Of Love, Beauty, and Sadness

      And, of Love, what can we say or know or live? Moving daily further along, does it only swirl more mysterious, inner and outer? 

Reading from Henry Corbin’s Avicenna and the Visionary Recital:

“But what the Soul tenderly desires is precisely to assimilate itself with the Intelligence by becoming like it, as the disciple makes himself like his master, or the lover like the beloved. To do this, the Soul must ‘grasp the beauty of the object that it loves; the image of that beauty increases the ardor of its love, this ardor makes the soul look upward, and thence arises a motion by which it can apply itself to the object with which it desires to assimilate itself. Thus imagination of beauty causes ardor of love, love causes desire (inquisitio), and desire causes motion.’”

 

    Corbin continues into the next page commenting on Suhrawardi’s The Familiar of the Mystical Lovers with a discussion of “three beings who proceed from the threefold self-intellection of the Intelligence [who] bear three names that, despite appearances, are less abstractions than typifications, since they have correspondences in three names from Biblico-Koranic hagiography (Joseph, Zulaykha, Jacob). The three figures that proceed from the meditation of the First Archangel reflecting upon his being are named Beauty, Love, Sadness. Of these three dramatis personae, Sadness corresponds to the heaven whose subtle matter ‘materializes’ the thought of a nonbeing; it measures the zone of shadow, the distance that always intrudes between Love and the Beauty to which it aspires—that is, between the celestial Angel and the Angel-Cherub. But at the same time this heaven, this Sadness, is the instrument that allows the Soul, by the roundabout way of a long pilgrimage, to approach that Beauty, to attain the goal of its desire, just as, by moving its heaven, the Soul tends toward the Angel from which it emanates. Thus the same nostalgia that is close to the secret of the mystic’s heart is likewise the secret of celestial physics.” pp. 74-75

 

    So good to have guidance on the way that gives place and relationship among Sadness, Beauty, and Love; and all this encouragement for finding oneself on the pilgrimage of life with such fine companions.

A Woodland Valentine

7:19AM February 14, 2026

“Where else but in nature do we learn to overcome nature and thereby become our humanity—our finite, open-ended transcendence?” Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, p. 231.

     The heart songs offered in forests and woodlands come freely every day. Their blessings enter the window above my desk as well as all windows around our home and perhaps even better when walking amid the oaks and maples. Harrison’s book enriches these experiences with his elaboration on the words and representations articulated by historians, story tellers, poets, and visual artists who have ventured into forests across many lands and ages. One, of course, is Henry David Thoreau. Harrison notes: “The woods do not contain the knowledge that Thoreau seeks by going there; they do, however, uncover the habitual hiding places of the self, leaving it exposed to the facts of life,” p. 222.

February 14 2026

Exploring woodlands through the lens of John Constable’s paintings, particularly Study of a Trunk of an Elm Tree, Harrison furthers an understanding of logos:

… the trunk of the elm tree…stands there as the embodiment of something that has come to appearance, that has emerged from the earth that somehow gives itself over to representation. The tree and its encircling forest, the patch of open sky and its sphere of illumination on the floor of the clearing, appear in Constable’s study in what one might call their pregivenness. The phenomenon is always pregiven, the human presence is that to which it is given. Expressed otherwise, the phenomenon takes its stand within a fundamental relation, or correlation, that binds together the human essence and the self-disclosure of the phenomenon. This relation is logos. Logos is the ‘word’ that keeps silent in the artwork by disappearing into the presence of the phenomenon.

We must go further and say that this fundamental correlation underlies the correspondence between soul and landscape which Constable’s paintings strive to evoke. Constable’s devotion to the light, tone, and atmosphere that pervade a landscape and imbue it with a mood that is like a fusion between human feeling and nature’s appearance—this devotion to the emotional modalities of the chiaroscuro indicate the extent to which, for Constable, human presence in the world belongs most intimately to nature’s manner of being. ‘Painting is but another word for feeling,’ he declared, and feeling is but another word for the relational bond—the logos—through which nature comes to presence in the phenomenon. (p. 208)

This commentary contributes to my sense of the possibilities of photography involving these woods.

     Harrison also meditates on the abundant giving from the woodlands through several poets, especially A.R. Ammons, John Clare, and Andrea Zanzotto. Poignant are the revelations from seasonal expressions shown by forests in relation to longing and loss. Profound are the gifts that flow from fallen leaves covered in snow.

Disfiguring

 

Jan 5, 2026, 9:03PM

Ah-Ha! Just when I think I’ve figured it out…Not.

 

                                   yesterday's sunrise, taken with the camera’s “default” setting

Maybe moving into my 80th year I’m finally learning to look through, maybe to revalue the quick take or the disappointment, perhaps to imagine a conception possibly drawn from the other world. The “figured-out” more likely marks the activity of presumption and delusion, but rather than throwing it out, consider it as an opportunity to “disfigure.” The really important things like beauty, truth, love and the other 96 Names for God all surpass human containment. Claiming to grasp them descends into all manner of trouble; yet when problems are recognized and this brings a humbling recognition of human limitation--then  comes the chance of surrender to the beyond. And, by Grace, the Divine just might allow a whiff of the ecstatic.

same image edited to remember and imagine possibility of spring, etc

This venture beyond the bounds of cognition invites the play of imagination, and opens a free space where interpretations guess and dance with uncertainty. The figures that have ruled as unquestioned reality, as absolute right, get unmasked in  “disfiguring.” This term finds provocative elaboration in Mark C. Taylor’s Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion. Taylor explores and richly illustrates with contemporary artists, also connecting with philosophy and theology, as he develops the process of finding sacred ground by breaking idols that block access to creativity and compassion. How can we engage the modern condition without sinking into despair and alienation?

same image edited for black and white setting

“Modernism’s perfection is always a ‘violated perfection’; its purity is impure from the beginning, indeed, before the beginning. Modernity is infected by an other it both refuses and cannot refuse.

One of the figures of this irrefutable other is figuration. Modernism’s disfiguring is not only an aesthetic strategy; it is, as we have seen, a moral crusade. The struggle between figuring and disfiguring is the strife between madness and civilization. Inasmuch as it re-presents sensuousness and irrationality, figuration represents the primitive, infantile, feminine, and mad that modern civilization is constructed to refuse. The refused, however, never goes away. Constituting itself in and through acts of refusal, modernity needs what it nonetheless cannot bear. The refused eternally returns to disrupt and dislocate the structures constructed to control it. 

At its height, modernism’s search for purity is violated by the eruption of surrealism. . . 

The goal of surrealism is to reclaim the rights of the imagination by releasing the strange forces that inhabit the mind. These uncanny powers constitute madness in the midst of civilization and folly at the heart of reason. By soliciting the return of the refused, surrealism attempts to subvert modernism’s repressive puritan ethic. . .

Against modernism’s preoccupation with purity, order, rules, reason, clarity, and function, surrealists set impurity, disorder, transgression, irrationality, and uselessness. Such concerns are hardly reasonable; indeed they are folly—‘les folies les plus vives.’ Forever incomprehensible in any system—be it philosophical, religious, or economic—the folly of surrealism is the ‘non-knowledge’ that Bataille associates with the ecstasy of ‘inner experience.’ If the proposition (non-knowledge lays bare) possesses a sense—appearing, then disappearing immediately thereafter—this is because it has the meaning NON-KNOWLEDGE COMMUNICATES ECSTASY.’ 

(pp. 232-233, 235 in Taylor, quoting Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 52; emphasis in original).

Perhaps reading Taylor has encouraged my play with photo editing and its application to other stuck places in views of life past, present, and future. The snapshot offers a limited perspective dependent on the camera’s default setting and the photographer’s point of view, focus, zoom…so much like the mind’s view that has its own default settings, often unexamined, that control and limit understanding, action, and love for others as well as for self. So let's figure, dis-figure, re-fuse, play on...

Cornflaked

 

Cornfield, July 25, 2025

Why did the cornflakes cross the road? It’s not a joke…well, maybe it is hinting toward one, inviting the kind of humor that copes with such mind&heart-numbing craziness that’s swirling off the world: political lies and flagrant abuse of law/morality/justice, religious hypocrisy, the obscenity of wealth concentration coupled with neglect of the poor, the threatened, the environment … 

Anyway, closer to home and concerning the usually-more-manageable woodlands and gardens here, the west wind’s been delivering mail: “cornflakes.” The no-longer green field across the road, now littered with debris from the harvested field corn, 

Cornfield, Nov 22, 2025

sends over each day (or minute) the thrashed remains. Here’s our front garden featuring the west wind’s recent unwelcome delivery contrasted with its appearance before getting cornflaked:

Nov 17, 2025

May 8, 2025

Perhaps the cornflakes could just be left to rot, but internet info says their decomposition takes over a year. Assuming that only in a few months, spring will come again, what’s the chance that the poppies and iris will break through layers of heavy leaf stubble in order to bloom and bring their blessed end of winter?

Iris Garden, May 19, 2025

The “joke” is that sometimes it takes an overwhelm to enable a breakthrough. Perhaps such a mess is necessary to push past normal sense-making in order to make way for a crucial insight or inner development, particularly vital for the spiritual pathway. St. John of the Cross says certain transformations cannot come by any human effort. No prayer, no contemplation, not even the ascetic acts of the hyper-religious mystic can do it. Only the power and gift from God.

Yet God always acts in this way—as the soul is able to see—moving, governing, bestowing being, power, graces, and gifts on all creatures, bearing them all in Himself by His power, presence, and substance. And the soul sees what God is in Himself and what He is in his creatures in only one view, just as one who in opening the door of a palace beholds in one act the eminence of the person who dwells inside together with what that sovereign is doing. Therefore what I understand about how God effects this awakening and view given to the soul (which is in Him substantially as is every creature) is that He removes some of the many veils and curtains hanging in front of it so that it might get a glimmer of Him as He is. And then that countenance of His, full of graces, becomes partially and vaguely discernible, for not all the veils are removed. Because all things are moving by His power, what He is doing is evident as well, so He seems to move in them and they in Him with continual movement. Hence it seems to the soul that, in being itself moved and awakened, it was God who moved and awakened. [“The Living Flame of Love” kindle version, p. 117; print version: Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, p. 645  Trans/Ed Kieran Kavanaugh & Otilio Rodriguez]

“Cornflakes” that can never be managed by human effort are obviously not just about the physical debris left after the harvest of field corn. And acknowledging the inadequacy of human effort is not to deny the necessity of it. In other words, to “let go—let God” does not mean a dismissal of the need for prayer-without-ceasing and other acts of devotion.

In addition to being overwhelmed by the literal cornflakes brought by the west wind, an inner message that has been struggling to get through for over twenty years may have gained extra current. It seems the body’s complaint (stooping, raking, hand picking, hauling, grrr…) was needed to conduct the message. This aching body was almost to the point of generating curses that might spark out at the causes of this undeserved heavy burden. 

And perhaps the charge came in that presumption of judgment and vengeance (cf Matt 7:1, “Judge not” and Deut 32:35, “vengeance is mine, saith the Lord” also Matt 5:38, Rom 12:19, Heb 10:30…) that the better angel was roused and prompted to whisper “now, now” or an admonition more harsh, along the lines of “do you think you’ve got it so bad…what about all the hungry children…” Thanks, Mom, I needed that. Seriously though, if suffering is required, cornflakes are a piece of cake. And I found myself substituting gratitude for this light burden, easy yoke, which could have justifiably been more severe.

But, let not escape the elephant: Is suffering required? For there’s the real deal within the cornflake kerfuffle. How does a person deal with the Job issue? Why does an All-Powerful, All-Loving Creator make and allow so much pain and suffering as witnessed in each morning’s news? 

A pretty good sized library is needed to contain the writing on this issue, 

sometimes called “theodicy.”

Studies of the book of Job and other volumes on this topic might approve the summary expression given by David Burrell’s Deconstructing Theodicy in his subtitle: Why Job Has Nothing to Say to the Puzzle of Suffering. Perhaps the best and/or only reaction to this unsolveable problem is found in Silence (with awe). 

Tired enough by raking out and hauling off cornflakes, it became easier to yield to this: “You have to suffer and you aren’t able to know why!” And that surrender may have allowed a next step. Previous attempts to “get” St. John of the Cross hadn’t been very successful, but now the guidance from his works began coming through. St. John says:

It cost God a great deal to bring these souls to this stage [of solitude and tranquility], and He highly values His work of having introduced them into this solitude and emptiness regarding their faculties and activity so that He might speak to their hearts, which is what He always desires. Since it is He who now reigns in the soul with an abundance of peace and calm, He takes the initiative himself by making the natural acts of the faculties fail, by which the soul laboring the whole night accomplished nothing [Lk. 5:5]; and He feeds the spirit without the activity of the senses because neither the sense nor its function is capable of spirit. 

The extent to which God values this tranquility and sleep, or annihilation of sense, is clear in the entreaty, so notable and efficacious, that He made in the Song of Songs: I adjure you, daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes and the harts of the fields, that you stir not up nor awaken my beloved until she please [Sg. 3:5]. He hereby indicates how much He loves solitary sleep and forgetfulness, for He compares it to these animals that are so retiring and withdrawn. p. 95 kindle; p. 631, para 54 in Kavanaugh & Rodriguez

Amen. Yes, there is a blessing for humility and a season for stillness, for a maturing, a seasoning, a special kind of purification particularly to take out toxicity of arrogance, entitlement, egotism, and suchlike.

And then, perhaps another season follows. Having gained through humble surrender a sensitivity in accepting that the human mind is not sufficient, a purpose takes form in relation to moving further into an increased sense and/or feeling of the divine presence. How is God being revealed each moment? In this particular case, when tending gardens where the Beauty of Nature usually comes, why might our labor be frustrated, even destroyed, by cornflakes? Could this relate to a preparation to receive a special gift, that involving a God-given transformation in the capacity to hold the overwhelming problem of suffering: 

Stanza 2 of The Living Flame of Love

O sweet cautery,

O delightful wound!

O gentle hand! O delicate touch

That tastes of eternal life

And pays every debt!

In killing You changed death to life.

St. John seems to be saying that pain is the price of the path. That’s an overly simplistic reduction of his teaching, but it suggests the inarticulate grasping that hours and days of dealing with cornflake extraction might approximate a gentle and loving application of the cautery requirement. St. John comments on these lines: 

The reason these trials are necessary in order to reach this state is that this highest union cannot be wrought in a soul that is not fortified by trials and temptations, and purified by tribulations, darknesses, and distress, just as a superior quality liqueur is poured only into a sturdy flask that is prepared and purified. By these trials the sensory part of the soul is purified and strengthened, and the spiritual part is refined, purged, and disposed. Since unpurified souls must undergo the sufferings of fire in the next life to attain union with God in glory, so in this life they must undergo the fire of these sufferings to reach the union of perfection. This fire acts on some more vigorously than on others, and on some for a longer time than on others, according to the degree of union to which God wishes to raise them, and according to what they must be purged in them.

 Through these trials in which God places the spirit and the senses, the soul in bitterness acquires virtues, strength, and perfection, for virtue is made perfect in weakness [2 Cor. 12:9] and refined through the endurance of suffering. Iron cannot serve for the artificer's plan, or be adapted to it without fire and the hammer; as Jeremiah says of the fire that gave him knowledge: You have sent fire into my bones and have instructed me [Lam. 1:13]. And Jeremiah also says of the hammer: You have chastised me, Lord, and I was instructed [Jer. 31:18]. Hence Ecclesiasticus says: What can anyone know who is not tried? And the one that has no experience knows little [Ecclus. 34:9-10]. 

And here it ought to be pointed out why so few reach this high state of perfect union with God. It should be known that the reason is not that God wishes only a few of these spirits to be so elevated; he would rather want all to be perfect, but he finds few vessels that will endure so lofty and sublime a work.

p.51 kindle; p. 604 in Kavanaugh & Rodriguez

Shifting a worldview may be like moving a sand dune, grain by grain. Like decomposing “entitlement” or “power-over” or “THE truth” so that the God-given may take form. 

This experience with cornflakes should obviously be taken as highly individual and not preached as literally or metaphorically applied to anyone else. St. John has strong words to say for anyone who presumes to impose prescriptions:

Thus the whole concern of directors should not be to accommodate souls to their own method and condition, but they should observe the road along which God is leading one; if they do not recognize it, they should leave the soul alone and not bother it. And in harmony with the path and spirit along which God leads a soul, the spiritual director should strive to conduct it into greater solitude, tranquility, and freedom of spirit. He should give it latitude so that when God introduces it into this solitude it does not bind its corporeal or spiritual faculties to some particular object, interior or exterior, and does not become anxious or afflicted with the thought that nothing is being done. Even though the soul is not then doing anything, God is doing something in it. Kindle p. 88 ; p 627; para 46 Kavanaugh & Rodriguez

Homeward, Nov 19, 2025

Thinning Veils

November 1. Dawning

These days almost refuse to go unseen. The pink gold of dawning light penetrates through where just-fallen leaves so recently shaded, through where clouds covered seconds before, revealing how the color spectrum’s right now breaking open…all this almost as with a Halloween spell and/or with the holy demand that must not be denied. See! Look through the worlds. Know like a prayer that crosses the materialistic blinders and receives admission into the eternals of truth, beauty, love…

November 1 pathway of early light

So many of my favorite writers are sharing this time of light breaking through. From Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations:

What some call “liminal space” or threshold space (in Latin, limen means a threshold) is a very good phrase for those special times, events, and places that open us up to the sacred. It seems we need special (sacred) days to open us up to all days being special and sacred. This has always been the case and didn’t originate with Christianity. Ancient initiation rites were intensely sacred time and space that sent the initiate into a newly discovered sacred universe.  What became All Saints Day and All Souls Day (November 1–2) was already called “thin times” by the ancient Celts (as were February 1–2: St. Bridget’s Day and Candlemas Day, when candles were blessed and lit). The veil between this world and the next world was considered most “thin” and easily traversed during these times. On these days, we are invited to be aware of deep time—that is, past, present, and future time gathered into one especially holy moment. 

November 1 Dawn

Of course, for those who learn to see, liminal time is the eternal now, Rumi’s “breeze at dawn,” telling secrets. As suggested in the top photo, my favorite space for contemplating this comes in the woodlands. Krista Tippett links these liminal days with forest time: 

Suzanne [Simard] trained my vision and imagination down to the ground, where features of the natural world that we’re only now taking seriously are stitching the life of the forest and the life of the planet together: mycelia, fungi, mosses. It turns out that a forest is a single organism wired for reciprocity and mutuality. The oldest hub trees — which she calls Mother Trees — are incessantly sensing “who is rich and who is poor, who is healthy and who is sick.” They communicate, send warning signals, and deliver nutrients — you can hear this with a Geiger counter — by way of carbon and nitrogen and phosphorus and water and chemicals and hormones. One of Suzanne’s most astonishing findings is that these networks of communication and sustenance closely mirror what we’re now able to see in the neural networks of the human brain.
I’m letting all of this enliven my understanding of what it means to stay grounded and vital and whole in this time. For this too is the generative story of our time: We’re on dazzling, revolutionary territory of seeing the workings of vitality inside the body of the Earth and inside ourselves. 

Today, November 1st, “The Morning” (shared from The New York Times) features Melissa Kirsch on “Quality Time” reminding us that we’re only one more twilight from the end of Daylight Savings Time:

The hour between dog and wolf, or “l’heure entre chien et loup,” if you prefer, is, I think you’ll agree, the dreamiest way to refer to twilight. (I will entertain arguments for “the gloaming” and “the violet hour,” but I don’t suspect litigants will get very far.) It’s that time just after sunset when the atmosphere is still partly illuminated by the sun, when the light is ambiguous and the sky can’t choose between blue and black. Night hasn’t yet fully fallen and we are in the borderland between day and dark. One might be forgiven, in this threshold moment, for mistaking a dog for a wolf, for mistaking safety for danger, for feeling slightly off.
Daylight saving time ends tomorrow. That first Sunday in November is a full day suspended between dog and wolf. We’re still grasping at the corn-silk tendrils of summer just as winter gets more insistent. 

October 31 sunset across the cornfield