WOW – Advent – vonda drees art

“Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone: who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy.” -Audre Lord

“My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might invite further solidarity. And so on. My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow–which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow–might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive. It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival.” – Ross Gay, Inciting Joy

Welcome to Day 9 of the Wonders of Worship (WOW) series. Although we are admittedly in the season of Lent, the Wonders of Worship series includes other seasons of the church year. Today we ponder Advent.

One way to ponder Advent during Lent is to hold revolutionary hope next to wilderness lament, which makes me think of the work of Audre Lorde and Ross Gay. I was delighted to find this video of Ross reading Audre’s poem, A Litany of Survival.

Joy stirs in me when I see a dragonfly. I love their iridescent wings and bright colors, the way they move, their large eyes. Did you know they have a nearly 360-degree field of vision?! They are ancient, too, having taken to the air some 300 million years ago! Imagine what it would be like to see that completely, to belong to a species so long-living.

Ways to Engage:

Practice Visio Divina (receive, reflect, respond, rest) with the painting.
About a year ago I was walking some country roads in Texas and experienced a swarm of dragonflies. I stood there mesmerized. Bring to mind an encounter of yours with nature that incited joy.
Download the B&W image. Color it on your own or with a friend. Color in silence or while listening to the video linked above. Let it inspire further contemplation/conversation.
You do you. Trust your intuition and engage in the way your heart desires.

To download the black and white image for personal use: on a computer, click and drag the image to your desktop; on a phone, press on the picture until it gives you the option to save it to your photos. The image is formatted to fit on an 8.5″x11″ piece of paper, but feel free to print it whatever size you’d like.

Background: I created a series of forty 5″x7″ watercolor paintings inspired by the elements of worship. It was work commissioned by a project with Nourishing Vocation with Children at St. Olaf College, a program funded through Lilly Endowment’s Nurturing Children Through Worship and Prayer Initiative.

As the paintings are shared, you may notice a pattern: