Giraffes in Kenya

A dance unlike anything you've quite seen before. Choreography by the Kenyan savannah. Music by Angélique Kidjo and videography by Debi. Turn up the volume on your computer.

Cézanne and Mont Sainte-Victoire

Sometimes the world opens and takes you into secrets where it seems only you are meant to go.

But if we really notice—and if we really prepare ourselves, saying no to everything that has become irrelevant, and yes to the path that is ours and ours alone—then we find this opening happening more than we would have realized.

How many excuses we tell ourselves to avoid committing to who we really are—and to where the world would take us if we just had the courage to say yes enough.

A year ago we were in Aix-en-Provence,

…which means that during most of the daylight hours we were outside of it,

 …sur le motif,

  …walking in the footsteps

…where Cézanne had walked and painted.

We didn’t write about this then. And we almost didn’t write about it now.  It means too much to us. And our words will fall short of how we really feel.

Another difficulty is with these images on your screen right now. They aren’t the paintings themselves, of course. So you can’t get the colors right. Or the genius of the touches of his brush upon the canvas.

Or the exact relationships among the colors and touches and empty spaces.

And yet if you click on these images, you begin to get a sense of them. (Click here, for example, and move around awhile. Then backspace to return.)

What a thing it is to enter such a world again.

Now we only have what he had—our vision and our imagining.

And we aren’t meant to live in a surrogate world either.

It is the actuality of where we really are—together with our imagining—that creates anything real at all. And imagining, of course, isn’t the faculty of inventing something out of thin air, as if that were even possible.

It isn’t avoidance or dissipation.

It is the faculty of really seeing—in which our own true self emerges.

But you can’t say much about this, or you will frighten her away.

“Yes, that’s what I like to paint, the absent man, but totally integrated into the landscape,” Cézanne said.

It’s like that. You can’t see the absent man anywhere. And yet there isn’t anywhere he hasn’t been.

Cézanne spent most of his life in Aix. He was born and died there.

 

And so his life moved around the mountain, too.

 And within the conformations of his native land, each small movement, each difference in the rhythm of where he walked and worked, taught him to see differently. And so it can teach us, too.

Later in his life, Cézanne rented this cabanon at Bibémus, where he could store canvases and materials, and sometimes take an afternoon nap, in between working sur le motif there.

Bibémus was an abandoned quarry

…and afforded Cézanne mysterious angular man-made shapes in yellow ochre within the wildness that reclaimed the place.

He also later rented a room at the Chateau Noir along the Petit Rue du Tholonet.

As at Bibémus, Cézanne kept painting materials in the room to save himself the time and effort of transporting them to the places where he worked.

He wanted to buy the Chateau Noir, but his offer was refused. It would’ve brought him closer to the mountain, and he loved the wildness of the forest and grottoes there.

But sometimes the best thing that can happen is for our own plans to fall through.

And so instead Cézanne built an atelier part way up the hill of Les Lauves, outside of Aix.

It must have been while the studio was still being built that Cézanne walked further up the hill of Les Lauves

  …and came upon this vista of the mountain.

In his last two years, he would paint Le Mont Sainte-Victoire vu des Lauves many times, moving his easel a few feet one way or another.

The mountain always changes.

The mountain is always the same.

But you can see that in these late paintings there isn’t a way to the mountain any more.

You will have to integrate the experience differently now. You will have to compose it, too.

 

Aix has changed a lot since then.

Cézanne had shaken his walking stick in rage when electric street lamps first arrived in Aix.

So what would he think now?

And so in a world of such development, we hadn’t expected to be able to find the mountain any more. Of course, we knew that the geological formation would still be there—but certainly the solitude and presence would have fled.

Cézanne had said, “To see is to conserve—and to conserve is to compose.”

That simple-sounding sentence can ring so many ways.

Perhaps he wouldn’t have intended the sentence in an ecological sense per se.

But he saved the mountain anyway.

He didn’t move from art into political activism the way John Muir did.

Instead, he saved the mountain by seeing it.

Every place must have its poet, Wallace Stegner wrote.

That is, they must find each other. 

And for that to happen, there must be a place—and within us, too—that can still be found

…and in which we can be found, too.

Mary Magdalene, patron saint of prosperity

 Here is another icon of Mary Magdalene—by artist Elaine Savoie of Hornby Island in British Columbia. Click on the image.

Of course, you recognize the Red Egg.

We had a delightful visit with Elaine about sixteen months ago. We didn't realize it then, but when she heard the story of the Red Egg, this icon began percolating within her. And now here the icon is.

 

We just received this image—as if posting the story below had called St. Mary all the way down this coast.

Look how regal she is. This is a woman to stand up to a Caesar or two—let alone to you or me.

I don't know who these figures are beneath the Magdalen's regal, starry skirts. Are they recipients of her patronage who have commissioned this icon in their gratitude?

 I do know that on the indigenous northwest coast coppers are signs of economic and social status.

And in economic times like these, all of us—including artists, certainly—would be grateful to have copper wings like these.

Why "Red Egg" anyway?

The first person Christ appeared to after his Resurrection was his friend and follower Mary of Magdala. She couldn't recognize him at first and mistook him for the gardener. But when he called her by name, she turned and said to him, "Rabboni, that is, teacher..."

"Noli me tangere," Jesus said. "Do not cling to me. I must rise to my Father first."

Mary of Magdala is often confused with other women in the gospels. But she is not Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus. And she is not the woman caught in adultery.

She appears to have been a woman of means who helped support Jesus and the disciples. She was a myrrh-bearer because she purchased and brought myrrh and spices with which to anoint Christ after his burial. And she is an apostle to the apostles because she was sent by Christ himself to announce his Resurrection to them.

Traditions say that Mary of Magdala spent much of her life in contemplation and prayer after the Ascension. One legend is that she sailed—or drifted in a small boat—to the south of France with Joseph of Arimathea and Salome and "the other Mary" who had gone to the tomb to anoint Christ's body, too.

As the first witness of the Resurrection, she would proclaim, "He is risen!" and would hold an egg as a symbol of that transformation. One day she attended a banquet of the Caesar Tiberius.

"He is risen!" Mary proclaimed.

"He is no more risen than that egg is red," Tiberius scoffed.

Mary stretched out her arm and opened her hand. The egg was red.