Particles and Waves, Galaxies and Cells

 I've been in another online journaling class offered by the Grunewald Guild.  It follows a similar pattern as the others:  we're reading a common book, we're sketching and putting our sketches online in a private Facebook group, and we meet periodically in a Zoom session to talk about it all.  This class is making our way through Barbara A. Holmes' Race and the Cosmos.  We're using the second edition, which Holmes tells us (in a foreward) that she's completely redone in the wake of revelations/discoveries in the 20 years since the first edition was published.

Some of us immediately started doing watercolor galaxies--a quick "how to" search will show you that creating watercolor galaxies is quite a thing right now.  I watched one of the videos that had inspired one of our group members, and I wasn't inspired to do my own watercolor galaxy.  However, as you will see, I'm doing an approach to galaxies of my own.

On pages 80-82 of the book, there's some interesting theology that mixes cosmic dust, communion, and the cosmos.  There's this quote by David Toolan on p. 82 that gives you a taste of the larger material:  "Swallow this, Jesus effectively declares, I am God's promise for the elements, the exemplary inside of nature, its secret wish fulfilled.  Assume my role.  Swallow me and you will have taken in what God imagines for matter--that it be spirited and at peace."

So to the sketch above, which I thought of as a moon or a planet, I added the cross in the middle that made me think of the eucharist host, the disc of bread, the wafer.

I really liked the effect of the white acrylic ink mixed with the colored markers, so I continued to experiment with the next sketch:

I also wanted to do something to illuminate this quote from Barbara Brown Taylor:  "God is the web, the energy, the space, the light--not captured in them . . . but revealed in that singular vast net of relationship that animates everything that is" (quoted on p. 81, original quote from Taylor's work, The Luminous Web:  Essays on Science and Religion).  I added the thin, black lines thinking I was creating a web, but I also liked the stained glass effect:

For my next sketch, I wanted a smaller, white circle.  I was still thinking about communion and the wafer, but also the cell, also an embryo:

I added the dots because I was also thinking about this quote from David Toolan:  "the everlasting desire of cosmic dust to mean something great and God's promise that it shall be so" (p. 82).  I also wrote a haiku-like thing:

Desire of dust
God gathers the scraps of stars
Secret wish fulfilled

I liked the small, white blob, so I wanted to do something with a larger circle in my next sketch.  By this point, the book was talking about particles and waves, so my brain went in that direction.  I love the overall sketch, but I really love seeing what each black marker can do:

It's been a fun series, and I don't think I'm done yet.  I love when sketches speak to each other, when the work of others in a journaling class start talking to each other, of how we can respond to a book in this way.

As Barbara A. Holmes says, "When we are fully alert in spirit, mind, and body, we are more than we imagine and can accomplish more than we suppose" (p. 45).