Before it happened, I was stitching together the red-orange flower that would eventually find its home at the far edge of my quilt. I was bone tired after a day of cleaning and cooking and running after the children, and this was a special time of reflection. There is something divine in the devising of … Continue reading Rebecca Davis, Honeycomb Quilt, 1846
Before the pump house was built, there was just a stretch of marshy, flat prairie. I was only thirteen when the crews moved in to build the place, but I can still remember games of tag with my brothers in the tall, humid grass that once grew there. Back then, before we were old enough … Continue reading A. E. Staley Pump House, 1919, Decatur, Illinois
What is it about the desert that makes me feel so at peace? Maybe it is its subtle, sun-faded colors. Its boundlessness. The fact that it is at once monotonous and variegated. The way the rows upon rows of sagebrush slide out into the horizon, greens and silvers fading into silvers and tans. There are … Continue reading Agnes Martin, Flower in the Wind, 1963
I am hard stone pulled from the earth. For millennia I was pressed and squeezed and heated. My universe was dark and compact. I was limestone, and then as the earth roiled and shifted around me, year after year, millennium after century after epoch, I became what you now see. A "metamorphic rock," a stunning … Continue reading Winged Victory of Samothrace, 220–185 BCE
The heat has lifted, and a cool breeze is blowing in off the coast. There is a reprieve from the intensity of late summer. All day a steady stream of traffic barrelled south, back toward the city. To concrete, to offices and schools, to the rush of crowds and public transport. It's as though the … Continue reading Edward Hopper, Gas, 1940
I am one of three who toils on this page. We are brothers in the scriptorium of Iona. Our abbey is on a windy and wet promontory. Isolated. An ideal place to contemplate our Heavenly Father, the Trinity, the Gospel. This morning, after tending the kitchen fires, I came to the scriptorium as I do … Continue reading Chi Rho Iota Page, The Book of Kells, 800
Ellen A. Hurst 