Simplicity and complexity: A piece hanging on the wall at sculptor Paula Castillo’s studio in Santa Fe. The two entries below, a poem by Moramarco and a quote by Tom Robbins, were included in two separate posts on my favorite random access wisdom source, Whiskey River. But when I landed on the site this morning […]
Wisdom
Entropy and the Super-Growth of Consciousness
A dear friend who is also a neighbor announced quite unexpectedly last night that he had decided to sell his beautiful new condo and move into a home built in the mid-1800s 20 miles away. “Be happy for me!” he pleaded, seeing the anticipated loss of his frequent visits painted plainly on my face. Of […]
Life That Doesn’t Lie Flat
Galactic beach wood, from Half Moon Bay We fall into a story about enlightenment—about life, in fact—and we can get trapped in it for many lifetimes. I wonder more and more how well any life really fits a story. What if our life is not this, then that, in a flat and sensible way, but […]
Keeping The Edge On
Snow, and part of a shoe If we don’t offer ourselves to the unknown, our senses dull. Our world becomes small and we lose our sense of wonder. Our eyes don’t lift to the horizon; our ears don’t hear the sounds around us. The edge is off our experience, and we pass our days in […]
The Thing Is
The road to High Head Castle, first built in the Middle Ages and then destroyed by fire in 1947. The thing is to love life to love it even when you have no stomach for it, when everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands and your throat is filled with the […]
Other Laws
Spiral carvings on Long Meg, a menhir that sits outside the Long Meg and her Daughters stone circle in Cumbria Here are a few more thoughts that percolated through me during my stay in the Lake District. The spiritual meaning of art belongs to the realm of the subjective or superconscious mind. Only when the […]
Self Sowing
The landscape in the Lakes, near Hesket Newmarket One of the reasons I have made repeated visits to the Lake District in England is because the land feels porous. It is as if the barriers are fluid and the membrane between earthness and creatureness has been rubbed into a soft and pliant translucence. Being in […]
Flavors of the Ineffable
Winner of the “best conversation between an artist and his/her son or daughter”: My friend George is an artist whose work ranges from representational painting to highly conceptual installation work. He’s extremely facile, but sometimes that range of output can leave his various audiences a bit confused. After his new body of work was greeted […]
Fall Classic
Varigated leaves, Maine 2009 We’re off for a few days in Vermont and Western Massachusetts with our Jack’s Place gang of friends. Jack’s Place is a house in the western corner of Vermont that a group of us are building together. At the helm of this project, emotionally and architecturally, is my favorite pied piper […]
Dune Dwelling
Sand storm on the Sands of Forvie (Photo: Martyn Gorman) Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this […]