30/04/2023
Daily Reflection: 1 May:
Joan Chitister’s theme for the month “Give Us Bread and Roses” is prompted by Cézanne’s painting “Still Life with Fruit and Curtain.” She argues: “At first glance … still-life paintings do not seem to have much to say to anyone. The subjects they use, in most part, arouse no pathos, provide little in the way of human insight, touch the eye more than the heart. But not this one. Not Cézanne’s Still Life with Fruit and Curtain. This one strikes at the core of life. It requires us to ask ourselves what it is that nourishes us. And why.
I, for one, know how easy it is to get caught up in the dramatic and miss the power of the mundane, the wisdom of the daily, the comfort of regularity, the unexciting exciting dimensions of what it means to be really alive. And yet my life cries out for more and more and more of it always.
The question of the painting begs for attention, then: What am I overlooking in life? What nourishes me? Am I doing enough to provide it? What happens to me when I don’t?
Whatever the answer to all those things, one thing grows increasingly more obvious as the years pass: every one of us, whoever we are, in this highly frenetic, jangling technological world in which we live—I certainly—need more of what nourishes us and less of what drains us.
May 1: We live in a culture so glutted by a multiplicity of people and things that it is almost impossible to appreciate the power of singularity. But, in the end, it is only the singular that has any real effect on us at all. It is in our commitment to the awareness of the singular that we are either nourished or starved of soul. (Joan Chittister, "The Monastic Way")
