Britt Franc is an oil painter, originally from the West Coast of Canada and now lives in the Jura mountain region of France. She is deeply inspired by pastoral subjects, and seeks to convey their beauty and teachings through her paintings. Her desire to create stems from her fondness of God’s creative works and her gratitude for all of the ways that this is expressed through poetry, nature and the inner lives of the animals that we share this earth with. It is her hope that her paintings may inspire a deeper reverence to the natural world that we all share.
“But ask the animals, and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you.” —Job 12:
To Learn From Animal Being by John O'Donohue
Nearer to the earth's heart,
Deeper within its silence:
Animals know this world In a way we never will.
We who are ever
Distanced and distracted
By the parade of bright
Windows thought opens:
Their seamless presence Is not fractured thus.
Stranded between time
Gone and time emerging,
We manage seldom
To be where we are:
Whereas they are always
Looking out from
The here and now.
May we learn to return
And rest in the beauty
Of animal being,
Learn to lean low,
Leave our locked minds,
And with freed senses
Feel the earth
Breathing with us.
May we enter Into lightness of spirit,
And slip frequently into
The feel of the wild.
Let the clear silence
Of our animal being
Cleanse our hearts
Of corrosive words.
May we learn to walk
Upon the earth
With all their confidence
And clear-eyed stillness
So that our minds
Might be baptized
In the name of the wind
And the light and the rain.
John O'Donohue From: To Bless the Space Between Us