To hear about God, to know about God, you go through the motions. You don your Sunday best. You settle reverently on a golden wood pew. Like the words that are said, a smattering of colors from stained glass windows cascades across your face but never touches your heart. You bask in the peace of the sanctuary,…Read more To Know About God or to Know God
Author: Fragments of Light
Progression of a piece – Songs in the Dark
There is an idyllic perception of the artist, wiling away hours in beauty and serenity. Paint streams from garden paths of the mind. Birds sing, sun shines - effortless flow. Perhaps this is the experience of some creatives. It is not a familiar space to me. Almost every piece I begin thrusts me onto a precipice…Read more Progression of a piece – Songs in the Dark
Songs in the Dark
Sometimes darkness presses in all around, suffocating, like the hazy veil of smoke from a nearby wildfire. It irritates our eyes, catches in our breath, and coats everything in layers of black soot. But we are able to hold it at bay, just beyond the ragged edges of our being. We figure out how to…Read more Songs in the Dark
Sojourn
Something autumn seeps among these grasses. Rooted, fettered - bodily, as through me treads the sky. Pressed to this leaden veil, geese consume me there, suspended in their hollow, longing call. Oh, ponderous song! Where the way through? Take flight! if I could, neither north nor south -
Why I Make Art
I am wired to connect with people. Although I measure about as strong on the introvert scale as possible, I am an introvert who loves people. I need to connect with others in order to thrive. For many years of my life, I felt torn between these two seemingly contradictory compulsions. I crave hours of…Read more Why I Make Art
All This Falling
In weakness cling to brittle bones. Blaze, molten orange on leaden sky. Kiss the sun one last time, summer’s fire leaks from your veins. Pulse thin and aching, cast yourself into this fall, all this falling. No loud dispute, no furtive begging, can postpone this fall. Like a shooting star, exploit this drift to set…Read more All This Falling
Song of Us
Warm scent of thriving green veiled in creeping grays of dusk; inky washes fade in sweep of vastness - yet touching me, touching you. Vast the intertwining of two journeys into one wandering of this forest of shadowed trails. You and I rambling to ruins hidden on a mountain, crumbling in the clash of yesterday…Read more Song of Us
Called
One minute you are leaning back, reveling in early morning-bird songs, relaxed, mind wandering. Then something quickens your spirit. You bolt upright, alert and faintly alarmed. You suddenly become aware that you are in the Presence of One Much Greater. And He is calling you. Maybe the calling is to meet Him for the first…Read more Called
Let It Be Me – Response to Terrorism in Kenya
Horror still clutches my heart like an apparition from beyond the grave. “It is over,” Kenyan President Kenyatta assured the world on Tuesday. Some of the perpetrators are dead. Hopefully the rest are amongst eleven people detained in a sweep of Kenya’s exit points. And yet the echoes of their evil acts reverberate long after they…Read more Let It Be Me – Response to Terrorism in Kenya
Am I an Artist?
Last night I faced the question I mostly dread these days. Sitting around the table at a fancy event with well-meaning, newly-met acquaintances, they asked innocently: “So what do you do?” I felt that moment of uncertainty, tinged with panic. A simple question, expressed with genuine interest. In America, we commonly inquire about a person’s…Read more Am I an Artist?
Colleen Briggs Images & Writing 