Inspiring and Intriguing

"Winter Hare" by Wendi Fyers.

Notes Wendi: "In winter the hares fur turns pale to provide better camouflage in the snow. Ever watchful ever fearful, I love the sensitivities of these creatures. Sadly, we don't see many hares here in Cornwall these days. I find their demeanour of mystery and silence inspiring and intriguing."

The Christmas Leveret

Image: The Leveret.

Bel Homme XXIII

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Sol Invictus

. . . In connecting with the natural world in a way that honors the sacred immanent in all things, we establish a resonance with the seasons. Ritual helps to shift our consciousness to reflect the outer world inside our inner landscape: the sun stands still within us, and time changes. After the longest night, we sing up the dawn. There is a rejoicing that, even in the darkest time, the sun is not vanquished. Sol Invictus – the Unconquered Sun – is seen once again, staining the horizon with the promise of hope and brilliance.

We need to see that light. We need to feel that hope remains in the world, even in the face of young children shot dead in a classroom, or in a village after drone strikes, even in the face of rising waters and devastated forests. The sun is our symbol of that hope. Day and night dance together in the cosmos, just as beauty and fear dance among us every day.

As 21st century people, do we really think the sun won't rise again? We don't. Yet kindling our small fires and gathering in the darkness feels important. Singing up the coming light is a balm for the embattled soul. These rituals remind us that in the midst of the worst pain that can be inflicted, some things are still whole. Some things are still beautiful. Some things continue to occur, in all their beauty, no matter what else is happening on this earth.

– T. Thorn Coyle
"Honoring the Winter Solstice"
HuffPost Religion
December 21, 2012

Image: "Luna Moon Hare at the Winter Solstice" by Wendy Andrew.

Bel Homme XXII

Subject: Ethan Maxwell Landry (a.k.a. Eh Moo La).
Photographer: Michael Huitt.

Hare Décor IV

Measuring 7 1/4" in diameter, Royal Copenhagen's 1971 Christmas Plate is entitled "Hare in Winter." Kai Lange is credited as the artist on the back of the plate. It is number 64 in a series of Christmas plates issued since 1908 in limited quantities. The master model is always destroyed at the end of each year.

Royal Copenhagen's "Hare in Winter" plate can often be found for sale on sites such as E-bay and MyVintageChina.com.

Morning Light

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Hare in Snow

Writes textile artist Sharon Blackman: "All my pictures are made entirely by hand using recycled textiles. I love reusing a favourite old shirt or vintage buttons and trimmings, making each artwork completely unique. I have a quirky naive style, never using patterns or templates and cutting directly into the fabric and stitching everything by hand."

To view more of Sharon's beautiful artwork, visit her website.

Bel Homme XXI

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

A Thanksgiving Wish

Related Off-site Links:
Thanksgiving's Gay Secrets – HuffPost Gay Voices (November 24, 2011).
Gay Pilgrims in 1600′s Plymouth, MA? Gather Round The Table Boys, Historian Says Yes – Will Kohler (Back2Stonewall.com, November 20, 2012).
Pilgrim Thanksgiving Included Gays John Alexander, Thomas Roberts – Vintage Gay Media History (November 23, 2009).
Gay Pilgrims Go to Philadelphia – WoodBlock Dreams (March 8, 2011).

Image: Steven.

A Certain Power

In ancient Greek and Roman [times] . . . the male hare was thought capable of bearing young and, perhaps for this reason, was associated with both transgenderism and same-sex eroticism. The poet Philostratus writes: "And let not the hare escape us, but let us . . . catch it alive as an offering most pleasing to Aphrodite . . . the hare . . . possesses the gift of Aphrodite [i.e. fertility] to an unusual degree . . . As for the male [hare], he not only [sires offspring], but also himself bears young, contrary to nature." Men desiring other men, having "found in the hare a certain power to produce love," give hares as gifts, "attempting to secure the objects of their affections by a compelling magic art."

-- Excerpted from Cassell's Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol and Spirit
by Randy P. Conner, David Hatfield Sparks and Mariya Sparks
p. 170

Image: Roman Hare Mosaic (350 CE).

Morning Light XLVIII

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

November Hare

Image: Kerry Buck.

Hallowtide Transformations

. . . Halloween developed from a pagan holy day, the ancient Celtic feast of Samhain (pronounced sow-in), which was the eve of the new year. It was a time when the veil between this world and the next was at its thinnest, and people and spirits could “cross over,” could pass back and forth between the two worlds. Huge bonfires were lit on hilltops – some say to frighten away evil spirits; others, to warm the souls of the departed. Perhaps both.

. . .[G]ay people who are conscious of having undertaken the often difficult (even scary!) journey of coming out of the closet, are very much open to the idea of new beginnings, of “thin places” (i.e., fragile opportunities), of crossing thresholds and expanding boundaries, of walking in more than one world.

Gay people, like witches of old, are very adept at transformation. And as Michael Ventura points out: “Witch-power is transformative power [within an awareness of] humanity as not entirely of this world, the world of daily life . . . It is to imagine us, rather, as a living gate between this world and worlds beyond. As through humanity were the very membrane through which what we now call ‘information’ passes between the worlds – information, in this case, being force, energy, a kind of wind, through which come messages, healings, destructions, visions, transformations.”

Sherman Alexie [says] the indigenous peoples of the Americas view[ed] gay people as “magical.” Yes, folks, we’re in the realm of the mystics now; of witches, dervishes, bodhisattvas, shamans . . . all those people across time and cultures who, in Ventura’s words, can “consciously place themselves at the gateway or passageway [between the worlds]; take responsibility for being there; and . . . make transformation in this realm possible.”

And I don’t believe that we’re talking only about this reality and a world or worlds beyond it, but the different “worlds” within our reality - the secular world, the church world, the straight world, the gay world. I believe gay people have a special gift and role to play in transforming them all, in one way or another, for the better.

– Michael Bayly
"Halloween Thoughts"
The Wild Reed
October 31, 2009

Images: Sylvain Norget.

Bel Homme

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Starlight Hare

"The Starlight Hare" is a beautiful work of art by Karen Davis, who lives in the Wiltshire countryside of England. She describes herself as an "artist/illustrator, woodcrafter, mother, daydreamer, nature lover and seeker of magic!"

I love the Earth and the night sky, moonlight, hares, foxes, mistletoe, books, music, the smell of woodsmoke, the scent of bluebells and the song of the robin. I am a night owl. If I was a colour I would be indigo.

– Karen Davis

Tan Lines XXXVI

Image: R. Müller.

The Quintessential Quarry

Writes Simon Carnell in Hare:

The earliest extant hunting treatise is composed as if almost everything that can be said about the art can be done so by considering the pursuit of hares with hounds. For Xenophon, roughly 70 percent of whose Cynegeticus or 'Hunting with Hounds' is about hare hunting, the hare is the quintessential quarry, virtually synonymous with the pleasures of the chase — "so pleasing, that whoever sees it trailed, or found, or pursued, or taken, forgets everything he is most attached to." For this retired Greek general writing in the fourth century BC, as for later theorists of the hunt, it is the hare's combination of speed, endurance and 'artfulness' that makes it so suitable for sport. A sport which consisted of following on foot what must have been relatively slow-moving scent-hounds, for he writes that "she is not overtaken by the dogs by speed alone, she is so fast; if they are caught, it is in spite of their natural physique, by accident."

— Simon Carnell
Hare
p. 91

See also the previous post: Vile, Gluttonous, and Cruel

Image: "The Hunted Hare" by Akinga.

Morning Light XLVII

Image: Arthur Keller photographed by Rick Day.

Hares at Play

Sculpture: Julieann Worrall Hood.

Bel Homme XIX

Flaming September,
what can you give me that is true?
Do you remember, do you remember
all the life I gave to you?

– "Flaming September"
Marianne Faithfull
(from the 1995 album A Secret Life)

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

The Golden Hare

Writes SquirralBasket:

. . . One of the most amazing pieces of hare jewellery ever must surely be the golden hare pendant with tinkling bells made by Kit Williams as the prize for solving his “treasure hunt” book Masquerade, published in 1979 . . . It was a picture book containing cryptic clues and riddles that eventually led to the jewel, buried in a crock in the shadow of Catherine of Aragon’s Cross at Ampthill in Bedfordshire.

Tens of thousands of questers all over the world tried to find the treasure but in the end it went to someone who (it was later found) had inside knowledge, which was a terrible shame, as around the same time someone else had actually solved all the riddles and worked out the answer for real.

For several decades now Kit Williams has lived as a recluse, but carried on painting, some of his work being of a rather “titillating” nature but still beautifully detailed and colourful.

The BBC did a fascinating TV programme about him last year, in which he was reunited with his fabulous golden hare.

– "From Mad March Hare to Golden Hare"

SquirrilBasket

March 14, 2010

Related Off-site Link:
Return of the Golden Hare: It captivated Britain – An Epic Treasure Hunt for a Beautiful Jewel Buried in a Cow Field – Jane Fryer (MailOnline.com, August 25, 2009).

Mon Bel Ami

Image: The Leveret

Leap

Notes AirportTechnology.com: 'Leap' is a 56ft red hare designed by artist Lawrence Argent and located in Terminal B of the Sacramento International Airport.

Image 1: Jason A. Knowles.
Image 2: Photographer unknown.

Olympic Male Beauty (Part II)

Above: U.S. wrestler Jordan Burroughs.

Above: U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps.

Above: British gymnast Louis Smith.

Above: French swimmer Camille Lacourt.

Above and left: South African sprint runner Oscar Pistorius.

Above: Canadian diver Alexandre Despatie.

Above: Italian heavyweight boxer Clemente Russo.

Above: U.S. swimmer Nathan Adrian.

Above: U.S. track athlete Nick Symmonds.

Above: Australian diver Matthew Mitcham.

Above: The U.S. rowing team. From left: Glenn Ochal, Henrik Rummel, Charles Cole and Scott Gault.

See also the previous posts:

Olympic Male Beauty (Part I)
The "Sheer Magnificence" of Ricky Berens' "Pretty Good Show"
Wrestling: : "The Heterosexually Acceptable Form of Homosexual Foreplay"
The Domain of Eros
In the Arena

On Sicilian Coins . . .

Images of hares can be found on a wide range of Greek artifacts: on amphorae, bowls, dishes and bronze vessels; on wedding and other rings; necklaces, mirror surrounds, in mural paintings; in the form of zoomorphic scent bottles, and on coins. The motif of eagles, feeding on or carrying off a hare appears on numerous Greek coins. But it also takes place there with many other designs including hares. On Sicilian coins of the fifth century BC there are single, gracefully designed leaping hares; a hare leaping over a dolphin above a wave; a hare over a grasshopper, and another over a fly; a hare over an ear of corn, Nike above; a hare springing over a scallop shell; and another with Pan sitting on a rock. There is also a hare with a dolphin below and a cock above it; a hare springing between a shell and a hippocampus; and a hound standing, head averted, with an inverted hare below. Though the last of these is merely naturalistic, a hunting scene, and though some of the others clearly allude to naturalistic attributes of the creature (chiefly its speed and athleticism, relating it to the dolphin, grasshopper and fly as well as Nike) the presence of the ear of corn also signifies its symbolic association with fertility and increase, just as the presence of Pan alerts us to the association of the hare with the gods and goddesses of the wild and of the chase.

– Simon Carnell

Hare

pp. 59-60

Olympic Male Beauty

Above: A member of the Australian men's water polo team.

Above: Philipp David Boy of the German men's gymnastics team.

Above and below: British driver Tom Daley.

Above: Jake Dalton of the U.S. men's gymnastic team.

Above and below: Brazilian swimmer Marcelo Chierighini.

Above: Swedish decatlete Bjorn Barrefors.

Above: A member of the Greek men's water polo team.

Above: American swimmer Ryan Lochte.

Above: Cameron Van Der Burgh (right), after winning the 100m breaststroke (and breaking the world record time for it).


NEXT: Part II


Related Off-site Links:
Olympics or Gay Porn? — Stacy Lambe (BuzzFeed.com, August 1, 2012).
Boardies, Budgie Smugglers and Euro-Togs — Michael Bayly (The Wild Reed, February 1, 2011).

See also the previous Leveret post:
The "Sheer Magnificence" of Ricky Berens' "Pretty Good Show"
Wrestling: : "The Heterosexually Acceptable Form of Homosexual Foreplay"
The Domain of Eros
In the Arena