" The Go-Between"

“The go-between wears out a thousand sandals." Japanese Proverb

—

"She Didn't Call Me Here"©                             2008

From The Inter-Faith Prayer Painting Series / Derivations

 “When before the beauty of a sunset or of a mountain, you pause and exclaim Ah!, you are participating in divinity.”

Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth, quoting The Upanishads

"BronXscape             2008         Parsons   The Design Workshop

"No, I have seen the mirage tremble, seen how thin

The veil stretched over apparent time and space

To make the habitable Earth, the enclosed garden."

Kathleen Raine      Three Poems on Illusion

UPenn SAS Music Building Renovation       2009

"We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with an other."

Thomas Merton - Author, Trappist Monk

"Portal Study" ©                                                                    2008

From the Spidey-Hole Series - Bloated Geometries

For the first time in my life I saw the horizon as a curved line. It was accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light—our atmosphere. Obviously this was not the ocean of air I had been told it was so many times in my life. I was terrified by its fragile appearance.

 Ulf Merbold -  ESA Astronaut (Germany)

"Bench Seat"©                 Jack Matney Courtyard                  2008

Multicolored cast concrete, acid stains, shattered tempered glass.

I wonder when we began to define our lives as a parenthetical expression: a life lived between the confines of life and death. 

                                                                                       Beginning and Ending.                                                                                                       I would prefer that the "in between" that we define as life would be more expansive. 

In my thinking (and please understand that I neither exclude, nor diminish your thinking),

we as individuals, and as a people, would embrace the possibilities that surround the one and the other, the Life and the Death.

I'm thinking that the 'thin space' could become the 'broad space'.

Dimensions once brought asunder; married in a new union.

"Which Frightened Both the Heroes So"

Eric Charles White wrote in 1987:

Kairos is an ancient Greek word that means "the right moment'" or "the opportune."

"Nebulous Grid"                                   2009

From the Spidey Hole - Bloated Geometry Series

"The map is a significant cultural document. The native mapmaker employed an indigenous graphic system of circles, lines, and alternating scales to portray his knowledge of the physical and social geography of nearly a quarter of the continent."

Another America: Native American Maps and the History of Our Land   Mark Warhus    1997

"Loaded: the Weisiger Chapel Project"                               2009 

".........it's so friggin endless it's like poems endless everywhere and no one knows why bettern old Buddha you know where he says it's like "There are immeasurable star misty aeons of universes more numerous than the sands in all the galaxies, multiplied by a billion lightyears of multiplication, in fact if I were to go on you'd be scared and couldn't comprehend and you'd despair so much you'd drop dead," that's what he said in one of those sutras - Macrocosms and microcosms and chillicosms and microbes and finally you got all those marvelous books a man aint even got time to read em all...."

Big Sur Jack Kerouac  1962

"Leaning Psalm"                                                                2009

Weisiger Chapel Project  Hospice, Charlotte NC

"........which frightened both the heroes so, 

they quite forgot their quarrel."

Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee

"Expulsion From the Grid"                     2009

From the Spidey Hole Series

I operate my busy-ness primarily from Chronos time: deadlines, appointments, schedules. I'm pretty good at that. Daytimers help. As do your calls and reminders (thank you very much). But my life is more based in Kairos time. My personal narrative mapped out in a survey of bruises and good-byes. Aches and hellos. Healings and salutations. My days are a palimpsest of heavings and liftings and measurements and wishing. My nights are filled with wandering around back into the day, bringing forth images more dense than any laurel thicket. The blinds are opened; the blinds are closed. I mark my territory with lemon juice, and read the directions by holding the image to the light.

How does your time work, human?

"The Words of My Roaring"

"To the Chief Musician"

"Motif Motif"            Study for Weisiger Chapel               2009

"The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course - its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions modified by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events."

Hermann Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale 1851

Pew End Detail              Weisiger Chapel                       2009

"Roll away the stone

Don't leave me here all alone

Resurrect me and protect me

Don't leave me laying here

What will they do in two thousand years?"

Leon Russell 1970

Motif and Actuality - the Concrete and the Abstract

"Eli, Eli, lama sabach'thani"

"Clarifying Arrangement"

Copper and Stainless Steel Armature, Cement, Black Walnut. Metallic Paints and Reactive Patinas        2009

To be forsaken is to place oneself in the position of opportunity (if we keep our heads about ourselves). Each new threshold may only be crossed when the old world is left behind with abandon.

But fear not, 

 for we shall (each of us) be recognized by those willing to see us.

I would never insinuate that such a passage is without its own specific trials and traumas, but still I maintain that such is the fodder of many a great narrative.