In his Greenbelt lecture — Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace — John O’Donohue spoke to the fragmentation that marks so much of modern life, and to the work required to gather that fragmentation into meaning. He suggested, too, that there is a particular and remarkable beauty to be found in those who undertake that work — people who engage honestly with their own lives, striving to understand and hold together the threads of experience, memory, and becoming that shape who they are.

Thought Work

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

It was early November 2011 — the evening after a day of photography training in Vulcan, Alberta. On my own, with camera in hand, I found this farm and spent an hour or so photographing it in the fading light. What drew me in was the visual conversation between the prairie farm and the winter clouds building overhead.

Many years later, I would discover what I had been photographing. This was a CPR demonstration farm, built in 1912 and used by Canadian Pacific Railway to showcase the agricultural potential of southern Alberta to prospective settlers. The CPR sold these fully equipped kit farms to aspiring farmers, and considerable thought had gone into how they were laid out — the placement of the homestead and outbuildings designed to appeal to farmers, whether they encountered the farm in a photograph or stood before it in person. It was, in its own way, a study in the persuasive power of visual presentation.

The farm still stands. I passed it again on 13 August 2023, on a drive from Lethbridge to Edmonton, and it looked much as it had that November evening more than a decade before.

(Source: Chris Doering, “CPR Demonstration Farm,” 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. The life he had built for himself in retirement at Qualicum Beach, British Columbia, was no longer sustainable, and the time had come to bring him closer to family. In the summer of 2011, we moved him home to Edmonton, and what followed was the hard, tender work of clearing his house and settling his estate in preparation for a sale.

The drive back was long — two days behind the wheel. Somewhere near Vavenby, British Columbia, a side road offered a reason to stop. There, half-hidden and quietly rusting, sat a collection of old trucks. Stiff from driving, I got out to stretch — but it was more than the need to move that held me there. These trucks had lived working lives. They had hauled and strained and weathered, and now they rested in the kind of dignified stillness that only time can produce. Something about them engaged my curiosity and imagination in ways that felt, just then, entirely necessary.

The owner gave me permission to photograph them.