Tag Archives: Realm

896. Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. ~Victor Hugo

by

25

Music by itself carries us beyond
words and thoughts into the realm of feeling.
~Jane E. Vennard

Screen Shot 2015-10-08 at 9.09.21 PM

It has been officially autumn for a couple of weeks now, but the temperature and unchanging leaves tell a different story. Theirs is a tale of summer, a summer not yet wanting to relinquish its throne. While begrudging that fact as I sat in a church meeting yesterday, a man quietly entered the room, sat down at a piano behind me, started playing a familiar tune, and as if by magic changed everything for the better. For almost immediately after he began playing, autumn’s glory flowed down his arms and oozed from his fingertips onto the piano’s keys. As he played on, the tinkling sounds of the musical notes emulated more and more the spectacle of autumn’s falling leaves. Enthralled I turned so I could watch him play and noticed he was not reading sheet music. Instead he was playing solely from memory and out of his heart. Thus as Vennard suggests, music  does remove the limitations of words and speaks to us of things bigger and grander than the mere scope of language can, so much so that it is indeed able to carry us into and from the “realm of feeling.” Not only that but when we quiet our bodies and minds and listen carefully, we are also able to discern, in the silence of music’s pauses, the holy footfalls of Yahweh’s abiding Presence in Creation.

Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth, burst into jubilant song music. ~Psalm 98:4  ✝

**Image via Pinterest

722. I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it’s at its most powerful. ~A.S. Byatt

by

25

My skin is kind of, sort of brownish
Pinkish yellowish white.
My eyes are greyish blueish green,
But I’m told they look orange in the night.
My hair is reddish blondish brown,
But it’s silver when it’s wet.
And all the colors I am inside
Have not been invented yet.
~Shel Silverstein

DSC_0075

A German artist named Hans Hoffman noted that “the whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.” And I’m so glad it is a realm drenched in color into which we are born and that we are blessed with eyes that can distinguish the millions of hues therein. Initially, one might think in terms of the basics like: grey, red, green, blue, yellow, brown, orange, purple and pink. But then what about dark and light shades of all those colors that take us into the realm of shades like hunter green, cherry red, hot pink, cobalt blue, lemon yellow and so on. Even a rainbow is a continuum of hues as one color overlaps the neighboring color, is it not?

Then Solomon began to build the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, where the Lord had appeared to his father, David…He made the curtain of blue, purple, and crimson yarn and fine linen, with cherubim worked into it. ~2 Chronicles 3:1 and 3:14   ✝

621. Color is a power which directly influences the soul. ~Wassily Kandinsky

by

55

In the house of words was a table of colors.
They offered themselves in great fountains,
and each poet took the color he needed:
lemon yellow or sun yellow
ocean blue or smoke blue,
crimson red, blood red, or wine red.
~Eduardo Galeano

DSC_0044

There is not one blade of grass,
there is no color in this world
that is not intended to make us rejoice.
~John Calvin

DSC_0040

Joy is the sweet voice, joy the luminous cloud–
We in ourselves rejoice!
And thence flows all that charms our ear or sight
all melodies the echoes of that voice,
all colours a suffusion from that light.
~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

DSC_0066

In nature, light creates the color.
In the picture, color creates the light.
~Hans Hoffman

DSC_0010

Color! Ah, the fabulous, mystic realm of color! Just look at these flowers I photographed in my greenhouse yesterday! What a sacred voice is the song of their colors! It never fails to wow me over and over again! Even in the low-light of a cold, grey, rainy winter’s day, color declares and praises God’s holy name! Thus, may it ever draw us near Him.

Sing the praises of the Lord, you His faithful people; praise His holy name. ~ Psalm 30: 4   ✝