icons opening in obedience

"Obedience, taken in itself, is not a "virtue"; it is blind submission, and there is no light in blindness. Only love for God, the absolute object of all love, frees obedience from blindness and makes it the joyful acceptance of what alone is worthy of being accepted. But love without obedience to God is 'the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life' (1 John 2:16), it is the love claimed by Don Juan, which ultimately destroys him. Only obedience to God, the only Lord of Creation, gives love its true direction, makes it fully love.

True obedience is thus true love for God, the true response of Creation to its Creator. Humanity is fully humanity when it is this response to God, when it becomes the movement of total self-giving and obedience to Him."

--Alexander Schmemann, For The Life Of The World, p. 84-85

Embarking on Schmemann for a time.

I have put forth into the world all the icons in my studio as silent yet moving witnesses of the lineage of Truth. For this I am pleased and pray for love to shine forth in this next wave that is about to unfold.

There will be another Theotokos as a commission, a very small Mandylion (face of Christ on a cloth), a Holy Trinity based on Rublev's (and the fluid interpretation of it that Leonid Ouspensky proclaimed) and a Christ in Majesty. This time the majority on beautiful carved panels with a kovcheg that my carpenter neighbor has made. I have carefully hand-stained their edges and backs with a custom oil color in a deep brown with some burnt sienna.

A new chapter in the journey. I will push to simply keep learning and growing as I know progress in skill and vision is being made. And may that never cease.

The very first icon I attempted almost four years ago was one of a portrait of Christ. I had been keeping it as a testament of how far I've come, but the other day I started to see that as a self-oriented perception of this journey. My icons should aspire to be the best always, and so it was almost a sad statement of an imperfect love to Christ allowing it to sit in a corner serving no purpose. The happy end of this realization has been scraping it down, yet saving the extensive gold that I water gilded on the panel, and I am prepared to sketch Christ as all that remains is the gessoed silhouettte. Now to move forward.

So as I share words, a rabbit-skin glue is heating on my stove so I can seal the four new panels. I have to prepare the gesso as well. That is an enormous project, and luckily one that my dear 3-yr. old Emma can assist with while her 1-yr. old little brother Soren can watch perched from my backpack. I am always perplexed at how I can move forward in the icon do-ing with so many laborious, prayerful and time-consuming movements required to complete an icon--being that I have five children. Yet I have never been so disciplined in my life because of that I think. I have my children to thank, and an increasing love of entering the icon and this ever-present sense of gift to be here--here at this precise moment in time, where I can take up brush and proclaim the kingdom of God. It is a miracle. May I never take this for granted.

But so much more to learn... Funny, how I made this shift from looking backwards at my youth and where I have been in terms of creative milestones (or lack thereof), and have now focused on the beauty of days to come, welcomed as I aspire to come into fullness of creative excellence. My body aging in appearance now is daily light to the wonderful place I am heading if I am faithful to the calling of this vocation. Perhaps strange, but a good shift indeed. Why wallow as so many do for youth when wisdom finally and hopefully can emerge. When you pass 40, it is a definite marker--but I think virtue can be obtained. Patience. Life becoming like a gesture of being poured out through a sieve--only the purified and cleansed falling into the basin. So many times I feel as if I really need the span of years to understand so much. But then there is the gift of my husband Aaron who has gifts of philosophical understanding where I do not, and thankfully he helps to pull me up to higher ground (And I hope, I, in other ways I can reciprocate).

Obedience. Patience. Love.

I am going to enter the sunlight pooling in my studio blessed on this beautiful warm day of winter. I am going to rest in thanksgiving. I am going to draw and find those lines to articulate love.

I am glad to be simple. I am glad to be here. I am glad to be immersed in the here and now. I pray the same for you.

Shown at top: Andrei Rublev's icon of Christ in Majesty

Becoming unravelings

...All material things are becoming unravelings from an inner core of substantial luminescence... apples, trees, rocks, birds, sky, my husband.

Patterns. Signs. Yearnings. Understanding. Hope.

I love this image of two clown lovers walking in the night.

I wish i could use my tongue better. I fall so short in spoken word. The same way i yearn and struggle for the subtlety of color and line through my brush that i see in my mind's eye, I try to speak with certain things but fail at arriving. I fail and become misunderstood. I frustrate. Words. But it is not only words. It is my lack of understanding, of remembering, of becoming. It is then the realization that i am culpable for this that i sink. Maybe i shall not fly, but i would like to walk or at least climb. Not handicapped. Whole and strong. Able to walk in the dark even when the light of the moon is hidden and in the moments where the path deviates or even becomes lost.

But the patterns are there. Patterns of love growing and shifting and blowing and moving. And certain ones remain as powerful signposts. Even when incubated for years and minutes suspended and then realized at its appropriate moment. Reminders. Things to grasp onto as we hurdle through space. Why is the past of our lives and the dreamed dream relegated to the same island once it has been?

After Aaron and i married, we went to Montreal to spend some alone time in marking the event. And the visit to the arboretum has been visiting me much lately. The day itself cloudy with light pockets bursting through--the air quality cold but warm at the same time. Spring. Bulbs were beginning to emerge out of the ground, tree buds blossoming. We didn't know where we were going and simply discovered the way we were to take. What stays with me most is that in the walking that seemed as if we were lost in the wild we would then come upon the most beautiful gardens. There was the Chinese and Asian garden and entering into the ancient Chinese house on a small island in the center of a pond next to a beautiful waterfall. And inside the house a woman was playing the harp. More walking along indistinct paths to emerge in the rose garden that was shaped like a labyrinth. Then a hyacinth field. Much walking for a long time in the extraordinary ordinary. Entering in then to a house that held the corpse of an ancient tree so you could lovingly touch its concentric circles. Again long walking and then descending into the house of insects like a cave--all i remember are all the lovely butterflies pinned open--miniature saints lined up in a row. Beautiful skins that once lifted light. And one's own strange feeling of lift when leaving back into a world we are only passing through. This distinct sojourn at the arboretum was a gift--our journey has unknown walking like the waiting of entering into the moments of light. Transcending the wild. bridging the night. The hoping then arriving. Like riding Peleshian's train. Everything pointing to the end. And we hurdle quickly there. Returning to the Garden.

The patterns remain. Like the prototype. Love caught within the pattern. Given in the pattern.

Someday i shall speak and be understood.
Someday i shall understand and hear.
Now, I and we shall strive for inner luminescence like foxfire from decaying wood.

Clowns lovers in the night. Holding hands.

Elijah in the wilderness, love, and an abiding hope

Sunday was beautiful. Finally after weeks of flu, pneumonia and other inhibitors, we made it back to father Andrew’s church. I felt like a child with such excitement to go—sometimes I wonder about my building desire and longing to be there. Is it out of proportion with reality in my present life with the drive and children and the austere commitment which goes so much further…? But it has been persistant and thoughts of this spin perpetually in my daily existence. Making me ask questions. Making me confront myself. Taking pause.
I had a bit of an epiphany at my icon table before. Here I am, finally gearing up for wholeheartedly working with father Andrew, as all of the previous icons (except for my large Resurrection piece and a small portrait of St. George) are oiled, sealed and currently on a missionary sojourn in Vermont. And so I proceed with drawing several icons. Taking the prototype as inspiration, and it was there in that process that I was most significantly moved. So interesting when all of a sudden things start to make sense—connection of lines in the iconographic space, the greater connection of life laid forth like a map. It’s as if the aperture has opened on a camera and light has flooded my vision. But it wasn’t just a singular understanding, it was the culmination of many things pointed to and landing in this moment.
First, gratefulness. I couldn’t sleep last night, being woken with this overwhelming sense of Love. And how to respond to “how can I be Loved so much?” when I in my earthly self am so small and sinful and far from resting at the Eternal door? But it was Love. Big Love. The kind of Love where the incarnation fleshes out and sits beside you. My innermost desires and prayers heard? My flashes of seeing the future perhaps not just my solitary musings but of a bigger pool of collective possibilities that definitively were glimpsed. And what does this mean this Love? This means that we need not ever worry about the future. We need not linger in a place of doubt when anything and everything is possible. Time opens up, Eternity opens up and we too can be there, making a significant difference in the hand of Heaven. All things appointed in its right time—each moment a calling to fulfill. I know the Spirit is moving in significant ways in our lives--even in the stillness. And this is what is markedly different for me in the here and now. Perhaps it is a basket of patience given, but in the basket were the most beautiful ripe fruits. Ones that must be eaten now, or at least the time is coming soon. My small prayers are heard. This makes me loved. And this reality of this is overwhelming me in joy.
Joy that indeed one day, both on and off the icon table, perhaps I will be able to imprint all these prototypes of icons on my heart and truly live the Love proclaimed in my day-to-day workings. That my gifts may truly be used. Even in my unworthiness. Even in the mountains yet to climb to get there. That souls will repent and see the glory of God. I know sitting with the icons and writing them has profound influence in my inner stirrings. I know that I can be a better person for it, if I die to self and doubt. If I allow myself to be used in the gentle hand of the Spirit. And in all this was another aspect of this Love that came to me.
That of Aaron. His appointed calling. In his steering of our ship, the navigation of waters unknown to places unseen but known, I can totally rest on God’s hand and Spirit upon him to give him guide. Even in my bouts of impatience, when I feel stagnant, or unmoving, or walking in slow motion, or ineffectual, or too small to matter--as if I am not making a difference, or impatient with not seeing around the next bend in our lives, or not feeling connected, that God indeed is working-- making our breath worthy, our place in this world and our lives full of hope. How can one’s faith oft be so lacking in trust unless we SEE? I have centered myself back into the miracle of the unseen hand—and then it played out in my sketching of Elijah in the desert. A prototype of the Novgorodian school again, from the 15th century (although unfound to share on this page).
Elijah (in Hebrew, meaning “strength of the Lord”), was a worthy prophet, in this icon depicted hiding in the desert, being fed by ravens, calmly reaching out his right hand to accept heavenly gifts to sustain him so he did not die of hunger. The very laws of nature can change according to the will of God. So quiet and most like a birthing from the cave, the lines move with my hand in a beautiful lyric play of form and shape, allowing one to enter in. Was it that I asked for guidance more? Was it that I, in gratefulness, felt the Love and allowed the opening up of Elijah in the act of drawing?
I don’t know. I don’t need to know. I need to do. I will be obedient. I will be grateful. I will be hopeful in the unseen promises of the moment. And of the past which will catapult us to the future—to the fullness of time.
And if you read this, pray for my hands that they may carry out the will of the Father. I want to draw and draw and draw making lines that dance and ignite with holy fire, lines that speak as with prophet Elijah on Mt. Horeb:
“Behold, the Lord will pass by. And, behold, a great and strong wind rending the mountains, and crushing the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: and after the earthquake, fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire the voice of a gentle breeze, and the Lord was there.” (1Kings 19, 11-12).
May we be attentive to The Voice. The manifestation of God in the world.
Elijah was able to open and close the heavens—filled with inner fire for the zeal of God. Elijah was a daring preacher. And I pray this too for my husband: a reminder that in answer to the burning love of God the natural order of things is changed by the Divine Will. St. Basil knows how to answer this. Are we not also in a desert of sorts? The prophet needs to be alone and pray in his new cave on the third floor of a building. To ponder, to discern, to act with inner fire.
And to remember that provision of this life’s journey is abiding hope in God.

"I do not make an icon of the invisible Godhead, but I make an icon of the visible flesh of God." –St. John of Damascus

I consider it to be no small miracle that I am here, brush in hand, making life-long pilgrimage as a defender and creator of Holy Images.
I know from seeing, from loving, from entering into icons, in all that I know and in what little I do know, it is indeed possible to enter in through prayer—yielding a transformation touched upon by the Holy Spirit through SEEING and witnessing that which IS through a still point, a breaking choir-sung silence where conversation initiates once that threshold has been passed through. Diving through time, connecting with Eternity through those who have walked before us, there is a means to intimacy and a sweet fullness and vulnerability of laying out our spiritual selves through the icon. It is there, here, now, always--through the slow, steady and meditative process of being with an icon, of being in that two-fold prayer with God’s Cloud of Witnesses (Hebrews 12:1), that the reality of God’s plan on earth can speak into our lives, through us, and point us toward Eternity.
This is a true spiritual gift of line, light, form and matter. In the Orthodox understanding, we iconographers “write” icons, for the icon itself is liturgy, the word made flesh through captured line and color on wood, and transforms even the matter to become something other. And the incarnation for Christians is the high point of our visible understanding of God. Man himself was originally intended to be the icon of God (Genesis 1:27), but when God deemed it necessary to become incarnate, He became fully manifest in human terms as His Perfect Icon, the Incarnate Christ, the New Adam.
O for the long journey that takes one to the road we are happy to travel. I think I have been graced with mercy in my search and recent arrival at a means in which to use my creative talents through my spiritual yearnings. Interesting to look back over the years since childhood and find signposts that led me here. In my early years, nature played an enormous part of my artistic curiosity as with many children—gathering clay from the mudbank, finding plant specimens to press and collage into visual forms, making my own paint from berries and glue, carving images into the trees that grew around my home, building small stick homes and villages—these experiences were my favorite and as an only child, I strangely never felt alone, although I grew up without a formal introduction to God. The notion of Church, perhaps being denied access, became something beautifully mysterious and grew into a quiet hunger in my further years to find out. Although I can markedly say that I did feel I always knew the Other…
Our trip to France as a young adult brought on an appreciation with beauty told through the ancient architecture of medieval Europe—especially in the small forgotten churches in the southern countryside around Sarlat in La Dordogne, where we lived. The Black Madonna of Rocamodour being a marked passage to greater internal desire and hunger to know more. And so I fell in love with early Christian art—raw and sometimes brute (certainly not the Renaissance approach) but it moved me, it was authentic story, added with knowing that the incense and candles burning were a continuum of a human gesture to some kind of Love played out since its inception. I returned in College (going to Art school in Paris), feeling God was pursuing me. Chartres Cathedral, and hours, amounting to days spent at the Louvre museum looking for signs of that Other pointing the way. It was on this road that that mysterious thing of salvation was found. And I am eternally grateful. Truth speaks out of the rubble of our lives and pushes its way to the surface so that we can be born anew in Love. First a Protestant, now a Catholic who has an Orthodox heart (with labels melting in an ecumenical shout for Oneness), I desperately want to see Christians and those questing for God to seek to use the tools that God has given and find our way to the foot of the Cross. To look upon the Holy Face, and the holy faces given to us through time-- to stop, hold, even kiss a tangible image passed down from iconographer to iconographer, since St. Luke initiated this journey through time in the play of Eternity.

Speechless be the lips of impious ones,
Those who do not reverence
Your great icon, the sacred one
Which is called Directress,
And was depicted for us
By one of the apostles,
Luke the Evangelist.

Through the icon I have found a home. I have been told it takes fifteen years to truly become an iconographer, but I am on my way (with five babes afoot). I have spent several years working with master Russian iconographer Ksenia Pokrovsky outside of Boston, and as I write this, I am making myself ready to shift to working with Father Andrew Tregubov of Holy Ressurrection Russian Orthodox Church in Claremont, New Hampshire. I am very much looking forward to my next mentorship—Father Andrew studied in-depth the icons of Gregory Kroug (who in turn pulled his inspiration from Andrei Rublev) in France and stresses the importance of Light in the work of the iconographer. Light is held suspended through the lives of the person depicted, but also literally through the pigments or colors used on the icon board. Marianna Fortunato, a French iconographer said, "...each icon is the name of God pronounced in line and color." Thus the line rendered must be full of love, alive, and reverberating of God’s inspiration. It is in aspiring to this that I hope to fill a full cup of beauty, and be found worthy of my effort.
May you be graced with the ability to enter in through my humble and sincere efforts, witnessing by sight the fullness of God’s Word.


Our faith is stronger than death, our philosophy is firmer than flesh, and the spread of the Kingdom of God upon the earth is more sublime and more compelling. –Dorothy Day

It has been strange this feeling of completion. There is something so final, a bit like death. Not a bad thing, but a definitive end to a phase of my learning. Time to move on. These icons I have lived with for the past two years are ready to enter the world. To speak, to interact with souls whom I don't even know. And I like that. I am happy to have been a means for creative and spiritual life to come into the world. And now they are.
How can there be such an enormous pause? I feel as if I have let a long exhale--all breath out. In my mind I am very eager for the inhale which will be deep. This time with Father Andrew. As of Friday, icons will be placed, and I will be able to start in to this next phase. I am hungry to go there. It is time.
Soren is one today. I still cannot remember where this past year has gone--time sliding so quickly. I am grateful for this little life so joyous and full with love. Amazing little one, with so much to give. Most beautiful living icon, Soren Basil Wiederspahn.
Just a brief moment to reflect and breathe again.
So all saints anointed with oil. Only my large Mandylion of Christ left to be oiled and finished.
Aaron's birthday coming as well.
And the trees are almost bare.
I give thanks to good things in my life--the gift of love. The simplicity of line and purpose.
Full and whole.
Overflowing.

The icon above is one I just found--attributed to Rublev. I haven't seen it before, and even through the darkening is captivating. Off to find more.

The gaze of heaven

Saturday morning, October 10th, 5:45am

Darkness pools outside in pre-dawn silence. Shadowy forms of trees moving with the wind. And I wait. And I hunger for the light to rise and my mind to wake.

Soren sits here oblivious to the fact that it is so very early--although when I took him to the window he said in a small mysterious voice:"daaaarrk" and then looked at me and smiled.

So here we are. I welcome the little chatter and play at my feet.

I have been thinking much about Light. And darkness.
The play of God's hand with the pull of the morning sun is a beautiful movement of time to witness. No wonder the cloistered and monastic rise in the dark to collaboratively bring on the day with voices of praise for this gift of Light, replayed each day as if it were the first. And here it comes. Out my window catching like a fire on the maple with the red-veined leaves that is soaked in its already crowned brilliance of gold and crimson. And so soon to pass on, leaving bare branch and the hope of a spring to come. I show Soren, and he speaks not a word, taking it in. And then he starts to sing...

How can one not sing? This gradual, natural perfectly timed sequencing of light, and the emergence of form. And I do think of Rublev's Christ which so silently glows off the board on which it was painted--it too quietly emerges. Like a breath hovering in mid-air. The board falls away and we are left with this apparition. And more so with Christ, His gaze. He who is. Penetrating to a slow, steady interior hum summoned as if by magnetic force to engage and enter into this conversation.

The first icon was that of the Mandylion (meaning cloth in Greek--also called "the icon not made by human hands")--when King Abgarus of Edessa, stricken with leprosy and too sick to travel, called his court painter Ananias and ordered him, along with a beautiful letter of plea to Jesus, to go and capture a likeness of Christ in hopes of healing. The painter went and struggled to capture his essence when it was near impossible to get close enough because of the crowds, and Ananias was frustrated in his attempts. Because he did not want to return empty-handed to the king, he climbed onto a high rock thinking he could get a better view, and then realized that it was not only the distance proving it hard to see Christ, but he could not reproduce his features because of the radience coming from his face. It was then that Christ himself saw the man and was moved in compassion-- and came to help him. He told Ananias he was unable to travel to Edessa, but would later send a disciple to visit the king. He then asked for a cloth and a bucket of water, wrung out the cloth and covered his face with it. Ananias was to take it back to the king--it was what he sought. When the King opened the cloth, he was instantly healed--an image of Christ's holy face had been transferred to the cloth--an image "not made by human hands"and the cloth was hung on the gates to the city of Edessa as a holy relic, and was thus reproduced by others throughout the ages.

A divine sign with healing powers.

I am so close to completion of writing my Mandylion icon. It is a very intimate thing to spend time writing the face of He who is, transferred in incarnational beauty. A gift to be rendered in pigment and line. Simplicity. The initiation of dialogue. The word that speaks. And yet I ponder too Our lady of Guadeloupe--and how sad it is that she has never been written in the Byzantine style because of the schism. Because she revealed herself in a Catholic context, and the severing of iconographic lineage has rendered silence in the West. This Light too needs to break dawn.

But spend time contemplating Rublev's Christ.
Rest quiet, still, certain in His Is-ness, his perfect being.
It is in the eye, the gaze that penetrates.
And so I am off to start the day.
To lift the lamp of self and be Christ's hands and eyes and feet
and mouth--body in this shadowy world. And to love this little man who has had less than a year of dawns in this world--he who is perfect innocent life. He who is the spring and the hope of bigger light to come, and who reaches out with small fingers and takes my hand.
And for this miracle I give thanks.

"We bless you now, O my Christ, word of God, Light of Light without beginning, bestower of the Spirit. We bless you, three-fold light of undivided glory. You have vanquished the darkness and brought forth the Light, to create everything in it."
--St. Gregory Nazianzen (Dogmatic poems, Patrologia Graeca)

This space of time, this place of heart, this tree of Paradise

Slowly, surely I stand and look at the cloud patterns on approach. Time patterns as a quiet fool sometimes, and I am the one who stirs the pot, watches the sky and cloaks my shoulders with shawl. Down spins the first leaf speckled with ochre and sienna, crimson and worm-hole.
Where to in these moments? Holding on to small little hands, we find that place of comfort. Soft, still and sweet, I too remember the familiar smell of wood burn, tart apples and hand-spun wool tight and pressed against a cheek with a glass of cold milk.

Little kisses from those who trust me with all they are.

Icons are moving their lips to smile.

I must admit, the movement of imminent goal of sharing my attempts of icon-writing with others quickens my blood. I want to get better. I want to find my way. And I am happy to share that journey with little hands grasping on to table-side, if that's what it takes.

Aaron's birthday will mark the delivery of eight or so of my icons to a gallery in Brattleboro, Vermont. To share, to mark a new phase in time in which to create.

Seraphine, the recent french film we saw last weekend, was an enormous encouragement to me--a beautiful and haunting portrait of a woman driven to create as an intimate and sacred love letter to the Other. A conversation with the divine, spoken through hand-made pigments ripped from the earth and other matter--distilled in a love and intimacy that channelled through her own unique brush. Tree of Paradise. Not without encouragement. Not without misunderstanding. Often and almost always alone and with interior conviction, and exterior semblance of a sort of madness. Who are we who create for the Creator? Holy fools?

I still fill with tears contemplating her grand gesture, wedding gown and bare feet trailing the cobblestones of her village, knocking on doors announcing the Feast. The here, now, always. Image bearers, the light of the Incarnation flooding it all. The mystery of the why spilling over canvas as blood on sacred ground--an echo to Love, a voice singing in the beauty and pain of life. The patterns of creation through fruit and leaf, limb and light. Colors that annunciate and speak of an intimate and most profound language.

Remember you are blest. See this film, spend time with her paintings, and kiss the crimson leaf you find at your feet.