Author Archives: nancy marie davis

About nancy marie davis

Nancy Marie Davis illustration, photography, mixed media, and thought writing…

seeds

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photo by tom heyes at flickr
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i have started sending seeds
by
e-mail
 
they are all packaged in little seed packets
 
i gather them from all different places 
tell a little bit about where i gathered them
and i leave the rest to you.
 
some
are being opened and enjoyed
 
some
are not getting opened at all
 
perhaps some are going into a spam file
 
…that’s how it goes with seeds
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if you are interested
just let me know by e-mail
and i will put you on the seed list
 
you can always take yourself off the list
there is that option inside each package
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nance.mdr@gmail.com
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coming and going

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Finally, cj’s last day of school.  And the sun travels high across the sky.  I hear a continuous drone of small
aircraft and distant whirring of a selection of machinery cutting back anything green.
 
My toes have been getting more air time and there has been less need for a jacket.
 
I have decided to try and post on the road, when ever i can get wifi with peter’s ipad.  But, not very much
reading…. so i hope that you all will leave me a comment once in awhile…or maybe an email.
 
I am still determined to spend most of my time off-line and turn that around to being more  present in my life… 
where i live. I am aware that it needs to be done for many reasons.
 
I realize that there will be a natural decline in readers here as i read less posts and cut way-back on Spacebook
and Flitter. I think that i will continue to write here anyway.  Writing is good to do, even if no one is reads it.
 
There is pizza on the menu for tonight, so i better get started with the dough making.
 
 
nance
(rhymes with dance)
:-)

places

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God willing, the plan is… for cj and i to be leaving soon on a road trip,  
to travel to and through quite a few states around the country.  It is our
waves of June. I am, with purpose, planing to spend very little time on-line.
 
I don’t know how much i will even use the things i am taking along with the
objective to use them; of which are paper, pens, pencils, coloured pencils,
watercolour and at least one camera.
 
I have been sitting with this thought that it is mostly a matter of place.
At this point, i think that it is important that all of me (heart, soul, mind,
body, spirit) is mostly in the same place at the same time. 
 
I must say that i have learned a little about my own reasons for relating and the
ways that i choose to do it from blogging, and by using facebook and twitter.
 
I have met lovely people on-line that have a similar kind of belief, of which have
helped me to grow in faith.  At the same time that i have been growing in faith,
i have also been growing in awareness that i need to be taking a step away from
my dependence upon internet relating.
 
There has been much positive interaction and encouragement, but, that’s 
part of what makes it so insidious.
 
It is time…for me… to take a step toward the people in my physical presence.  
 
I am not saying that one form of communication is more real than another. 
And yet, there is a difference.  I need to point-out that many of us can easily
let our internet interaction take the better part of us.  
 
It can take too much, and leave little to give to face to face, friends, family,
and  in the place where we are.  And i surely can see that the place that 
we do our physical living in each moment is a powerful place and it is the
place where the goodness for society starts to break-down if our hearts
and minds are not there.
 
It’s also the place where God is best shared when we spend time
with our heart, mind, soul, body, spirit closer to being on the same page.
 
Powerful, grace-filled moments.
 
I know that we all could share more of God when we give God the whole package.
 
I know that when i relate too much by way of the internet, my mind and heart
can travel to places other than where i am.  And when i depend on it too much
i am divided, and i am not sharing what is truly needed in the place where i am.
 
Other things besides the internet could do this just as well.  Like work, fear, 
worries, sickness, addiction, envy, desire, the list goes on and on.  Some things
we can do something about, some things not so much.  
 
But, am i the only one that is feeling this way about the internet relating?
 
 

june

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you may think that the new year, in january, is the time that most changes take place. 
but, it’s not the truth.  even with all the talk before hand about resolutions and promises, all the 
hoopla,  all the noise.  in the end, it is really very little more than talk. 
 
the time of year when things really change is now.  june.  some people leave on vacations, and others 
graduate from some kind of schooling, or both. these are events that grab a person out of their more 
usual tasks and goals and throw them into new ones. it is a time to explore new options and challenges. 
it also causes other people in those lives to make adjustments.  statistically speaking, june is the most 
popular month for weddings in the united states. there are so many things happing in june with a great
amount of an unrecognized undercurrent of gusto that don’t happen the other eleven months of the year. 
 
maybe because it’s not a national holiday it is allowed to be personal, to remain our own. our very
own real-life changes.  and so they might go more unnoticed.  but, isn’t that the way we want it?
 
it’s the june waves of change…for good or for bad, they belong to us and to those who know us.
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home
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there was once
a home here
roses tended
bed of rest
a place to hide
the nakedness
the tender skin
and delicate 
seasons of Love
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6.12.2012

wiman . three

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in the grass . nmdr
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the continuation of my series of Chritian Wiman…
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PORTION THREE

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The only way? Into my words, as into the things around me, seeps the silence that defeats them. Better to say that contingency
is the only way toward knowledge of God, and contingency, for Christians, is the essence of incarnation. And incarnation, as
well as the possibilities for salvation within it, precedes Christ’s presence in history:
 
Into the instant’s bliss never came one soul
Whose soul was not possessed by Christ,
Even in the eons Christ was not.And still: some who cry the name of Christ
Live more remote from love
Than some who cry to a void they cannot name.—after Dante
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♦♦♦
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I wouldn’t want any of this to seem like I’m blaming M. for her suffering, or that I’m in any way refusing to acknowledge the
full impact of it. (Christ is contingency? An absurd, even callous thing for me to have said to her at that moment. It was true,
but the time and the context made it, in any ordinary human sense, false.) There is a sense in which love’s truth is proved by its
end, by what it becomes in us, and what we, by virtue of love, become. But love, like faith, occurs in the innermost recesses of a
person’s spirit, and we can see only inward in this regard, and not very clearly when it comes to that. And then, too, there can
be great inner growth and strength in what seems, from the outside, like pure agony or destruction. In the tenderest spots of
human experience, nothing is more offensive than intellectualized understanding. “Pain comes from the darkness / And we call
it wisdom,” writes Randall Jarrell. “It is pain.”
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♦♦♦
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Sorrow is so woven through us, so much a part of our souls, or at least any understanding of our souls that we are able to attain,
that every experience is dyed with its color.
This is why, even in moments of joy, part of that joy is the seams of ore that are our sorrow. They burn darkly and beautifully in
the midst of joy, and they make joy the complete experience that it is. But they still burn.
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continue reading…
the rest of the story.
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wiman . two

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rosie face . nmdr
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A continuation from yesterday’s first post of Christian Wiman.
 

PORTION TWO

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“Christ is contingency,” I tell M. as we cross the railroad tracks and walk down the dusty main street of this
little town that is not the town where I was raised but both reassuringly and disconcertingly reminiscent of it:
the ramshackle resiliency of the buildings around the square; Spanish rivering right next to rocklike English,
the two fusing for a moment into a single dialect then splitting again; cowboys with creekbed faces stepping
determinedly out of the convenience store with sky in their eyes and twelve-packs in their arms. I have spent
the past four weeks in solitude, working on these little prose fragments that seem to be the only thing I can
sustain, trying day and night to “figure out” just what it is I believe, a mission made more urgent by the fact
that I have recently been diagnosed with an incurable but unpredictable cancer. How strange it is to be back
in this place, where visible distance is so much a part of things that things acquire a kind of space, an otherness,
a nowhere-ness, as if even the single scrub cedar outside the window where I’m working holds—in its precise
little limbs, its assertive seasonless green—the fact of its absence.
 
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to be continued…
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♦♦♦
 
There is an interview of Christian Wiman  from 2007 at the blog Kaurab Online.
 

wiman . one

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 june rose . nmdr
 
 
Today i would like to start a series of  posts on a man named Christian Wiman.
I suppose some of you may be well aware of him already, but, i had not known of him until now.
As i was looking for information about an image, i ran across this article by Christian Wyman, that
was published on the web page of the harvard divinity school, that i want to share here.  
And that’s where i am going to start.  
The article is a bit long so i’m posting it in several bite-size portions.
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PORTION ONE

Winter/Spring 2012 (Vol. 40, Nos. 1 & 2)
Harvard Divinity Bulletin
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By Love We Are Led to God

Faith is found in the mutable and messy process of our lives.

by Christian Wiman

 

AT NEARLY SIXTY years old, M. finds that her faith has fallen away. She tells me that it was love that first 
led her to God. Thirty-five years earlier, love for the man who would be her husband for most of her life seemed
to crack open the world and her heart at the same time, seemed to fuse those latent, living energies into a
single flame, the name of which, she knew, was God. There were careers and children. There were homes laid
claim to and relinquished. There was something perhaps too usual for a love that had torn her so wholly open,
but time takes the edge off of any experience, life means mostly waiting for life, or remembering it—right? She
tells me all this, right up to the depressingly undramatic divorce, at a table outside in far west Texas, the
country of my own heart.
 
She asks me: How can a love that seemed so fated fail so utterly? How can a love that prompted me toward
God become the very thing that kills my faith? Once, it seemed love lit the world from within and made it take
on a sacred radiance, but somehow that fire burned through everything and now I walk lost in this land of ash.
If God by means of love became belief in my heart, became the faith by which I lived and loved in return, then
what should I believe now that my love is dead? Or no, not dead; that would be easier. Actual death cuts life off
at the quick of your soul, but there is yet the quick to tell you what life was, assure you that life was. You grieve
the reality of your loss, not the loss of your reality. That former grief is awful, and may seem unendurable, but
at least it is more productive, for it is grief that has lost but not renounced life, grief that still feels to the root
the living reality of love because it feels so utterly that absence. All I feel is that the life I felt, the love that once
scalded me toward God, was a lie.
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to be continued …

♦♦♦

 
 
 
Bill Moyers talks with acclaimed poet and Poetry Magazine editor Christian Wiman
about how finding true love and being diagnosed with a rare and incurable blood cancer
reignited his religious passion as well as his creative expression.
 

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i have bound myself
with a chain of thought
a dream
of such things
as you
and though a thought
may get me through
today
and 
hold me
it won’t
hold back
what’s
bound to come
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Words . by davis rosback
Painting by Irene Belknap,“The House of Belonging”; the title and words in the painting come from a poem by David Whyte.

little

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Let love and faithfulness never leave you;
bind them around your neck,
write them on the tablet of your heart.

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It’s easier to let a small thing go, and to add a small thing, than a large one. That is how some kinds of change happens.
For the better, for the worse, if a person continues to let go of and add a small thing the effect will become evident over time.  
Not an instant recognition of the effect, but a gradual awareness, as dawn to one sleeping.  Small things and time…

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