THE MAP OF MIND
I was studying the different scratching on the surface of a wall -- in a room that was covered with the graffito -- Latin for "little scratching" -- of hundreds of people. Except that they didn't only write on the wall, but incise their ideas deep into the plaster. That tradition, in a funky way, permeates the walls of A couple of thousand years back, Herculaneum (and Pompeii) and other Roman cities, the graffiti was found in two ways: for one, scratched and incised in the walls and street...
THE CONCEPT OF THE (W)HOLE
Being at the DIA | Beacon, NY, up the Hudson, there are a series of installations by some of the greatest artists on the planet -- classical emplacements involving the highest theories of each, a kind of portfolio of perfected legends. Those that are still working. Those that have passed along. But one of them, Michael Heizer, is an especial theorist, artist, designer -- still working, expanding on his dreams -- has a kind of symbolic place in my heart of exploring. There's more to be...
THE LUXURY OF LIGHT
After the long running, days on daze of grim light, the proverbial oyster shell coloration of the Pacific Northwest wintering, low rolling clouds, the Sun merely a fuzzy luminescence. Today, for a moment, a turning to spring, sprung -- that first evidence came to light -- a bursting, bright and swaying in the breeze. Sun coming. I took a minute, just staring into that light, Sun brilliance, feeling that on my face, eyelids and eyes -- and watching the bobbing movement of the flowers,...
KEEP SMILING
Rummaging for a hat, the other day, I found an old baseball cap that I'd given my daughter. She never liked it, though I thought she'd like the pug-like expression of the front panel. But didn't. I think it might've been the coloration, which was sort of a muddied yellow device along with a yellow and black detail for the bill and back clasp. I got into dyeing a sequence of articles, all black. There were some things that were already black, and I was trying to make them more blackened; and...
STORMWANDERER
THE CIRCLED WIND I went out in the early dark this morning, in the storm. Wind, rain, cold whipped round -- circling. And I stood in the center of the storm. I dreamed of that, the wind, the circling. And I could taste the wet, the salt of the sea That turned in the sky and swung back round, the circle -- a sphere of energy, that wrings wound and wind. It's been going for days. The birds are reeling in the storm, wheeling and running the sky like the brushstrokes that come from my fingertips,...
THE WHORLWIND
SPINNING MIND AND IMAGINATION STORM I spilled the ink on the surface of the glass, milky underlayment and light flowing from beneath. There was light, showing through from the shadows, the street bound -- lights, emerging. That floated the ink, so it whirled on the glass, and I spun the movements with my fingertips. And as I spun the circles, spinning and whirring the lines of the ink, my fingers and fingernails, blackening the fingerprints -- these prints become other prints, and share in the...
THE GIVING PLANT
(a hallway meandering found, a personal photograph of a detail of Cappy Thompson's glasswork, Swedish Hospital: http://bit.ly/hvwWQu) MY FATHER AND MOTHER HAVE INSTILLED A LOVE OF PLANTING IN OUR FAMILY. The planting inheritance, a flourishing of the verdurous instinct... But it's more to the relishing of seeing things grow. And sharing in that growth. My father comes from a planting background, as a farmer. Early on, our family bought a farm, some several miles from our house in Spokane --...
INTO THE MIST
I'VE BEEN WALKING, THE LATE NIGHTS, THE EARLY SHIFTS. SOME AIR, IN EITHER -- BOTH FROSTED IN THE MORNING -- CHILLED, THE WIND AND RAIN AS DAY FALLS. I went out walking late, Vancouver. That night, the rains came, then they turned to mist, and finally ice -- snow gathered. I could see it in the water coursing, like cotton in the street channels. But it was snow, the ice a patterning of small plates that collide and drift like tiny scraps of hardened, translucent paper -- the asphalt, black...
THE LIGHT OF THE (H)EARTH
GOING DOWN, TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH THERE'S A HARD LIGHT, TO THE MINERALS THAT CRACKLE AND COMPRESS, CRYSTALLIZE IN THE DREAM OF BEING I was dreaming about that: be in the center of the earth and see what vista you can see and find what you shall find It was less to visioning and more about the fastness of the nestling -- nurtured there in the center of the earth. It was of the taste of iron, that sharpening glint of nickel, bronze, stone -- the palette, tongued, of steel. It was about the...
BEING ALONE, BEING ALL, BEING ONE
IN THE MIDST OF THE CROWD, YOU CAN BE ALONE, IN THE MIDST OF THE ALONE, YOU CAN FILL ALL ONE. It's an interesting balance, the idea of the alone. And the all one. Milling in crowds, in the journey of the tribe, the concept of the connected and the disconnected, it's a balance to the nature of the reach. What is the reach -- out; and what to the reach -- back? That reflectivity is part of the marvel -- in the being, alone, and the being -- all one. That notion of connection, the fulfillment of...