A Year Poured Out

Honest 

  Earnestly I seek you;
   my soul thirsts for you;
   my flesh faints for you, 

in your Name I will lift up my hands.

Pie & Sky

PIE

It's the day before the day before the first day. 

The hushed lull between the birth of a Child and the birth of a new year.  I've experienced much over these few weeks, I'm still ruminating over the stories and songs. 

I love Christmas. 

And I love this time of the year, even if it's a little odd without any snow. 

Speaking of a little odd, here's a recipe I'm posting for you. Yes, a recipe. (I know, odd.)

It's a Brink family tradition during the holidays (and any other day, for that matter) and one that I've been attempting to perfect (with much help of my Grandma) this Christmas season. Enjoy.

"Be good for each other. Be better than you need to be. Make pie." 

- A Prairie Home Companion

Apple Pie Cuts

 Filling:

10 medium sized apples

            (Peeled, sliced)

1 cup of sugar

2 teaspoons of cinnamon

Crust:

2 ½ cups of flour

1 cup of shortening

1teaspoon of salt

 (Mix together like pie crust, until granulated)

1 egg, separated

 Place yolk in a 1 cup measuring glass and fill with milk to the 2/3 cup line.  Whisk together. Set egg white aside in small bowl for later.

Take the crust mix and make a small well in the middle of the bowl. Add the egg and milk mixture all at once. Stir until completely incorporated.

Roll out half of the dough on a floured surface, on a 10 x 15 pan.

Place in pan and sprinkle 2 handfuls of dry flaked cereal (rice crispy, cornflakes etc.) on top of crust. Add apple mixture. Roll out remaining crust and place on top.

Beat egg white until frothy and smear over the top of crust.

Bake at  400˚ for ten minuets and then turn down heat to 375˚ and bake for a remaining 20 minuets.

Glaze:

1 generous cup of powdered sugar

Add a little bit of half& half so the consistency is thin enough to drizzle

Add ¼ teaspoon of vanilla.

Glaze immediately

From the kitchen of Grandma Jan Brink 2007

SKY

Waiting for the breaking

the heavenly host singing

glory

churning for this coming

air and planet humming

glory

to God in the highest

and peace 

to those with whom He is pleased. 

50mm, f/3.5 @ 1/40 A mid winter ev'n sky

Come and take Your Place, Jehovah Shammah

Oh and quite possibly the best wedding party ever:

I've been dreadfully behind in blogging weddings from this summer, slow catching up under a mountain of school and work and a lot of Monday-Tuesday-Wednesdays. However, please enjoy this image. Quite possibly the best wedding part picture ever. Ciao.

Remember

That moment when you realized your life was about to change forever:

3:31pm

                                               A shadow's opposite 1/125 @ f/2.8

                  

Affections

‎"The worship service is not a concert hall but a banquet hall..."



Bifrost Arts from josh franer on Vimeo.

upon seeing the water

All men dream:
 but not equally. 
Those who dream by night
in the dusty recesses of their minds
 wake in the day 
to find that it was vanity:
 but the dreamers of the day 
are dangerous men, 
for they may act their dream with open eyes, 
to make it possible.

 T.E. Lawrence

Portrait of a November Self

Photoshoots and winterboots. 
Learning to cook and hardcover books,
of Lewis and Langston Hughes.

A soft song rising, an Autumn sun shining.
Preparing for winter, out side

Perpetual cold may hit the globe
but my Fire still burns, alive. 

Summer

 Summer.


I've never shot Summer in the Autumn before.
It's the Season that we love and a girl with eyes like jewels.
Summer. It was a beautiful day.

Madison

Prologue 

____________

I've got 3,762 photographs in a folder from this summer alone. Moments captured and then thought about then forgot about, ideas and accidentals and 'what...was I thinking...here' pictures. And because of a small sojourner's sabbatical -a trip to the eye Doctor to get new vision- they lie in my harddrive in neat, categorized order until I can properly articulate up close, the message that I saw far off. It's both a comfort and a jar to know that I'll always have images to fall back on.

I've finally come up for air, it feels. And pleasantly so. 

I'm taking deep breaths of inspiration, feeding the cells of my imagination with the oxygen of Real things. Things that are in one sense just the same as the old things, yet at the same time they are now somehow different. Deeper, richer, truer. Lewis describes this sense of seeing things in a way that is "deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story: in a story you have never heard but very much want to know."  

  My unlined journal is all filled up in black ink with theory's and charts and stats on the source of this story, but my heart is all filled up with the steady secret that this Story is a True one- this grand tale of Real things, A Real Man, Real Words, Real Love- it is not written about me, but I get to partake in the mystery of its unfolding. I stand, reading, singing, speaking, weeping at the beauty of the Truth.

 A business/empire/marketing-driven, self-expressionist yuppie art endeavor will not hold up underneath the weight of this glory.  Mine didn't. I stand comforted by the fact that I don't have what it takes to make a name for myself. Only One man ever did, and he yielded his right to it. He was Real. He's making me Real. 

                                                                       

                                                                                                     ...

Speaking of Real things. I went to Madison, WI this past weekend to experience the sensation of listening to REAL music: Opera. Puccini's LaBoheme was ripe and in season.

The sublime voices, wooshing out of well trained lungs could have just blown the watercolored leaves from their fragile clasps,

 even the old oaks. 

The rustling leaves kicked up by pedestrians,

synonymously sounding with the rustling ideas

clasping onto smiling conversations, 

even the old jokes.

It was lovely. 

A smattering of images from the weekend follows: 

If I've ever loved anything truly

If I've ever loved anything truly,
it is light.

It does not cease to captivate me
to silence me the truest feat
to bring every part of me quiet
to a gentle and steady hum.

Nor does it cease
to surprise me with its beauty, its facets
its ever changing visage
and thus, the words I bring forth
to recall it to you
neither match my feelings or its truth.

(I am not alone in my affection,
the clouds too hold its fleeting rosy tones,
this last bit of day as long as allowed)

The end of each day the most bittersweet
the long night laid out ahead,
just I and the dark.

Yet it dawns just the same every morning,
unless one does not wake,
and in its paleness filtered through the clouds
or in its brilliant cleansing scorch,
hot enough to burn away
all the bitterness built up in the dark,
I am burnt clean.

-Elizabeth Ashton

For with You is the fountain of life;

         In Your light we see light.  And the Life was the Light of men. 

If I've ever love anything truly, let it be the True Light, which enlightens the world.

If I've ever love anyone truly, let him be the Lamb.

A Tennyson

Break, Break, Break

BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Break, break, break,

         On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

         The thoughts that arise in me.

A new month, a million new words wake, crest, wain. November has always been my favorite month, for just that reason. 

Nathan+Allison | Engaged!

Go into all the world and get married. 

Ready: Begin.