Darkness to Light

 This jigsaw puzzle is one I have done many times and love despite it not being the easiest puzzle I’ve ever done. It’s called Day and Night and is taken from a picture by a Dutch artist M. C. Escher who is known for his geometric art works. This is the only one of his pictures that I like. Others don’t seem real and indeed couldn’t be real and they don’t speak to me as this one does, although I’ve never really been able to put in to words what it says to me.

 I find it an intriguing picture. It must mean something. When I look at it I think it should have been called darkness to light rather than night and day as I see it as depicting a journey. The dark geese are escaping, moving away from the dark side while the white geese are taking light into the darkness.

 I see choice too. In the middle at the bottom along the road I can choose to go towards the dark or the opposite way towards the light. It makes me think of all the choices we make day to day. Some are good, some don’t really matter but some do have the power to take us to a dark place. I think of the choice to move to the dark side as being a little like the peer pressure young people have to work with or the choice a Christian may make between church and a day out on Sunday.

 To me this could be a picture of calm and anger, peace and restlessness, trust and fear.

 You see, none of those can live together in harmony. I can’t say that I trust God for all things if at the same time I’m worrying and living in fear of the future. I can’t be calm and still at the same time as seething with anger, and who can be peaceful and restless at the same time.

 My focus is always on the geese of course, and I see that the dark and light cannot live together. As the black geese emerge the white geese are squashed out of shape until they are unrecognisable as geese at all and as the white geese emerge the black geese are similarly squashed out of shape until they are not recognisable as geese. And maybe this is a bit like human behaviour when we do something that we know we shouldn’t do, when we lose our temper, when we begin to idolise something etc., when we start missing church, forget to pray, stop living as a disciple of Christ.  Do we get squeezed out of shape?

Jane