In his Greenbelt lecture – Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace – John O’Donohue hinted at the fragmentation of Life and Lives, and that work is involved in making sense of one’s Life; he also hinted at the incredible beauty to be found in those who engage in Life-work, understanding and maintaining the integrity of their Life toward identity.

Thought Work – John O’Donohue (Conamara Blues)

The mind is an old crow

Who knows only to gather dead twigs,

Then take them back to the vacancy

Between the branches of the parent tree

And entwine them around the emptiness

With silence and unfailing patience

Until what was fallen, withered and lost

Is now set to fill with dreams a nest.

Retrieve & Reweave

“This is the art of bringing your mind home, that if your mind [were] able to retrieve and re-weave all that is withered and forlorn and lost in your life, then the integrity of your memory and identity of your life would be incredible [if not beautiful] (Divine Beauty – The Invisible Embrace, John O’Donohue, Greenbelt).

“The presence of beauty is one of the most neglected presences in our contemporary world. Beauty was the word without which the ancient world refused to know itself; beauty was at the heart of everything they considered. In our times, beauty is reduced to glamour. It caters to the surface and the external image. Once you’ve got the up-front hit from it, there’s nothing behind it. Whereas beauty is a far more sophisticated, subtle and really substantial kind of presence (Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, John O’Donohue, Greenbelt).”

CPR Demonstration Farm – Vulcan, Alberta

An evening with my camera, on my own, following a day of photography training in Vulcan, Alberta – it was early November in 2011, and I found this farm and spent an hour or so photographing it.  Many years later, I would discover that this 1912 farm from a century ago had been a Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) demonstration farm, used to showcase the possibility of farming in southern Alberta. The CPR sold these ‘kit farms’ to aspiring farmers. Without a doubt, consideration had been given to laying out the homestead and farm buildings to attract the visual and pragmatic interest of farmers seeing it in a photograph and those seeing it up close, in real-time.  The visual appeal of a prairie farm and evening winter cloud work caught my attention here. The farm still stands. I saw it from the road on 13 August 2023 on a drive from Lethbridge to Edmonton. (Source: CPR Demonstration Farm, Chris Doering, ‘Off the Beaten Path with Chris & Connie,’ 9 July 2020)

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder has another meaning. If the beholding eye is gracious and has beautified itself, then it will pick up the beautiful. When we can’t notice the beauty, it is not that it is absent. It is just that our vision and gaze has become coarsened (Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, John O’Donohue, Greenbelt).”

Note – The collage presented here has replaced the single image of a white, late-sixties Ford half-ton in Vavenby, British Columbia.

“Rodin did not concern himself with the beautiful. His art was meticulous, careful and slow. The beautiful comes only in its own terms. ‘Like in the forest when the forest is free of strangers in the evening, the shy animals turn up at the river to drink.’  And, that’s the way the beautiful actually comes (Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, John O’Donohue, Greenbelt).”

“Without beauty, life would be unbearable. We need the beautiful as much as we need love. Beauty and the beautiful are not the preserve of luxus or the elite privileged. Everyone needs it. There are people in the world now who are holding out on the rawest edges of what’s humane – in refugee camps, in prisons, in hospitals, in places of starvation – who are only able to hold out because they’ve got some glimpse of the beautiful. Sometimes beauty is like that. It turns up as a minuscule moment in a dark landscape and recalls us to possibility and inspiration and encouragement. We can hold out in very bleak places if we are in touch with the presence of beauty (John O’Donohue – ‘Divine Beauty, The Invisible Embrace,’ Greenbelt).”

Alzheimer’s disease had found Dad and brought a need to establish assisted living care closer to family. In the summer of 2011, having pulled Dad from his retirement in Qualicum Beach, British Columbia and taken him home to Edmonton, Alberta, the tasks of clearing Dad’s house in readiness to be sold and settling Dad’s estate were next. With a body stiff from two days of driving and a need to stand and move, a side road near Vavenby, British Columbia, presented rusting relics, the opportunity to see these trucks that had had Lives and the opportunity to engage my curiosity, imagination and thinking.  The owner allowed me to photograph them.