Visual Poetry By Gina
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2017 exquisite corpse games

11/23/2017

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This piece is part of the 2017 Exquisite Corpse Games http://exquisitecorpsegames.com, a blind artistic collaboration, in which each artist was randomly assigned the creation of a head, torso, or legs. The assembled pieces were unveiled at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Pete, FL on Nov 2, 2018. 

My piece, True Self, is the torso portion of the completed work. It was inspired by a quote by C.S. Lewis:

What I call my ‘self’ now is hardly a person at all. It’s mainly a meeting place for various natural forces, desires and fears, etc., some of which come from my ancestors, and some from my education, some perhaps from devils. The self you were really intended to be is something that lives not from nature but from God.


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In silence

6/16/2017

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O be still while 
You are still alive,
And all things live around you speaking
(I do not hear)
To your own being,
Speaking by the Unknown
That is in you and in themselves.

​-Thomas Merton

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Casting Cares

2/5/2017

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Cast all your cares on Him, because He cares for you.

-1 Peter 5:7

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Woven

11/17/2016

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My frame was not hidden from You when I was made in the secret place,
When I was woven in the depths of the earth,
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
All the days ordained for me were written in Your book
Before one of them came to be.

Psalm 139:15-16

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Compassion

8/24/2016

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Compassion asks to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.

-Henri Nouwen

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Neutral Madness

3/9/2016

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I sit in darkness. I sit in human silence. 
I begin to hear the eloquent night.
The world of this night resounds from 
heaven to hell with animal eloquence, 
with the savage innocence of a million
unknown creatures.
The enormous vitality of their music 
pounds and rings and throbs and echoes
until it gets into everything, and swamps
the whole world in its neutral madness.

​-Thomas Merton

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moment of surrender

12/13/2015

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My body's now a begging bowl
That's begging to get back
begging to get back
To my heart
To the rhythm of my soul
To the rhythm of my unconsciousness
To the rhythm that yearns 
To be released from control.

-U2, Moment of Surrender

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Show me where it hurts

11/11/2015

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Show me where it hurts, God said, and every cell in my body burst into tears before His tender eyes.

​-Rabia of Basra

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eternal present

9/8/2015

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Now is the time to meet You, God,
Where the night is wonderful,
Where the forest opens out under the moon
And the living things sing terribly
  that only the present is eternal.

-Thomas Merton

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Unmade

4/8/2015

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Each breath I drew let into me new terror, joy, overpowering sweetness. I was pierced through and through with the arrows of it. I was being unmade. I was no one.
​
-C.S. Lewis, ​Till We Have Faces

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Glorious day II

3/9/2015

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There in the ground His body lay, light of the world by darkness slain;
Then bursting forth in glorious day, up from the grave He rose again.
And as He stands in victory, sin's curse has lost its  grip on me. For I am His and He is mine, bought with the precious blood of Christ.

-Keith Getty & Stewart Townend, ​In Christ Alone

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Glorious Day

2/25/2015

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There in the ground His body lay, light of the world by darkness slain; 
Then bursting forth in Glorious Day, up from the grave He rose again.
And as He stands in victory, sin's curse has lost its grip on me.
For I am His and He is mine, bought with the precious blood of Christ.

-Keith Getty & Stuart Townend, In Christ Alone


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Garden of Solitude

1/13/2015

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​

​This is the difficult road of conversion, the conversion from loneliness into solitude. Instead of running away from our loneliness and trying to forget or sent it, we have to protect stand turn it into a fruitful solitude. To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude.

-Henri Nouwen, Seeds of Hope

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White Stars

10/30/2014

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When the white stars talk together like sisters
And when the winter hills
Raise their grand semblance in the freezing night,
Somewhere one window
Bleeds like the brown eye of an open force.

Hills, stars
White stars that stand above the eastern stable.


​Look down and offer Him.
The dim adoring light of your belief.
Whose small Heart bleeds with infinite fire.

Shall not this Child
(when we shall hear the bells of His amazing voice)
conquer the winter of our hateful century?

And when His Lady Mother leans upon the crib,
Lo, with what rapiers
Those two loves fence and flame their brilliancy!

Here in this straw lie planned the fires
That will melt all our sufferings:
He is our Lamb, our Holocaust!

And one by one the shepherds, with their snowy feet,
Stamp and shake out their hats upon the stable dirt,
And one by one kneel down to look upon their Life.

-Thomas Merton, A Christmas Card

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True Form

10/19/2014

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Nothing is yet in its true form.

-C.S. Lewis

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Beach Glass

10/1/2014

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While you walk the water’s edge,
turning over concepts
I can’t envision, the honking buoy
serves notice that at any time
the wind may change,
the reef-bell clatters
its treble monotone, deaf as Cassandra
to any note but warning. The ocean,
cumbered by no business more urgent
than keeping open old accounts
that never balanced,
goes on shuffling its millenniums
of quartz, granite, and basalt.
                                   It behaves
toward the permutations of novelty--
driftwood and shipwreck, last night’s
beer cans, spilt oil, the coughed-up
residue of plastic—with random
impartiality, playing catch or tag 
or touch-last like a terrier,
turning the same thing over and over,
over and over. For the ocean, nothing
is beneath consideration. 
                                   The houses
of so many mussels and periwinkles
have been abandoned here, it’s hopeless
to know which to salvage. Instead
I keep a lookout for beach glass— 
amber of Budweiser, chrysoprase
of Almadén and Gallo, lapis
by way of (no getting around it, 
I’m afraid) Phillips’
Milk of Magnesia, with now and then a rare
translucent turquoise or blurred amethyst
of no known origin. 
                             The process
goes on forever: they came from sand,
they go back to gravel, 
along with the treasuries
of Murano, the buttressed
astonishments of Chartres,
which even now are readying
for being turned over and over as gravely
and gradually as an intellect
engaged in the hazardous
redefinition of structures
no one has yet looked at.

-Amy Clampitt, ​Beach Glass


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The Body II

9/10/2014

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Christ has no body now on earth but yours,
no hands but yours,
no feet but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which is to look out 
Christ's compassion to the world;
Yours are the feet with which He is to go about
doing good;
Yours are the hands with which He is to bless men now.

-Teresa of Avila, Christ Has No Body

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Primordial Daybreak

6/2/2014

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You, all-accomplishing Word of the Father
are the light of the primordial daybreak
over the spheres.
You, the foreknowing mind of divinity,
foresaw all your works
as You willed them,
Your prescience hidden in the heart of your power,
Your power like a wheel around the world,
whose circling never began and never slides to an end.

-Hildegard of Bingen

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Awake II

5/27/2014

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In these bodies we will live,
In these bodies we will die
Where you invest your love
You invest your life
Awake my soul.....
Awake my soul.....
Awake my soul.....
For you were made to meet your Maker.

-Mumford & Sons, Awake My Soul

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The Cage

5/19/2014

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My body is a cage
We take what we're given
Just because you've forgotten
Doesn't mean you're forgiven

I'm living in an age 
That screams my name at night
But when I get to the doorway
There's no one in sight

Set my spirit free
Set my spirit free

Set my body free

-Arcade Fire, My Body is a Cage

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Enjoy Me

5/2/2014

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Just these two words He spoke changed my life,
"Enjoy Me."
What a burden I thought I was to carry - 
a crucifix, as did He.
Love once said to me, "I know a song, 
would you like to hear it?"
And laughter came from every brick
in the street and every pore in the sky.
After a night of prayer, He changed my life when
He sang,
"Enjoy Me."

-St. Teresa of Avila

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Ashes

5/2/2014

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Ashes of paper, ashes of a world 
Wandering, when fire is done:
We argue with the drops of rain!

Until One comes Who walks unseen
Even in elements we have destroyed.
Deeper than any nerve
He enters flesh and bone.
Planting His truth, He puts our 
substance on. 
Air, earth and rain rework the frame that fire has ruined.
What was dead is waiting for His Flame.
Sparks of His Spirit spend their seeds & hide
To grow like irises, born before summertime.

-Thomas Merton

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Substance

4/17/2014

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In all those dark moments, of God,
grant that I may understand that
it is You who are painfully parting
the fibers of my being in order to
penetrate to the very marrow of
my substance.

-Pierre Tielhard de Chardin

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The Fisherman

2/4/2014

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Although I can see him still -
The freckled man who goes
To a gray place on a hill
In gray Connemara clothes
At dawn to cast his flies -
It's long since I began 
To call up to the eyes
This wise and simple man.
All day I'd looked in the face
What I had hoped it would be
To write for my own race
And the reality:
The living men that I hate,
The dead man that I loved,
The craven man in his seat,
The insolent unreproved -
And no knave brought to book
Who has won a drunken cheer -
The witty man and his joke
Aimed at the commonest ear,
The clever man who cries
The catch cries of the clown,
The beating down of the wise 
And great Art beaten down.
Maybe a twelve-month since
Suddenly I began,
In scorn of this audience,
Imagining a man,
And his sun-freckled face
And gray Connemara cloth
Climbing up to a place
Where stone is dark with froth,
And the down turn of his wrist
When the flies drop in the stream -
And man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream;
And cried, "Before I am old
I shall have written him one 
Poem maybe as cold 
And passionate as the dawn."

-William Butler Yeats

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The Dream

1/17/2014

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I am, you anxious one. Do you not hear me
rush to claim you with each eager sense?
Now my feelings have found wings, and, circling,
Whitely fly about your countenance.
Here my spirit in its dress of stillness
stands before you -oh do you not see?
In your glance does not my Maytime prayer
grow to ripeness as upon a tree?

Dreamer, it is I who an your dream.
But would you awake, I am your will,
and master of all splendor, and I grow 
to a sphere, like stars poised high and still,
with time's singular city stretched below.

-Ranier Maria Rilke


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    Author

    Gina White
    Mixed Media Artist

    Categories

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    Arcade Fire
    Hildegard Of Bingen
    MKW
    Mumford & Sons
    Pierre Tielhard De Chardin
    Rabia Of Basra
    Ranier Maria Rilke
    St. Teresa Of Avila
    Thomas Merton
    U2
    William Butler Yeats

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