Certainty amid the chaos.

TO KNOW WHAT MATTERS AND WHAT DOES NOT is the lesson that we long to be taught. Mondrian's Still Life With Gingerpot II shows us a geometrical tangle of incoherent lines, which might or might not have a meaning. But at the center of all this--pure, rounded, and still--gleams the pot, the one satisfying certainty amid the existential chaos. It is only when we are still, when we open up to our inner reality, that the things in our life fall into coherence for us. We do not necessarily have to think this out: Silence makes the order plain. But instead we quiet our restless minds, and then rise to find that we now see the essential.

SISTER WENDY BECKETT of Norfolk, England, well-known for her BBC and PBS television art series and her popular art books. Reprinted with permission from: Sister Wendy's Book of Meditations (DK Publishing, 1998; 888-342-5357). Painting: Still Life With Gingerpot II, 1911-12, by Piet Mondrian (Haags Gemeente Museum, The Hague, Netherlands).