Pictures, Poems, & Song
....inspired by George MacDonald
“Love Is Home,” is from MacDonald’s Violin Songs. This poem appealed to me for its combination of precision and wildness, representing both the duty and the freedom involved in coming home to the God worth believing in. My sincere thanks to sublime soprano Dru Rutledge for singing it so beautifully.
I stumbled upon George MacDonald when my husband and I were getting into creative writings and story-telling books. I read The Princess and the Goblin and then the sequel, The Princess and Curdie. What I love about these stories is the wisdom of not judging others by their outward appearance, but seeking to discover their true selves and their stories, finding their purity of heart and intention.
Lilith was the first MacDonald book I ever read, and has remained my favorite. Mr. Vane's eerie experiences in The Evil Wood, the mystery of Mara, and the affluent yet drab and oppressive existence of the people of Bulika, all of these ideas have always intrigued me. Over the next few years I would revisit the book and find something new, and that eventually became this tribute album.
George MacDonald opened my eyes to Christian mysticism, to the reality of the presence of God in the things he has made. Through his writings, and those of other great mystics and thinkers, I learned and am learning to see more deeply into the world around me, to look with spiritual eyes on what seems everyday and insignificant. The deeper I go into this way of seeing, the more I perceive the hand of God in in the natural world...
Jolyn Canty's watercolor below was inspired by reading George MacDonald's poem, Consider the Ravens, and listening to Mary Lichlyter's musical setting.
