Art Wins

I've been carrying a little birthday money around with me for quite some time now. The plan was to buy a knife, you know, the kind you can only afford once in a while, so it takes several years to fill that expensive knife block. That was the plan.

I was browsing through a bookstore recently, and art called my name when I saw this painting by Brian Kershisnik.

I include a small image here but you can see (and buy!) the larger and even lovelier image by clicking on the artist's name above.

I have seen and admired Brian Kershisnik's work before. (I saw a full wall mural of his Nativity painting at the BYU art museum this year and had to stand and look at it for 10 minutes.) But something about this painting at this exact moment just resonated with me and made my cells hum. I couldn't look away. I had to push the tears back so I didn't look like an idiot crying in the bookstore. 

Then I turned the painting around and saw the title, "She Will Find What Is Lost," and I gained an appreciation for the work on another level. The title is a perfect marriage of an image with words. I admit it: a few tears actually leaked out.

The meaning of art is personal to each of us. I can't really explain what this means to me, but here are some of the questions that go through my mind as I look at it. Maybe you'd like to ask yourself some of these too as you look at the painting. 

The Greatest of These Is Love

picture courtesy www.LDS.org/design by Jennifer

"And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love." 

1 Corinthians 13:13, NKJV

Welcome to Holland

This little story was written by a mother of a child with special needs, but I think it's a great metaphor most of us could apply when we feel like our plans for something important in our lives didn't turn out the way we had wished--at first. Until the wisdom of hindsight shows that Holland was where we were meant to be all along.

From one fellow traveler to another--welcome to Holland, my friend.

Welcome to Holland

By Emily Perl Kingsley

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability – to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel.

It's like this…

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip – to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum, the Michelangelo David, the gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

"Tulip Fields in Holland" by Claude Monet

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!" you say. "What do you mean, Holland?" I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."

But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland, and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to some horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.

His Angels Have Us in Their Keeping

photo courtesy www.LDS.org/quote from Elder Henry B. Eyring/design by Jennifer

"There is not one of us but what God’s love has been expended upon. There is not one of us that He has not desired to save, and that He has not devised means to save. There is not one of us that He has not given His angels charge concerning. We may be insignificant and contemptible in our own eyes, and in the eyes of others, but the truth remains that we are the children of God, and that He has actually given His angels—invisible beings of power and might—charge concerning us, and they watch over us and have us in their keeping."
George Q. Cannon

Unexpected Joy After Long Darkness: Poem of the Day

My husband and I pieced together all the places we had been at the same time before we finally met. The first time we know that we were in the same room was a small group gathered for a poetry reading by Leslie Norris in 1991 or 1992.

Mr. Norris gave some excellent advice on that fateful day when I didn't meet my husband. He said that one should read a poem every day. While I have failed to follow that advice most days, today I can correct it. And so can you.

Thank you, Leslie Norris, for holding up your candle in the dark world.

The Pit Ponies
by Leslie Norris

They come like the ghosts of horses, shyly,

from http://www.panoramio.com/photo/17676749

To this summer field, this fresh green,
Which scares them.

They have been too long in the blind mine,
Their hooves have trodden only stones
And the soft, thick dust of fine coal,

And they do not understand the grass.
For over two years their sun
Has shone from an electric bulb

That has never set, and their walking
Has been along the one, monotonous
Track of pulled coal-trucks.

They have bunched their muscles against
The harness and pulled, and hauled.
But now they have come out of the underworld

And are set down in the sun and real air,
Which are strange to them. They are humble

And modest, their heads are downcast, they
Do not expect to see very far. But one
Is attempting a clumsy gallop. It is

Something he could do when he was very young,
When he was a little foal a long time ago
And he could run fleetly on his long foal's legs,
And almost he can remember this. And look,

One rolls on her back with joy in the clean grass!
And they all, awkwardly and hesitantly, like
Clumsy old men, begin to run, and the field

Is full of happy thunder. They toss their heads,
Their manes fly, they are galloping in freedom.
The ponies have come above ground, they are galloping!