A Year With Rilke: January

The Words: It seems our own impermanence is concealed from us. The trees stand firm, the houses we live in are still there. We alone flow past it all, an exchange of air. Everything conspires to silence us, partly with shame, partly with unspeakable hope...Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened, like winter, which even now is passing. For beneath the winter is a winter so endless that to survive it at all is a triumpth of the heart. (A Year With Rilke, translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows, January selections)

The Color: All the whites you cannot name. Colorless landscapes often are richer in tone than you might expect; that pink and blue and yellow shine so strangely from colorless crystals. Refracted and reflected, light bends and changes in the greys and whites of our world. Color is gone, but color is everywhere.The mercurial nature of white makes it particularly difficult to define. White is a function of light waves, but it’s also an idea. One could define white as simply “all the wavelengths of color mixed together” but that doesn’t really capture how we use the word white. (Cultural histories of unusual hues, The Awl, Katy Kelleher)

A Year With Rilke: January we alone flow past it all, an exchange of air 60”x72” oil on canvas