About The Images
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Images are powerful, especially when combined with music. Combine music and an image with words and the three together can creating an experience so moving that you are changed forever.
That’s why I have paired each prayer with an image. Each one, along with the music available on each page, is meant to reinforce the message of the prayer as you read it (and, hopefully, speak it out loud).
I plan to offer you more helpful information about images in the future, and about how to use them for deep healing. Meanwhile, this page is really just for fun. It simply gives you some information on the images I've used in case you're curious about any of them.
Unless otherwise indicated, the images used on this site are mine. Photoshop has been used to extract sculptures from their backgrounds. Non-photographic images were created through a combination of freehand drawing and Photoshop.
At the time I took these photos I never anticipated using them as anything but memories of my travels; so I cannot provide you with the names of the sculptures or sculptors.
Most are photos I took in 1998 while in Paris, France and are of artwork displayed in the Louvre. So let me take you back, if just for an instant, to Paris.If you have never been to Paris and you love art, do whatever you can to visit the City of Light (La Ville-Lumière) because, in Paris, art is everywhere. Sculpture adorns bridges and buildings as well as museums.
(Take a French class before you go, if you can, and be sure to read French Or Foe and memorize the "ten magic words" for getting a Parisian to go out of his way to help you, the non-French speaker) out. These words really do work and will help smooth your way.)
I so adored Paris that I spent nearly a month there, practically living in her art museums and galleries. There is so much to see and experience.
For instance, I found myself face to face with Van Gogh's Starry Night over the Rhone in the Musée d'Orsay. Having only ever seen a tiny thumbnail of it in a book, I was not prepared for the effect it had on me. I wept. I found it that amazing.
While in Paris I took dozens of photos just for the pleasure of it, yetI missed the one image I would have loved to have, still impressed on my mind even now.
It was nearly sunset and I was walking on the quai (the path below street level that runs next to the Seine) when I came across a stone carver. With hammer and chisel he was chipping away at a work in marble, creating a thing of beauty right before me, sculpting a face for an ancient bridge he was helping to restore.
Several faces, sculpted over the previous weeks or months, were already installed. We never see this kind of artistic craftsmanship applied to public infrastructure in the U.S., much less see artisans repairing it. Nearly a lost occupation (and art) even in Europe, a stone carver busy at his work is extraordinary to witness.
The icing on the cake: he gave me a sweet smile and nodded in response to my obvious admiration.
That experience really hit me.
We live in a culture that sacrifices quality and beauty and care in order to have cheap things quickly. The soul is being squeezed out of everything, and it is being squeezed out of us.
Yet we have been willing participants in the degradation of the quality of our lives. We have allowed ourselves to be steadily programmed to want more. We have allowed economic leaders to codify the idea that every animal and object is a "thing" without spiritual impact and to make price, not spiritual significance, our moral compass.
Yet as the world around us is devalued, stripped of quality and made uglier, the energetic and spiritual consequences upon us are proving to be devastating.
So, whatever you do, put the quality of your own soul into it. It is so important to make everything you do uplifting to others and to yourself. It is so important to do quality work because then the labor of your life will have meaning and soul and a positive effect on others.
Make whatever you do and whatever you create a prayer to God meant to uplift the world and you cannot go wrong.
P.S. See below for more information on specific images.
About - This photo of me is on both the About and Contact pages.
Contact - This is me sitting in a chair on the patio of my winter home in Florida. The Anclotte River is in the background.
Images - The top image is a memorial to my great old basset hound, Buddy, who was a very patient, loving and good-natured friend. It's probably hard to tell, but that's him in each negative. I scanned a section of developed medium format film and colorized the image in Photoshop.
The image of the camera is courtesy of Wikipedia.
Links - I drew a simple sketch of five different types of links joined, scanned it into Photoshop and colorized it.
Addictions - This man fighting with a large snake is a sculpture in the Louvre.
Align - This sculpture is, perhaps, in the Jardin des Tuilaries, perhaps in the Louvre. I am not really sure where this photo was taken.
Attack - This sad and disturbing sculpture is in the Louvre.
Beauty - A section of the California coast taken in 2000 near Capitola.
Body - This graceful woman is a marble sculpture in the Louvre.
Children - This is a photo of me when I was about three or four years old. (The black and white original was colorized by the original photography studio.)
Devastation - A silhouette of shattered glass, this image and the photo at the top of the God Prayer were sent to me for use on this site by Michel Proulx, a professional photographer. He has an archive of thousands of quality photos available for sale. Contact him at: symbiosis@sympatico.ca
Earth - A scene from a park in Paris.
Energy - My husband and I visited Goderich, Ontario, a historic town on Lake Huron, where I took a photo of the setting sun using a star filter. Back at home I extracted the shape and colorized it with Photoshop.
God - This and the photo at the top of the prayer for "Devastation" were sent to me for use on this site, as a courtesy, by Michel Proulx, a professional photographer. He has an archive of thousands of quality photos, available for sale. You may contact him at: symbiosis@sympatico.ca
Homeless - This sculpture is part of a larger, memorial work in Paris dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust. It depicts a father, this mother and their children as they rest while facing the awful reality of their dislocation.
Iraq - This compassionate soldier is a sculpture in the Louvre.
Lorenzo - I took this photo with an open shutter as I spun around in a clearing in which Christmas lights were strung from Redwoods. It was in the backyard of a friend in California. The result were lines of light against a black background. I used Photoshop to distort the photo and form a circle of light through which other lightrepresenting myelingrows. My thinking is that Light, guided by our thought, creates everything including the growth of myelin.
Love - This sculpture of a man looking to heaven is in the Louvre. Whether he is adoring God, thanking God for his human beloved, mourning lost love, or beseeching God to send him love, he appears to have surrendered to love. (I decided against using Rodin's sculpture The Kiss because my prayer is not just to be used to attract romantic love, but to also increase our depth of love for God, our lives, ourselves, and all beings.)
Mid-East - This is a composite image that took many hours to create in Photoshop. The shape is the area comprising the entire Middle East. My feeling is that an angel sits upon a peace sign waiting for those below to listen to their better natures and stop fighting.
911 - An angel sculpture at a grave in a cemetery in Colma, California. The graveyard of San Francisco, Colma has few living residents, but acres of cemeteries and over a million graves. Wyatt Earp, William Randolph Hearst and the founder of Bank of America, Amadeo Giannini, are just three of the famous historical figures interred there.
Peace - A detail from a church window in France that reads Reine De La Paix (Queen of Peace).
Transformation - This is a double exposure in which a sunflower (grown in my backyard) is superimposed over a mask I made as an expression and representation of my creative and transformative self.
United States of America - A photo of the Statue of Liberty was downloaded from the Library of Congress section on Historical Architecture.
Work - "Joseph the Carpenter" by the painter Georges de la Tour. Marianne Williamson used this same image on the cover of her beautiful and moving book, Illuminata, which is comprised of "Thoughts, Prayers and Rites of Passage."
Worthiness (changed to Prayer for Self-Esteem) - This image is a double exposure of the ocean superimposed over me working on a painting. The idea here is to accept the gifts of God, to accept gifts of creativity and life from the vast sea of the subconscious.
Gandhi - This image was originally downloaded from www.mahatma.org, created by the Mahatma Gandhi Foundation in India, but that site isn't currently functional (March 2010) and has posted a message that it is being rebuilt.
Mother Teresa - This image was downloaded back in 2002 from www.judithcorsino.com, but she has changed her site and this image is no longer there. She is now promoting her genealogical book on the family Carvallo. Note: her book is written in Italian and I had found her site by doing a search under Madre Teresa de Calcuta.
St. Francis - This image was downloaded from a beautiful Italian site that had been dedicated to St. Francis of Assisi (www.san-francesco.org) that currently (March 2010) is parked with a domain host.
The Adventure - A detail from "The Creation of Adam" which is part of Michelangelo's painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, Italy and which I downloaded from Wikipedia.
America's Call - I drew a simple sketch of a dove, scanned it into Photoshop and colorized it stylistically to represent the Stars and Stripesand, therefore, the U.S.A.soaring to new heights of peace and enlightenment.
Prayerforce: 365 daily prayers
Available as an ebook or hard cover volume.
Pandia Publishing "Be The Light"
Prayerforce.Org ©2003 Clyo Beck
Background Image Courtesy Nicole Campbell