Oneness with God is the sole truth of humanity. Life parted from its causative life would be no life; it would at best be but a barrack of corruption, an outpost of annihilation. In proportion as the union is incomplete, the derived life is imperfect. And no man can be one with neighbour, child, dearest, except as he is one with his origin; and he fails of his perfection so long as there is one being in the universe he could not love.

…Of all men he is bound to hold his face like a flint in witness of this truth who owes everything that makes for eternal good, to the belief that at the heart of things and causing them to be, at the centre of monad, of world, of protoplastic mass, of loving dog, and of man most cruel, is an absolute, perfect love; and that in the man Christ Jesus this love is with us men to take us home. To nothing else do I for one owe any grasp upon life. In this I see the setting right of all things. To the man who believes in the Son of God, poetry returns in a mighty wave; history unrolls itself in harmony; science shows crowned with its own aureole of holiness…

…There is no enlivener of the imagination, no enabler of the judgment, no strengthener of the intellect, to compare with the belief in a live Ideal, at the heart of all personality, as of every law….

Read the whole thing – A SKETCH OF INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPMENT

GM

Beautiful music is the art of the prophets that can calm the agitations of the soul; it is one of the most magnificent and delightful presents God has given us.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world.

Merry Christmas!

This image is linked to Luke 2:16.

click to enlarge

Christmas, year end goals, business of many varieties and an eye on 2012 eh? I hope you all have been having a great holiday season – and look forward to a blessed Christmas as well. I have been busy writing and adding to my licensing library…and have had a fairly wide and wild variety of songs get checked off as of late…a bunch of Christmas public domain songs with Trina, Star Spangled Banner, my first foray into blues with “Corrupt Politician Blues”, which I will probably post here in the next days. If time allows I’ll crank out a video just for giggles. I purchased a guitar harp at an estate sale for a very good price (instrument is circa 1890’s)… I also picked up a very deep soft synth which I will be implementing and blogging on in the upcoming weeks. I really do hope you and yours are enjoying a great time of peace, reflection and celebration as we thank the Lord for His goodness in providing us the greatest gift of all in the birth of Jesus Christ. I find it so amazing that we can know our Creator on a personal level…and be allowed to co-create in myriad ways.

Albrecht Durer Melencolia 1514

This print, along with St Jerome In His Study, and Knight Death And The Devil is considered one of the 3 Meisterstiche, or Master Works of Albrecht Durer. This particular image was originally engraved on copper. It really does show an unsurpassed excellence in Durers artistic power. There are a lot of interpretations around what Durer “meant”. I will only say you and I can do well to look at his work as a whole, and the Master Works in particular, and draw what conclusions we can. The one obvious clue we have is the word meloncolia or meloncholy which has its roots in a gloomy, pensive demeanor often associated with creativity. Who knows? Maybe Durer expressed a kind of frustration with the gloom of an artistic block – and then in expressing it made one of his greatest engravings.

inspiration;
c.1300, “immediate influence of God or a god,” especially that under which the holy books were written, from O.Fr. inspiracion “inhaling, breathing in; inspiration,” from L.L. inspirationem (nom. inspiratio), noun of action from pp. stem of L. inspirare “inspire, inflame, blow into,” from in- “in” (see in- (2)) + spirare “to breathe” (see spirit). Literal sense “act of inhaling” attested in English from 1560s. Meaning “one who inspires others” is attested by 1867.

You want inspiration? Here are 10 tips;
1 ) Seek God first in all endeavors (prayer, bible study, obedience) for unexcelled inspiration.
2 ) Seek inspiration outside of your trade. Go to artists that work in mediums you don’t specialize in.
3 ) Get out in nature. You will never run out of inspiration in taking in this wide, bold, wonderful and sublime world God has created.
4 ) Be truthful / honest / real
5 ) Consider learning a lifestyle rather than a title.
6 ) Celebrate the amazing diversity we are surrounded in with the human experience, walk wide eyed in your daily gift of the present, fight evil at every opportunity overtly OR quietly.
7 ) Enjoy a deep and meaningful relationship with Jesus Christ, be it in a building called the church or not.
8 ) Fellowship with authentic Christians.
9 ) Make your goal to please God not man.
10 ) Admit you don’t know yourself.

sedit qui timuit ne non succederet

One of the finest early engravers was an anonymous artist known as the Housebook Master because scholars have linked his work with drawings in the same style in a manuscript called the Hausbuch. Here is an excerpt from an online encyclopedia;

Master of the Housebook (Meister des Hausbuchs), fl. 1475–1500, German graphic artist. The master is named for a series of vigorous and sophisticated drawings of everyday life found in the Hausbuch at Castle Wolfegg. Many of his engravings are in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. His work is thought to have influenced Bosch, Bruegel, and Dürer.

Personally I love what little of his work I have seen…especially the informality, and I have included 3 pieces of his work here for your enjoyment; Death and Youth, A Dog Scratching Itself and The Holy Family. You can click each image to enlarge it.

The place for the comforter is not that of one who preaches, but of the comrade who says nothing, but prays to God about the matter. The biggest thing you can do for those who are suffering is not to talk platitudes, not to ask questions, but to get into contact with God, and the “greater works” will be done by prayer (see John 14:12-13). Job’s friends never once prayed for him; all they did was to try and make coin for the enrichment of their own creed out of his sufferings. We are not intended to understand Life. Life makes us what we are, but Life belongs to God. If I can understand a thing and can define it, I am its master. I cannot understand or define Life; I cannot understand or define God; consequently I am master of neither. Logic and reason are always on the hunt for definition, and anything that cannot be defined is apt to be defied, Rationalism usually defies God and defies life; it will not have anything that cannot be defined on a rational basis, forgetting that the things that make up elemental human life cannot be defined. There are teachers to-day who play the fool on these elemental lines; they declare that they can give guidance, but they only succeed in doing a fathomless amount of harm. A man is a criminal for knowing some things, he has no right to know them. The primal curse of God was on Adam when he ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam was intended to know good and evil, but not by eating of the fruit of the tree; God wanted him to know good and evil in the way Jesus Christ knew it, viz., by simple obedience to His Father. None of us by nature knows good and evil in this way, and when we are born from above we have to take care that we deal with reverence with the elemental things underlying life.

Chambers, O c. 1931

And soft along the veins of will doth flow,
Seeking God’s arteries from which it came.
Or does the etherial, creative flame
Turn back upon itself, and latent grow?–
It matters not what figure or what name,
If thou art in me, and I am not to blame.

GM

Strange creatures, half tamed only yet, are pent—
Dragons, lop-winged birds, and large-eyed snakes!
Hark! through the storm the saddest howling breaks!
Or are they loose, roaming about the bent,
The darkness dire deepening with moan and scream?—
My Morning, rise, and all shall be a dream.

GM