Today is the 17th day, making two weeks and three days of the Omer. Balance within the Heart, Compassion within Compassion: Tifert within Tifert.
Today also marks one week that I have been on http://theartstack.com/susanrichardsar/. I have 'stacked' 440 images, 55 of which I have been the first to add. There seems be special grace and blessings during this Omer period, and ArtStack is part of that for me. Tiferth within Tiferth makes me think about what beauty really is. Sometimes it takes us by surprise. In my "Works on Paper" collection in ArtStack, I stacked two etchings by Rembrandt, one of a man pissing, and the more rarely seen image of a woman pissing, squatting against a tree while lifting her voluminous skirt. I thought I was pretty familiar with Rembrant's work, but hadn't seen these before, and wouldn't have without ArtStack. They aren't in any way salacious. They are part of his massive detailed recording of ordinary human life, in drawings, prints, and paintings. They are beautiful of course simply because of his use of line, and light and dark, as always, but there is a beauty in their truth, and indeed a certain tenderness in their intimacy. He made beauty out of the mundane.
I'm appreciating a certain heightened sensitivity during this Omer counting period, and can appreciate why someone said recently that they missed it when it was over.
People have devised various ways of aiding counting. The calendar page on the left side of my journal, from a 1982 calendar (thank you Michael Strassfeld), was a method for counting by coloring in day by day. In 1982 apparently I only colored in the center, but charts like these implant the concept of counting. After all, I did keep the calendar!
Here is a chart for 2013. They apparently also designated Tifert as green, so day 17, today, shows as green on green.
No comments:
Post a Comment