I’m a docent at the Frist Center for Visual Arts here in Nashville and gave a tour yesterday on our closing day for the Italian automobile show, Bellissima! It was a wonderful show and attracted large crowds throughout its four months at the Frist. We’ve just started training for our next 1st floor exhibition: “Samurai: The Way of the Warrior” which opens November 4.

I like what Frederick Buechner says: “Literature, painting, music—the most basic lesson that all art teaches us is to stop, look, and listen to life on this planet, including our own lives, as a vastly richer, deeper, more mysterious business than most of the time it ever occurs to us to suspect as we bumble along from day to day on automatic pilot….In effect, the artist is putting a frame around the moment, and what the frame does is enable us to see not just something about the moment but the moment itself in all its ineffable ordinariness and particularity…the frame sets it off from everything else that distracts us. It makes possible a second thought. It make us NOTICE the moment.”

We are frantic in our pursuit of life. We no longer have the time to listen to voices outside our own, the rustle of leaves, the creak of a chair or the water running in the kitchen sink when washing the dinner dishes. We no longer have lengths of time with pauses when we can listen to the rest of life.

Literature, painting and music provide a sanctuary in life where I can listen to the musical notes but also the silence in between the notes, drinking in the beauty of both the sounds and the quiet.

Blessings,
Agatha