To each of us you reveal yourself differently

This image really sang to me this morning; I'm not quite sure why, as it took a long time to find it.

I'm thinking it's the balance of it that calls to me, the equality between light and dark, the punch of the yellow and blue against the subtle grays and browns, the alternating pull of the upper and lower diagonals, the fog in the background and the way it sets off the clarity of the foreground...

But there's also a balance between the calm peacefulness and the watchful readiness of it: you know that at some point people will be using these boats, but at the moment they are just waiting.

I can write all these things, attempting to analyze the pull the image has for me, but the truth of the matter is that ultimately it's a mystery, and always a bit difficult to understand why one day I might love this image and another day I might pass it by altogether; why one person might want to buy it, and another might walk by without even registering it. And for some reason that makes me think of the Rilke poem I read this morning:

You are the future,
the red sky before sunrise
over the fields of time.

You are the cock's crow when night is done,
you are the dew and the bells of matins,
maiden, stranger, mother, death.

You create yourself in ever-changing shapes
that rise from the stuff of our days --
unsung, unmourned, undescribed,
like a forest we never knew.

You are the deep innerness of all things,
the last word that can never be spoken.
To each of us you reveal yourself differently:
to the ship as coastline, to the shore as a ship.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, from Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God