Blue Horses: Saying the Unsayable
- At May 23, 2022
- By Write in Community
- In Blog
8
Blue Horses
One Christmas I received as a gift the Mary Oliver book, Blue Horses, and was absolutely blown away by it. First of all because of Mary Oliver’s writing which I’ve admired for ages, and secondly, because of the book cover. This features a painting of four horses, their forms rounded and graceful, all looking to the left as if something interesting is there. A fox or a dog returning their gaze, perhaps, or a person. The horses are beautiful and blue, the background in shades of yellow, spangled with stars, as are the horses themselves, their heads and bodies starry. So whether the horses are of the earth or the heavens, we are not sure.
Franz Marc
The painting is by Franz Marc, an expressionist painter and part of the “Blue Riders” group of artists in Germany in the early 1900’s. Marc was talented and influential, but his career was cut short after serving in the army in World War I. In 1916, flying shrapnel struck him in the temple and he was killed instantly. He was just 36 years old.
What Can Cranes Teach You?
- At April 12, 2021
- By Write in Community
- In Blog
- 10
“Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.”—Mary Oliver
Photo by Jeanne Dill.
The cranes’ visit.
Last week, on a side road off Nebraska Interstate 80, I heard them first, the “music of an angelic avian chorus” as naturalist Paul A. Johnsgard describes the strains of the sandhill cranes. For more than a thousand years, five hundred thousand cranes have come to Nebraska and refuel in the harvested cornfields along the Platte River Valley consuming corn and other grains.
The cranes’ thin, pointed black bills move up and down like pistons and, while their heads blink red, they pick clean the harvested fields. When you see them from a distance—all those legs and elbows—they look like the moving parts of a great overheated threshing machine.
What can cranes teach you?
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