The tree prints | 1979. Girvins like trees. No, they love them. Every member of our family has some connection with trees. And I suppose that arboreal love could have some distant simian link, like the notion that if you suddenly jerk when you are just dozing off, it's a recollection of sleeping in trees. I don't know the reasons precisely why, but we love them. All kinds of them. And each of us has a special connection. I savor drawing them, photographing and being in them, forest spaces and...

Some time, there is no sound, but the calls of birds, that waft their notes, reaching out to me, in bringing the beginnings of the day, the life that we lead in finding again, beauty that rings round us as we gather in, to listen. tsg | decatur island | 5.55am

A friend of mine, just returning from China, Paula Rees, experienced the razor's edge of the darkest anguish in Sichuan, China. As did many of us. But that was nothing compared to the Chinese themselves -- the survivors -- those that were left. And she had a dream of a Phoenix rising, something to speak to this dark vision, this nightmare -- and a realization that perhaps I could help with, in fulfillment -- that would come from my heart, brushes and fist, fingers flowing out of that dream....

There are 8 stories. 8 ideas. And 8 ways of thinking about things. 8|8|8 1. On this door. There was a door, that was a door to somewhere else. In merely seeing the door, it was a vision to another place -- I knew that it went somewhere. I tried to get in. Any door takes us somewhere -- we walk through, and in passing the step, the transom, the lintel, the floor plate, the lock, the bolt, the knob -- we cross over. There we go, here we are. I found an 8 door -- and it didn't take me anywhere,...

The quiet now is so profound that the only thing making noise are the two raccoons that, walking like humans, have come to visit me, coming up the steps to my studio checking on my progress. tsg | decatur island 3.36am

A tiny snake, gartered -- came to my house and chose one thing. To be quiet and cool, in the corner slate, just inside the door next to the wanderer stone. tsg | decatur island

Just as I was leaving, I heard this high p i t c h e d sound, like the tiniest call, with a flutter w h i r r i n g that rustled to a kind of quiet that I almost missed it, that sound just as I was leaving. tsg | decatur island

It's in my path to find that way to explore that place, where light is regained anew, when I go out there, to find again Photos by Tim Girvin that here, that is just some times forgotten and I reach to recall, call back, that harkening glimmer light, amidst the scintillant flicker that is each moment. tsg | the island

Creating personal rituals, altars and prayers. I do believe in this: making offerings. And in that, making place for that to happen. Making Place. For Offerings. What that might comprise, those offerings, is about the nature of what is offering, and what is prayer. Because most offerings do that -- they are a prayer. My experience in offering is deep and long running. Perhaps my first exposure to powerful offerings was in Tibet -- there, an offering is about prayer, meditation, and taking...

What sense, am I? I am, what -- sense? "Hornkostel cites a tribe that has a separate word for seeing, but employs a common term for hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching." [A.G. Engstrom, "Philological Quarterly," XXV, 1946] I wonder about that, the idea of what I sense -- wholly -- and how sensible I am. Sometimes I feel like the sense of things, my perception -- my grasp -- of what's happening around me is unclear, clouded. Smoke and mist. Then, other times, I'm overwhelmed by feeling(s),...