heart stop.

The mountain in question is Arenig Fawr which, 2800 feet high and twin-peaked, is located in a wind-blown, desolate spot in Snowdonia.

Born in Llanelli, Innes studied at Carmarthen Art School and the Slade. A colleague there noted that he ‘was of middle height, black haired and thin featured, handsome to many people… there may have been something satanic in his look.”… He was already dying of tuberculosis, having been diagnosed at 21.

Shortly thereafter, Innes traveled to North Wales and was captivated—obsessed might be a better word—by Aernig Fawr’s brooding majesty. He painted impulsively and passionately, almost as if he and the mountain shared a secret language. His sensibility, talent, and bold, saturated colors—vermilion, citron, Prussian blue—were noticed by the far better known (and far more notorious) Post-Impressionist painter Augustus John, nine years Innes’ senior. John ended up moving to North Wales himself where he and Innes became friends, rented a stone farmhouse, drank, caroused and tramped the cold, dank mountains. But above all, they painted. Their work was exhibited in New York in 1913, alongside that of Cézanne, Gauguin, and Picasso.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

THE EXISTENTIAL DILEMMA OF MASKING

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins: “If you invest in the marriage of the inner and outer worlds by putting honest energy into dreaming a dream on, all the people in your life, maybe the whole of humankind, is enriched, though it may not produce the result your ego was seeking. This […]

IT IS TIME TO SIGN UP FOR THAT WRITING WORKSHOP!

Fall is upon us: time to turn over a new leaf, form community, take a leap into creativity. I have two spots left–grab ’em while you can! You can read testimonials from our last session HERE. To register, email me at hdking719@gmail.com. THANK YOU!!

DREAMS OF IRELAND

My newest project is that I’m applying for Irish citizenship, my paternal grandparents having come over from “the old country” (Limavady, Northern Ireland, #potatofamine). Last night I thought to check the mean temp in, say, Galway: 60 F IN THE SUMMERTIME. Apparently it also rains literally ALL THE TIME. Then I’m sorry to say I […]

OLD-TIMEY QUILTS AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

Living with COVID has given rise to some interesting sleep patterns. I typically find myself awake, for example, around 3 a.m.

Often my mind wanders to possibilities for future columns, and I turn to my phone.

Online searches, as we know, can take on life-of-their-own twists and turns. Thus it was that one recent night I found myself at the Library of Congress (LOC) in Washington, DC.

This is a rabbit hole, I saw instantly, into which a person could disappear for days. But the LOC is a resource that educates, delights and inspires pride in our landscape, achievements, and people! Better this, I consoled myself, than many of the other rabbit holes that do the opposite.

Meanwhile “America’s Library” led to “America’s Story” led to a feature called “Meet Amazing Americans.”

I skipped over “Leaders & Statesmen,” “U.S. Presidents” and “Activists & Reformers” and went straight to “Writers & Artists.” (You can also explore Entrepreneurs, Scientists, Athletes, Entertainers and more).

Here you can learn how architect Frank Lloyd Wright “looked to Japan,” how photographer Dorothea Lange came to document the abysmal conditions of the migrant workers who traveled in large numbers to California during the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s, how Langston Hughes (“From Busboy to Poet”) became one of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance, and how Mark Twain came to choose his pen name.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

LURA STANLEY

24 YEARS A CATHOLIC

Servant of God Walter Ciszek, S. J. (1904-1984) was born to a large Polish Catholic family in the mining town of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. As a youth he headed up a street gang and proved so incorrigible that his father once went to the police and asked them to put him in reform school.

Instead, young Ciszek developed a private, secret desire to be a Jesuit priest. Mulishly stubborn, he was accepted into seminary, studied in Rome, and was ordained a priest in 1937. He felt a passionate call to go to Russia, but was instead assigned to Albertin in eastern Poland. When the Russians invaded and closed the Jesuit mission down, Fr. Ciszek, with permission from his order, snuck across the Russian border. There, he worked in a lumber camp for a year: learning the language, quietly performing baptisms, absolutions, and anointings, and—some of the happiest moments of his life, he would later recall—celebrating clandestine Masses in the woods with a priest friend.

Arrested one night, he was convicted on trumped-up charges of being a Vatican spy and sent to the notorious Lubianka Prison. Much of his five years there was spent in solitary confinement. In He Leadeth Me, a spiritual classic, he tells of praying that the Holy Spirit would provide a clever retort to put his interrogators smartly in their place. Instead, in one particularly grueling session, he finally broke and numbly signed page after page of trumped-up charges.

Back in his cell, he was devastated. He, who had prided himself on his strength, had been broken. It struck with the force of revelation: for all his prayer and self-discipline, he had still been relying largely on himself. The episode was a “purgatory” that “left me cleansed to the bone” and marked a turning point after which he abandoned himself completely to God’s will.

He was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor at a Siberian work camp. Often in the sub-arctic cold during lunch break, he and his fellow believers secretly celebrated daily Mass: “[T]hese men would actually fast all day long and do exhausting physical labor without a bite to eat since dinner the evening before, just to be able to receive the Holy Eucharist—that was how much the Sacrament meant to them in this otherwise God-forsaken place.’

Released from Siberia in 1955, he worked as an auto mechanic and served as village priest. In 1963 he was exchanged for two Soviet spies and, after twenty-three years, Fr. Ciszek came home. The sparkle in his blue eyes was intact, yet “in many ways, I am almost a stranger.”

In today’s Magnificat reflection, he writes: “What was I, in comparison to the millions of atheistis in the Soviet Union? What was I, in comparison to the might and power of the Soviet government? What were any of us, really, in the face of the system around us, with all its organs of propaganda and powers of persecution? Yes…this was the place [God] had chosen for us, the situation and circumstances in which had had placed us. One thing we could do and do daily: we could seek first the Kingdom of God and his justice—First of all in our own lives, and then in the lives of those around us. From the time of the Apostles—twelve simple men, alone and afraid, who had received the commission to go forth into the whole world to preach the good news of the Kingdom—there has been no other way for the spreading of the Kingdom than by the acts and the lives of individual Christians striving each day to fulfill the will of God.”

That is true of all people of good will striving to make the world a better place. Which I sincerely believe is all of us.

Today is the 24th anniversary of my confirmation and First Communion (Church of the Blessed Sacrament, Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, CA!) Thank you for counting me worthy to stand under the same roof with Fr. Ciszek, who is one of my heroes.

And apologies if you’ve already seen a shortened version of this post on FB or IG: to my mind, we could hardly have enough of Walter Ciszek.
Fyi, you can find this and many other such stories in FOOLS FOR CHRIST: Fifty Divine Eccentric Artists, Martyrs, Stigmatists, and Saints.