Do you like haystacks?  I say this somewhat tongue in cheek to make a larger point:  today is the birthday of French painter Claude Monet.  One of the most famous of the nineteenth century impressionists who transformed the nature of art, Monet achieved perhaps his greatest fame for his series of haystack paintings.  He depicted haystacks in the spring, summer, autumn, and winter, using subtle shifts of color to portray the fact of permanence in the face of change.


     Consider one of Monet's most well known theses:  "I wish to render what is."  In Monet's work we see an effort to take what "is" and make it as we feel it might otherwise be.  Not what we think it should be, but what we feel it should be.  We turn rationality on its head; we elevate emotion over all.
     In so doing, we capture the heart of who, and the world, most are.  Like our creator, we are deeply personal beings, beings whom although we like to think we are rational (which we indubitably are), we are, in our deepest essence, creatures of passion.  Beings of viscerality and pathos.  So do we embrace the world, so do we embrace the transcendence out of which it comes.
     We thank Monet for his insight, that amidst our dogged attempts to understand life rationally, perhaps we do better to grasp it as it most fully is:  the work and expression of a profoundly passionate creator.