Today we are visiting my niece, to whom I recently delivered a family heirloom of sorts, a small replica of Rodin's classic sculpture, "The Thinker," a gift I gave my parents many years ago.
Coincidentally, I opened up a book my husband got from the library, "Inevitable Grace: Breakthroughs in the Lives of Great Men and Women," by Piero Ferrucci. There I found a wonderful quote by Rodin that, for the artist,
- "all is beautiful...because he walks forever in the light of spiritual truth. Yes, the great artist, and by this I mean the poet as well as the painter and sculptor, finds even in suffering, in the death of loved ones, in the treachery of friends, something which fills him with a voluptuous though tragic admiration. At times his heart is on the rack, yet stronger than his pain is the bitter joy which he experiences in understanding and giving expression to that pain... When he sees people everywhere destroying each other; when he sees all youth fading, all strength failing, all genius dying, when he is face to face with the will which decreed these tragic laws, more than ever he rejoices in his knowledge, and seized anew by the passion for truth, he is happy."
Lately I have been closing up my parent's home of fifty years, also my childhood home, after losing both of them in the last 9 months. Their home is in escrow and I am now dismantling the last of its furniture, paintings, dishes, memorabilia, and all that made it a reflection of their lives. It's not easy, nearing the final goodbyes to a place full of memories, something that has been a more stable and unchanging part of my life over the last fifty years than my own body.
All that Rodin says speaks to me at this time— the losses and pains that life can bring — and yet there is a beauty behind it all. That beauty, as I see it, is the persistent renewal of love, which arises in the midst of our pains and losses, our tears and sorrows, as surely as tulips and daffodils arise each spring out of the dark earth.
And indeed, on this near-final visit to our family home, my mother's roses, which have been looking poorly in the summer heat of Phoenix since her death in July, have at last begun to return to their full beauty. I cannot take these roses with me. They will stay in the care of the new owners, a landscape architect and his kind wife.
And so instead I took only a picture, the memory of how much my mother was an artist of roses, and most of all a feeling... the persistent renewal of love.
via susanpitcairn.com