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Typewriter Haiku

My friend Frederica has asked me to contribute haiku to her installation about uranium that will be going into the Coconino Center for the Arts in a show called Uranium Legacy. We both decided I should focus on peace.

I write my best poetry on my typewriter, on the top of our land, sitting at a desk that looks out to three different mountain ranges and is snuggled in the arms of the Ortiz Mountains. This morning, I rose with the sun for the fourth time this week, got myself up the hill to the Poetry Hut and wrote haiku on scraps of paint samples (yellow ones, of course.) I tried to imagine all the people who have been affected by uranium; the children who were given uranium toys to play with, those that lost their health mining it, the many, many victims of the atomic bombs. I tried to imagine how to help them find peace after such injustice.

A lot of these haiku are about finding inner peace. A few of them focus on finding your voice after you have been wronged. Some are about justice. I have not been directly affected by uranium, but I understand how it is to be wronged by selfish powers. I feel anger that our earth is raped for even more violence. I don’t want people to placidly accept injustice–I want us all to find our voices to stop it, as peace warriors.

Here are some of my favorite ones:

Find a way to peace                                                                                                                                            Let it be your only goal                                                                                                                                   Come back to your heart

Mystery of god                                                                                                                                                 Contained in earth’s elements                                                                                                                           Not for careless use

Peace will end the pain                                                                                                                                        Peace and justice united                                                                                                                                     Start with peace inside

Truth and Honey

Dear Higher Self,

My family disagrees with my politics and my religion, and talk about their views but don’t let me talk about mine. My friends suggests engaging with them “won’t change anything, and will just upset them.” I don’t want to upset anyone, but I’m tired of not having a voice. I’m also tired of having to assert myself every time to be heard. What should I do?

Sincerely,

Just Wants to Show Love

 

Dear Gentle Soul,

It’s not that you “aren’t allowed” to talk about things, it’s that they prefer you would keep silent about it because it brings up unpleasant feelings in them. You can say “I know you don’t want to talk about this, but I’m going to.” This is how you bring persistence and love into speaking the truth. This is how you break their unspoken rules without flaunting them.

If you want to show love, then you will speak your heart with kindness but firmness. No need to tell them what to do, judge them, call them names or use harsh language. Keep it firm but center around your experience. Everyone has the right to speak about their own perspective! If you have been kind and they still get upset, then it is their path that they have blocked, it is their fear and judgment that arise. No one should be exempt from gentle honesty because of their specific fears.

Imagine that your voice is like honey. When not used for a long time, it crystallizes and won’t flow. When fresh or reheated, it spreads easier. The more honesty you spread, the more it softens, becoming gentle and easy. When you first start, it will be stiff and hard and you need to work with it, warm it. Use it often, keep it soft and it will go farther. But the good thing about honey is that it never goes bad—it is always edible and delicious.

Honeybees are the tears of the Egyptian sun god Ra. Those sacred tears were made up of holiness—all the emotions of the world are contained in tears like that, and so there is not only sadness, but happiness, joy and release. They contain all humanity, and because of that they taste sweet. Imagine your honesty and your voice as those tears—as sweet as honey. Both the Atharvaveda (ancient Hindu scripture) and the ancient Greeks associated lips anointed with honey with the gift of eloquence. If you consciously cover your lips now with honey, you’ll notice it has filled the cracks, the place of pain and blood, and makes your lips feel plump and full. The words become sweet.

The Jewish historian Josephus noted that the name of the poet and prophet Deborah meant “bee”. The same root, dbr, gives us “word”, indicating the bee’s mission to give the Divine Word, or Truth. Truthful word is like honey, essential and sweet. It never spoils, it has healing qualities and gives us insight into the Divine meaning of life. Like a bee, you are tasked to ingest the individual grains of truth, the small seeds, digest them, and transform them into the sweetest, highest truth. Then share that sweetness.

Bees are endangered, and their hives are threatened by the advance of “progress”. If you don’t practice your voice, it will go extinct. It will die, and no one will be able to enjoy its nectar. Bees are also highly social insects that operate within a teamwork-based community. If you don’t speak up, you will isolate yourself and will stop interacting with the people that you say you love. Instead, contribute as a member of the hive and the family!

You want to speak out because you need to practice your voice. Your closest relationships require that you be your most authentic self; in your relationships with your beloved, with your child, with your friends and with your family. To have a voice means that you can go deeper into those relationships, grow closer to truth and be your best. The bee pollinates other flowers as it creates its honey, and you too fertilize other minds when you discover your truth through your life journey. Don’t limit the spread of it.

If you really “just want to show love” then you will stop protecting people from the truth, stop shielding them and not upsetting them. They are fearful of some of the things you will say because they have long ago stopped speaking their own voice. They have tried to stop it in others as well. But those are not your rules and that is not your game. You have your own life that you get to choose how to live. You have your own heart that governs you and you are not required to live up to their expectations. You are not required to please them, but to have a loving family you are required to have open communication.

Practice your voice in difficult situations, and it will become stronger and heard more clearly. You will find that your words have more depth and more conviction and those that are ready to hear you will find their way to you. It will be effective and will be heard, if not to the family who disagrees, but to others outside the family.

Yes, it is valuable for you to speak your voice and to be heard. It may be hard work, but it’s as precious as the gold of the honey.

Synchronicities: Trickster Version

This is the first installment of a synchronicity project that Lauren Paredes from Portland, OR and I are undertaking. Lauren read my post “The Reason I Read: Or Seven Synchronicities I’ve Had With Books Recently”, tracked me down online and wrote a completely charming introductory email. “I completely agree with you about feeling like those moments are pieces of evidence that you’re on the right track – I truly believe that,” she said.

We decided to do some research on the phenomena, pay attention to it happening in our own lives and share the pieces of synchronicities and magic with each other and then a broader audience. I am so grateful for this person who landed in my life to push me into a more aware and deeper-seeking lifestyle! I haven’t had any trouble spotting synchronicities; the biggest problem I’ve had is interpreting them.

Last weekend, my partner Owen and I traveled to Taos and Santa Fe, NM. At the beginning of the trip, I asked for synchronicities along the way that would help us decide if we should move to either place, as we want to eventually move somewhere outside of Flagstaff, AZ. We search for someplace with new opportunities for professional growth (I’m a writer and Owen’s a sculptor.) I was reading “The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity” by Trish MacGregor and Rob MacGregor and realized that I had to ask for synchronicities to answer my questions–and be ready for them when they came.

In Taos, we checked into our Airbnb, owned by Joni who looked like a lot of other in-shape older yogis from Flagstaff. In fact, her parents lived in Flagstaff. After dinner we went to the Alley Cantina. I struck up a conversation with Tony, an Australian hotelier who had traveled to New Mexico for a few days. Owen discovered that he and Tony both knew two different businessmen from the days when Owen worked as a consultant and designer. Both were named John, one from New Zealand and the other from Bali. Then I looked at the dance floor and saw a friend from Flagstaff. She was an English instructor for the university I used to work for. I passed her in the hallways many times as I finished my MFA degree and I had boogied next to her many nights in my hometown—and here she was, seven hours away in Taos, to visit her mom and dad.

We thought for sure we were supposed to move to Taos that night. But in the morning, the town wasn’t as appealing. We listened to a few different shopkeepers, and they all inferred similar themes; choosing the artist lifestyle meant being poor and Taos is not as chi-chi as Santa Fe (and proud of it.) After we left each store, we joked about how everyone “talked long…and listened short.” People seemed frustrated with the local economy. Some shopkeepers even followed me around and watched me so close that I felt like I couldn’t touch anything–or that I was a potential shoplifter! Still, we had a great time and saw Big Horn Sheep, ducks and hawks when we went to BlackRock Hot Springs.

The animals had a lot to say this trip. As we left town, a coyote crossed in front of us. The trickster archetype! I had read “Synchronicities are the jokers in nature’s pack of cards for they refuse to play by the rules and offer a hint that, in our quest for certainty about the universe, we have ignored some vital clues,” (F. David Peat, Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind.) I realized the Taos synchronicities were a bit of a cosmic joke. We had felt at home in Taos because it was similar to our current life, the place that has served well, but that we are looking to expand our horizons beyond. In fact, we had both received synchronicities from our old careers—the very ones that we had left behind because of their creative limits!

When we went to Santa Fe, we also saw someone from Flagstaff, one of my son’s high school teachers. Then we went to Allan Houser’s sculpture studio, as he has influenced Owen on a current marble sculpture project. By chance, Allan’s number one assistant, Tony Lee, who worked with Houser from 1989 til his death in 1994, showed up at the studio. Another Tony! Owen had a great time talking with him about sculpture. This was a synchronicity that pointed positively towards Owen’s new career potential in Santa Fe, but I’m not sure what it meant for me.

Paul Kammerer was an Austrian biologist who came up with the theory of “the law of seriality.” He stated that the phenomenon was an objective but undiscovered principle of nature. He used to study random-chance events to see how many people were using umbrellas or wearing the same hat and classified his synchronicities into first, second, third, and high-order series. All of Kammerer’s research influenced Carl Jung’s theory of synchronicity. I’m not sure what all the synchronicities in Santa Fe meant, but I’m collecting them and others to keep track.

Here is a list of other things I’ve noticed this week:

Lost Items

  • My turquoise horse fetish that represented healing and strength
  • Owen’s Ipad
  • Taos guide books

Found Items

  • Owen’s Ipad! (lost in the menus at El Gamal, Taos)
  • 1 pink plastic bead
  • 4 pennies (in the Hot Springs in Taos)
  • 1 quarter and 1 dime (near the Earthships in Taos)
  • $12 in bills (in the snow, near the fabulous waterfall in Flagstaff)

Animals

  • horses
  • big horn sheep
  • ducks
  • hawks
  • quail
  • coyote

Words/Names

  • clavicle (x3)
  • lacrima (x3)
  • milieu (x2)
  • Tony (x2—one from Santa Fe, one from Australia)
  • Nimue (x2—in novel and Fairy Cards)

Numbers

  • 11:11 and 1:11 (too many times to count)
  • 12
    • found $12 in snow
    • dreamt I received a $1200 rent check

Dream Images

  • phonebooths and coins
  • buying eggs and milk from the grocery store
  • a scooter
  • the badhakonasana yoga pose (needed for female cycle)
  • Crystal Bridges (the museum in Arkansas that I’ve never been to)
  • cupcakes
  • cell phones and voicemail messages 10 minutes long
  • oil and vinegar
  • Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac

 

Some of the synchronicities are just surface level coincidences that tickle my fancy, but there are those synchronicities that hint at a deeper order in the universe. I found out that physicist David Bohm called this the implicate or “enfolded order”, that births everything in the universe, even time. External reality is the explicate order. Synchronicity is where the implicate and the explicate, the inner and the outer, coincide. This is also called psychoid, where it shares both psychic and material aspects and acts as well on a psychic or material plane. (A synchronicity here; I found David Bohm’s book at a bookstore after I had read this about him. It was so scientific it went completely above my head, but it was fun to find it.)

This hunt for deeper meaning is making me feel more alive. It gives me daily motivation to wake up, feeling like life is a treasure hunt and I’m the only one that can understand its clues. I feel a bit younger too, as if life is more playful and fun.

Ekphrastic Poetry

 

image

“Ourobouros” by Chance Roberts

We are Prima Materia 

displayed concurrently with “Ourobouros” at the Firefly Gathering Emergence Gallery, June 11-14, 2015

The Tail Devourer says

“The All is One”

so a man halts traffic to help someone’s

Granny safely cross

 

The Ouroboros says

“You are what you eat”

so a woman sips on her tears like wine

enjoys her tender flesh for nosh

 

The Serpent says

“Life out of Death”

the man takes a leap off the cliff; he’s wanted to

fly since his first dream aloft

 

The Lemniscate says

“Transcend Duality”

the woman releases judgment and allows love

she walks the same earth but follows her heart

 

The Universe says

It is “Infinite”

“The Soul of the World”

and “Immortal”

and the humans slay themselves to be born again

embrace the coiled Kundalini

assimilate their shadows

 

The prima materia of art is man herself.

 

Ekphrastic Flash Fiction 2

 

"The Blind Leading the Blind" by Rebecca Slater

“The Blind Leading the Blind” by Rebecca Slater

 

Pure Science

He says it’s science at its most beautiful, with definitive results every time. It’s beautiful science he says, while wearing his white lab coat. His glasses hold eyes that turn surprised quite easily, and porcupine hair sticks out his head.

But is it comfortable in that…balloon?

The surprised eyes flash at my gaucheness. Wedo not use that word, he says. He says, we prefer the term elium-encased latex womb. The embryo will develop externally, floating above you, and connected to you by this fiberglass cable.

My husband says Darling Dear, look how easy you’ll have it. He licks his wolf-like teeth. You’ve always wanted this! His piercing eyes stab through my reluctance.

Lab Coat and Husband Dear and I tour the breeding grounds. It looks like a county fair
celebration with all the baby balloons floating in the sky. In the cafeteria, there are bloody steak specials, and gleaming knives to cut them. For the celebrants.

In the garden, the pink latex-encased beings bob like bubble-gum balls, or cotton-candy clouds beneath branches that have broken in a recent storm. I worry about the branches. Where is their gardener? Who is weeding and trimming and coaxing new growth?

Nine months go by. I have vicarious food cravings for hard sugar treats. I pull on my candy cane until it’s a Christmas dagger. At night, I dream about wolf-like teeth, biting my foot down to a keen little cuspate. All while my fragile dirigible navigates blowfish fruits, cat’s claws, and
freshly sharpened pencils.

I cradle even my words in pillows.

In the morning, Husband Dear tears his grapefruit from its membrane with the teeth of his spoon.

It is time, he says.

We rap sharply on Porcupine Hair’s door. He blinks in surprise. Oh, you’ve made it this far! He points his finger at my fragile little blimp.

Now what? My Husband Dear asks pointedly.

It’s pure science, he says, with consistent results. Unfortunately, there’s a 100% mortality rate every time we pierce the latex womb. But it’s that purity, that consistency, that makes it
beautiful. Pure Science, he says.

Covering the arts for Flagstaff television: NAU TV’s “Route 66”

I’m a guest host for NAU TV’s “Route 66”, a show about art, culture and community in Northern Arizona. I’ve been covering the art and cultural scene in Flagstaff, AZ for almost 10 years for multi-media outlets such as video, print, and radio. Here’s the latest:

Season 1: Episode 4, Segment 1



Season 1: Episode 4, Segment 2



Season 1: Episode 4, Segment 3

Strange Efficiency Program for Creativity

 

Post Beam Cube by Ronald Wendell Davis

Post Beam Cube by Ronald Wendell Davis

These are personal rules (as I have downloaded them through time and praxis) of my Strange Efficiency Program for Creativity.
1. My “sullenness” is actually creativity building. I need to make space for it to bloom forth.
2. My writing/creativity/curation comes best when I don’t judge its path or direct it too much and just let it flow.
3. Physical activities (such as 10 burpees or one minute hand-stands) help me transition from passive creative thought to active creative making.

Other guidelines that save me “time and money”:
a. I must write down the lines that come to me as I lie in my warm bed in the cold dark.
b. I am allowed to use my most-recent favorite words and images in my writing. There’s a reason I was attracted to them. Collect them in my book.
c. All those YouTube videos by Alan Watts, the literary research on Maya Angelou, the overheard phrases and quotes from Facebook can guide me too. Anything meaningful has a prioritized place amongst all the other junk that never penetrated.
d. Insomnia is just found writing time.

And finally, I find that these are some of my Rules of Adulthood that use creativity and curiosity to help me live my favorite life.

1. Look up all words that you don’t know. Otherwise you will never learn that “apophatic” is close to “mysticism”, and “mysticism” is the explanatory word you’ve been looking for all your life to describe your spirituality. (Mysticism–system of belief which focuses on a spontaneous or cultivated individual experience of the divine reality beyond the realm of ordinary perception, an experience often unmediated by the structures of traditional organized religion or the conditioned role-playing and learned defensive behavior of the outer man.) To name is to know it.

2. Don’t ever give up, but especially don’t give up when you are at the point of “close but no cigar”. I’ve found that finding things at the thrift store that are close to your perfect find only mean that the ultimate score is just around the corner. If you are looking for the perfect word, or phrase, don’t disregard the ancillary thoughts that come to you. Persistence pays off.

4. Silence is my fertile earth that all good thoughts spring from.

Analog: It Carries the Story

IMG_3652

Pinhole Photography by Nancy Spencer at New Mexico Museum of History in Santa Fe

Recently, due to events too complicated to go into here, my son has been relegated to a sans internet, sans texting, and sans phone call lifestyle. At 18 years old, he is at a complete loss.
“How will I look up words in the thesaurus?” “Use the book.” “I don’t know how.”

This is the same son who explained passing notes in class like this: “It’s like texting Mom, except you write on paper.”

Getting him off screens has been a blessing for our connection. He is somehow more accessible, more available to meet my eyes. The energy flow is much different.

I’m the kind of girl that prefers stoves to microwaves, books to kindles, letters to emails, pencils to keyboards, and even (theoretically) typewriters to computers. I prefer mechanical clocks to binary clocks. I keep a journal. I have records and I think that hand-made gifts are the best.

I think the thing I love the most about artwork is when I can sense and see that it was hand-crafted. I remember standing in front of a Frida Kahlo painting at a special exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum in the late 90s. They have some of her pieces in their permanent collection, and I saw them this weekend. I could very clearly imagine and see Frida painting it, her body placed exactly where mine was. I followed her tiny brush strokes and had a kind of psychic thrill and celebrity connection with her. In general, I always know when someone else’s hands touched the piece before my eyes witnessed it, or my curator-hands touched it. I know that someone with soul interpreted their vision into an art piece. And it’s imperfect. It has room and space for hidden meanings, for interpretation, pockets for dreams to hide in. The best pieces of artwork, in my opinion, are like humans walking through a field. The seeds, pods, and brambles get caught on the piece as if it were a cotton pant leg, inviting them to journey along. The artwork becomes a carrier for grains of experience and emotion to fall in new places.

IMG_0714

A tree made out of newspapers at SITE Santa Fe.

I’m sure we have all heard this kind of art or experience referred to as “analog”. But when looking up the word, it is mostly defined as “something having analogy (or features, similarities of two things, on which a comparison may be based) with something else.” I think this means that “analogue” artwork is closest to the human experience; it is flawed, mysterious and imperfectly perfect just like humans. The process isn’t controllable and sometimes wonderful, unexpected things are carried through the human process of creation.

Pinhole photography seems to be the most analog of photography. You work with a simple box and a mechanical shutter–you have to develop the film. Focusing, adjusting, manipulating are not parts of the process. There is much room for error, for imperfections. Nancy Spencer understands this. She writes, in the Pinhole Photography exhibit at the New Mexico Museum of History in Santa Fe, “Pinhole photography is the closest medium I know to record both “things seen” and “things unseen.” Sometimes the “things unseen” are intuitively known. The knowledge that “things seen” and “things unseen” might be recorded on film maintains my interest in this type of image making.” (1985)

IMG_0892

Donald Judd’s piece at Phoenix Art Museum.

Analog leaves room for the “unseen.” It is not Pure Science with a direct hypothesis; it is not black and white. There is room for interpretation, for the holistic zeitgeist of the experience, for touch and intuition to shine forth. I like this world. It makes my feel like I am surrounded by things that are analogous to me and my imperfect human experience. It seems that the effort of a handwritten poem will carry the reader past the ambiguity of words or turns of phrase. In the case of my son, I feel like I know him a little bit better, as he communicates with his eyes, gestures and words. All of this simple technology leaves more room for the human touch.

Because we understand the analogy of each others human creation process, we can go deeper. Analog picks up these magic pebbles and seedpods and carries our stories further.

IMG_5168

Scottsdale, AZ.

Nature of seeing

IMG_4902

Santa Fe rosary tree

“After nearly five decades of picture-making, of gazing into the world with no camera at all, I still wonder what I have been looking for. What is the practice of seeing? How is it done and why? These are very large questions, wrapped in mystery and, I suspect, wrapped specially for each of us to find afresh from within our own solitude.” Michael Mideke, photographer, 2004

In a recent lecture, my friend, artist Bruce Aiken sat next to his peers Ed Mell and Shonto Begay and said (to paraphrase) “I don’t know why I can see things that other people can’t see. I don’t know if they could see them if they just tried.”

It’s a question I’ve been grappling with, in various forms, ever since college. I have longed for most passionately to be in the present moment, to really see things. Many people agree that being in the moment involves being ultra aware of our senses and our surroundings. I love being in the moment at the beautiful art exhibits and museums that I visit. But sometimes I’m disappointed with my attention span, and realize that I didn’t concentrate on something and couldn’t recall the picture at all.

IMG_0044

Weaving, and getting lost in ribbons of color

“How is seeing done and why?” asks Mideke. Some people focus on the lights, the shapes and textures, or even the figures to be able to “see.” They have extensive color theory knowledge and can differentiate the hues and identify the saturation. I love color fields, and can get lost in them. But ultimately, for me seeing is really and truly activated when my other body systems are contributing to the process.

A great example of this happened over Christmas vacation when I saw “Our Lady of Sorrows” at the New Mexico History Museum. I had walked into the room of the exhibit “Painting the Divine”, and hadn’t noticed her, until I turned around and suddenly she was there. I gasped. My pupils dilated, blood rushed to my face.  She caught me by surprise. Her wig was made from

Our Lady of Sorrows

Our Lady of Sorrows, 18th Century Mexico, unidentified artist. Polychromed wood, wig with human hair.

real human hair, her face had real sorrow etched into the circles under her eyes. She made my head pound. I was so struck by her that I was a little intimidated and had to force myself to breathe slowly. I also had the urge, as I do sometimes, to touch the museum piece (which I would never do, what a faux pas!) and I could feel the textures in my imagination, as I rubbed her various components between my finger pads.

Perhaps you can see why I was so activated from the picture here on the left.

When I’m really looking, actually seeing something in a museum, as I did with Our Lady of Sorrows, I start to notice my heart-beat. I feel my body, notice how I’m inhabiting it. I gesture in a similar way as the figure, or as the movement of the art piece. Sometimes, if the piece is also emotionally moving, I feel a shiver down my back, or as if someone is gently pulling individual hair strands.

Whereas externally looking at art or beauty in the natural world inspires me to go inward, reading (an internal activity) inspires me to look outward. I’ll stop between fantastic sentences and I’ll look around at my scenery. When Jane Eyre said “I had heard it–where or whence, for ever impossible to know! And it was the voice of a human being–a known, loved, well-remember voice–that of Edward Fairfax Rochester; and it spIMG_7035oke in pain and woe wildly, eerily, urgently,” I had to physically look around my present surroundings for the voice. I remember Colorado mountains and plains that accented these words and their strange metaphysical meanings. Jane Eyre’s words needed my landscape to be heard by me. The inner needed the outer to be seen.

When we see something, by reading words on a page, or by witnessing beauty in paintings, nature, or through humans, we want to integrate our images. We don’t want to look without registering. We want their meanings to sink in. We need comparison, a contrast of the body’s reactions, or the outer world to become the analogy to the stories we have just read. We need a connection to something tangible. The known, whether it is corporal or contextual, helps us to recognize the unknown. My physical world helps bring meaning to what I see. When I am paying attention to myself or my surroundings, I am able to listen to words and see meaning in pictures.

As for why I want to see, it’s only because I want to be as alive as possible.

Curator Hands

 

Hand-picked, fragile, warm eggs

Hand-picked, fragile, warm eggs

My son is reading Siddhartha by Herman Hesse in Literature class. I remember reading it at 18, his age as well. It added a dimension of self-reflection and spirituality to my life that had never been there before. I lovingly handled the pages of that book and didn’t want to set it down.

To add to the class’s understanding of the story, they were assigned to watched a PBS movie called The Buddha. In it, the Buddha explains that everything we love and cherish is already gone from us. That is the nature of life: it is ephemeral and fleeting. Despite all promises to “be together forever,” we can’t control our own mortality. My beloved’s mother just passed away this week, reminding us thoroughly of that fact.

Situations change, relationships end, new ones begin. And of course, we can’t control the lifespan of our possessions. My son is learning this with his car that is on its last legs. Is it okay to let go of our material goods without being shallow? Are we betraying them, or being materialistic?

The Buddha also points out that to understand and come to peace with the inevitable nature of loss and suffering is to let go of our attachment to that person, that thing, that moment.

I’m not a Buddhist, but for me, letting go of attachment means cherishing everything as a gift while we have it. I don’t want to completely detach-I want my love and honor to go through the suffering and come out the other side. I hope that awareness can help me with this. By knowing that I won’t have something forever, I am striving to fully be in the moment with it.

If I look at curating a gallery with a Buddhist eye, I would see the inevitable end of all material. My future self sees that the objets d’art would eventually break, tear, rip, and crack. I see the mortality of matter. Of course, this is nothing I want to hasten. By being aware of its fragility, I am more respectful, more aware, more loving in every moment I am holding work. By knowing that destruction is coming, I bask and glory in the beauty of each object’s fullness and vitality in its present manifestation.

I’m attempting to hold my loved ones in the same way. I want to hold my relationships, my situations, and my possessions with loving respect. I want to hold the beautiful and virtuous entities with curator’s hands, lightly and safely. I know that some will be in my palm for a good long while. Others I will set down gently.

But the point is to be prescient in the holding.