Morning Light

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Hare and Ferns

Artist Blandine Anderson set up her ceramic studio in Devon in 1989. Here she produces figurative sculptures, creating complex compositions of both grouped and single animals. Sometimes the landscape takes on a more predominant role in the composition, constructing unique, more abstract forms and providing her characters with a fabulous stage. Her recent work has been inspired by animals in and around her farm in rural Devon.

Some works are animal portraits; others are inspired by sources in the world literature, ranging from exotic tales, to the more familiar myth and folklore.

All Blandine’s work is handmade, no moulds or other repeat devices are used in the building process. All works are hand built stoneware or porcelain clays.

– Source

To see more of Blandine Anderson's sculptures, click here.

Tan Lines XXXVII

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Wrestling with the Angel

Writes Donald L. Boisvert in Out on Holy Ground: Meditations on Gay Men's Spirituality:

Gay men can truly claim and affirm their lives only by coming out, by naming who and what they are, which includes their experience of the sacred. Gay men's joys and sorrows, their lives and relationships, their amazing ways of celebrating human sexuality and community, and their ways of dying – all require a meaningful interpretive framework, a bigger picture that gives sense and focus to human contingency. The religious is encountered wherever human beings crave and create meaning. All spiritualities, including those we choose to call "gay," are about the carving out of meaning, the bringing forth of transcendence, the ultimate wrestling with the angel, to borrow the title of a bestselling book on the religious experiences of gay men. In the biblical language and imagery of yore, the sacred is encountered and named in this wrestling.

See also the previous posts:
Affirming Our Essential Goodness
Gay Consciousness, Sex, and the Evolution of Religion
Hallowtide Transformations
Body and Soul
Gay Identity
Animal Energies
Prince with a Thousand Enemies

Image: Becki Jayne.

In the Winter Garden . . .

. . . Till winter has passed, and spring returns,
winter is here in our garden, my love.
As I watch the vapour of my breath rise,
I say your name, a love for all time.

– Excerpted from "In the Winter Garden"
by Matthew Holloway

Image: The Leveret.