Sacred Matter - Donna Oglesby Photography

Selections from my Sacred Matter Portfolio are being shown in a wonderful group exhibition at the A Smith Gallery during June 2024. The show is called Axis Mundi/ Sacred Center and features my work along with that of seven of my friends. The show is over but you can still listen to the gallery talk to learn more about our approach to expressive photography.

Divine Thread

Celtic Blessing

This is a time that is not a time

In a place that is not a place

On a day that is not a day

Between the worlds, and beyond.

Invocation

Portals There are physical places in the world that offer us threshold moments because they resonate with our internal, spiritual landscapes. These thin places where God is at work are often wild and messy. Time seems to stand still. There is a discernible sense of sacredness; and, if we listen, the world around us reveals our one shared story. Crossing the threshold allows us to see our world in a larger frame and reflect on the presence of absence and the potential of true communion between nature and grace. In the Celtic tradition, on such thresholds we are advised to slow down, pause and recover a sense of wonder and harmony in our lives and the world.

Samhain

Watch Tower Ruins

Sacred Threshold

Dream Abbey

Golden Portal

Westward Passage

Unveiling

The unveiling is a sudden realization of divine presence in all matter. The veil obscuring our vision is pierced and the unseen becomes visible. In the tender emptiness and silence on the west coast of Ireland there is opportunity to waste time conscientiously.

We can pause, listen and receive the grace of revelation. All that is asked of us is patient attention: a willingness to let go of our expectations, to accept the possibility that what we seek can not be sought; but unfolds in its own way, in its own time.

Ours is to breathe in everything that appears to us in its loveliness by mingling it with our hearts.

Golden Stone

Frail Shelter

Connemara Kiss

After The Sea

Interweaving

In the Celtic vision, the divine flows deep within everything that has being. Spirit and matter are interwoven. God is not apart from, but rather manifests within the naturalness of the physical world.

Worshiping outside in the great cathedral of earth, sea and sky we feel the deep connection between grace and nature, spirit and matter, heaven and earth.

To point us in the right direction, the interlacing patterns of the Celtic Cross call on us to reflect on the movement of the cosmos and the inner landscape of the soul.

Unfolding Life

White Wind

Before The Dawn

Primal Memories

Pied Beauty

Emerging Fullness

Memory

Stone in its silence holds memory. The late poet and priest, John O’Donohue, calls stone a tabernacle of memory. In this light, the Burren is a sanctuary where landscape recalls you into a mindful mode of stillness, solitude, and silence, where you can truly receive time.

The landscape was first to be created. It precedes us and our interpretation of it. But as Rilke insists, we are not really at home in the interpreted world. We must re-encounter creation with fresh eyes. “Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.”

Buried Beauty

Tabernacle Of Memory