Diversion 2012 by Drea
“Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” ~ Mary Oliver
http://dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com/featured/diversion-2012-drea-jensen.html

Sometimes
By Mary Oliver

1.

Something came up
out of the dark.
It wasn’t anything I had ever seen before.
It wasn’t an animal
or a flower,
unless it was both.

Something came up out of the water,
a head the size of a cat
but muddy and without ears.
I don’t know what God is.
I don’t know what death is.

But I believe they have between them
some fervent and necessary arrangement.

2.

Sometimes
melancholy leaves me breathless…

3.

Later I was in a field full of sunflowers.
I was feeling the heat of midsummer.
I was thinking of the sweet, electric
drowse of creation,

when it began to break.

In the west, clouds gathered.
Thunderheads.
In an hour the sky was filled with them.

In an hour the sky was filled
with the sweetness of rain and the blast of lightning.
Followed by the deep bells of thunder.

Water from the heavens! Electricity from the source!
Both of them mad to create something!

The lighting brighter than any flower.
The thunder without a drowsy bone in its body.

4.

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

5.

Two or three times in my life I discovered love.
Each time it seemed to solve everything.
Each time it solved a great many things
but not everything.
Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and
thoroughly, solved everything.

6.

God, rest in my heart
and fortify me,
take away my hunger for answers,
let the hours play upon my body

like the hands of my beloved.
Let the cathead appear again-
the smallest of your mysteries,
some wild cousin of my own blood probably-
some cousin of my own wild blood probably,
in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.

7.

Death waits for me, I know it, around
one corner or another.
This doesn’t amuse me.
Neither does it frighten me.

After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.
It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.
I walked slowly, and listened

to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

Flighty 2011 By Drea
Even though we usually associate current with water, there is a powerful current in our everyday lives.
http://dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com/featured/flighty-2011-drea-jensen.html

Summer Story
By Mary Oliver

When the hummingbird
sinks its face
into the trumpet vine,
into the funnels

of the blossoms,
and the tongue
leaps out
and throbs,

I am scorched
to realize once again
how many small, available things
are in the world

that aren’t
pieces of gold
or power–
that nobody owns

or could buy even
for a hillside of money–
that just
float about the world,

or drift over the fields,
or into the gardens,
and into the tents of the vines,
and now here I am

spending my time,
as the saying goes,
watching until the watching turns into feeling,
so that I feel I am myself

a small bird
with a terrible hunger,
with a thin beak probing and dipping
and a heart that races so fast

it is only a heartbeat ahead of breaking-
and I am the hunger and the assuagement,
and also I am the leaves and the blossoms,
and, like them, I am full of delight, and shaking.

Eye of Horus 2013 by Drea
A person’s words can only say so much, look to their eyes to see them for who they truly are.
http://dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com/featured/eye-of-horus-2013-drea-jensen.html

Moss
By Mary Oliver

Maybe the idea of the world as flat isn’t a tribal memory or an archetypal memory, but something far older ~ a fox memory, a worm memory, a moss memory.

Memory of leaping or crawling or shrugging rootlet by rootlet forward, across the flatness of everything.

To perceive of the earth as round needed something else ~ standing up! ~ that hadn’t yet happened.

What a wild family! Fox and giraffe and wart hog, of course. But these also: bodies like tiny strings, bodies like blades and blossoms! Cord grass, Christmas fern, soldier moss! And here comes grasshopper, all toes and knees and eyes, over the little mountains of dust.

When I see the black cricket in the woodpile, in autumn, I don’t frighten her. And when I see the moss grazing upon the rock, I touch her tenderly,

sweet cousin.

Aperture 2014 by Drea
Celebrate and embrace who you are.
Have fun expressing your uniqueness and enjoy life by savoring your dreams.
http://dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com/featured/aperture-2014-drea-jensen.html

Summer Morning

Heart,
I implore you,
it’s time to come back
from the dark,

it’s morning,
the hills are pink
and the roses
whatever they felt

in the valley of night
are opening now
their soft dresses,
their leaves

are shining.
Why are you laggard?
Sure you have seen this
a thousand times,

which isn’t half enough.
Let the world
have its way with you,
luminous as it is

with mystery
and pain-
graced as it is
with the ordinary.

~ Mary Oliver

Red Coral 2003 By Drea
There are layers upon layers on nearly everything that cover up what they really are.
Peel those layers back to see that most things are honestly the same. http://dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com/featured/red-coral-2003-drea-jensen.html

The Plum Trees
by Mary Oliver

Such richness flowing
through the branches of summer and into

the body, carried inward on the five
rivers! Disorder and astonishment

rattle your thoughts and your heart
cries for rest but don’t

succumb, there’s nothing
so sensible as sensual inundation. Joy

is a taste before
it’s anything else, and the body

can lounge for hours devouring
the important moments. Listen,

the only way
to tempt happiness into your mind is by taking it

into the body first, like small
wild plums.

Spirit 2007 by Drea
Thinning of the veils between worlds is the feeling invoked in this painting.
The spirit behind the universe comes through.
http://dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com/featured/spirit-2007-drea-jensen.html

Spirit Call
By Drea

Connect with power
gift of conversation
authentic chemistry.

Snare heart with wild intention
reel in spark
awaken internal growth.

Create beautiful reality
magnetize adoration
answer spirit call.

Letting Paint Dry 2012 by Drea
Though we are constantly surrounded by magnetic energy, by looking carefully, we can find internal harmony.
http://dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com/featured/letting-paint-dry-2012-drea-jensen.html

“I was always attracted not by some quantifiable, external beauty, but by something deep down, something absolute. Just as some people have a secret love for rainstorms, earthquakes, or blackouts, I liked that certain undefinable something directed my way by members of the opposite sex. For want of a better word, call it magnetism. Like it or not, it’s a kind of power that snares people and reels them in.”
~ Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

Resonance 2013 by Drea
“Could it be love, with its sweet clamor of passion?”
http://dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com/featured/resonance-2013-drea-jensen.html

What is the Greatest Gift?
By Mary Oliver

What is the greatest gift?
Could it be the world itself-the oceans, the meadowlark,
the patience of the trees in the wind?
Could it be love, with its sweet clamor of passion?

Something else-something else entirely
holds me in thrall.
That you have a life that I wonder about
more than I wonder about my own.
That you have a life-courteous and intelligent-
that I wonder about more than I wonder about my own.
That you have a soul-your own, no one else’s-
that I wonder about more than I wonder about my own.
So that I find my soul clapping its hands for yours
more than my own.

Veracity 2011 By Drea
Truth comes from the heart is what this painting invokes in me.
I used layers of paint to add depth, rubbing for blending and the pulling out of shapes for form.
http://dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com/featured/veracity-2011-drea-jensen.html%5B/caption%5D

Yes! No!
by Mary Oliver

How necessary it is to have opinions! I think the spotted trout
lilies are satisfied, standing a few inches above the earth. I
think serenity is not something you just find in the world,
like a plum tree, holding up its white petals.

The violets, along the river, are opening their blue faces, like
small dark lanterns.

The green mosses, being so many, are as good as brawny.

How important it is to walk along, not in haste but slowly,
looking at everything and calling out

Yes! No! The

swan, for all his pomp, his robes of glass and petals, wants
only to be allowed to live on the nameless pond. The catbrier
is without fault. The water thrushes, down among the sloppy
rocks, are going crazy with happiness. Imagination is better
than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless
and proper work.

Perception 2011 by Drea
Though there are always people looking at you, there is never just one impression that you leave.
Everyone has their own perception.
http://dreajensengallery.artistwebsites.com/featured/perception-2011-drea-jensen.html

First Happenings
By Mary Oliver

A morning-glory morning with its usual glory, dawn particularly startling with citrons and mauves, petunias in the garden flashing their tender signals of gratitude. The sunflowers creak in their grass-colored dresses. Cosmos, the four o’clocks, the sweet alyssum nod to the roses who so very politely nod back.

And now it is time to go to work. At my desk I look out over the fluttering petals, little fires. Each one fresh and almost but not quite replicable.

Consider wearing such a satisfying body! Consider being, with your entire self, such a quiet prayer!