Sometime after falling......

"Some days I'm bursting at the seams 

  With all my half remembered dreams

  And then it shoots me down again.

  I feel the dampness as it creeps 

  I hear you coughing in your sleep

  Beneath a broken window pane.

  Tomorrow, girl, I'll by you chips

  A lolly-pop to stain your lips

  And it will all be right as rain.

   -This an't no love thats guiding me-"

                                                            -David Grey

  I get caught up in being caught up, nothing new about that is there? "But knowledge does not vanquish mystery, or obscure it's distant lights." Annie Dillard writes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  Just a soft reminder, tickle at the base of my spine to step back and breath again.  My friend Scott says that if you aren't sleeping well it is a good indication that something isn't right in your life, the balance if off.  Well.......... It could be a bomby hot house, noises in the night, or restless dogs wondering around hacking up hair balls too, but I think generally Mr. Marksberry is correct in his analyses.  I have a knot in the base of my neck which tells me I have some stress and that stress starts with a mind that is filling up and over flowing with burdens not mine to carry.  Yet "knowledge does not vanquish mystery" and I wonder why I didn't see it coming and check my self.  All the warning lights were flashing weeks ago, the neon lights flashing through my brain cells "step back, step back"! Jesus lead a great example when he would slip away, tell no one, and disappear from his friends to find solitude, prayer, and silence. Are we that much greater to not need this as well?  I go sleepless nights of crazed drifting, morning hazes, reactionary actions, and unthought of conversations until I become so dissatisfied with my present state of mind that I collapse in frayed exhaustion. Then I look up. Where does hope come from? I have some urge for quantity and immediacy that is always at war with spirit and soul.  I become a wild eyed friend and a manic companion to any new acquaintance that happens to cross my path.  I want to sell the shop and not the trinket, squeeze the balloon before watching it rise.  I ask my self how many times must I be the "Prodigal Son" returning home, yet it doesn't matter really and I don't know.  It is just nice to get home again............ 

Gravity

"Is this what it's like, I thought then, and think now: a little blood here, a chomp there, and still we live, trampling the grass? Must everything whole be nibbled?"

                                                                                                                       -Annie Dillard

  On account of life and deeds, color and texture, sexuality and religion I am a tumble weed of both desire and constraint.  As one writer wrote about his life (and I paraphrase): "There I was, successful, famous, and rich only to find my self the next day raving mad!"  When desire takes her hand and holds me too close the scales shift to that side of life and off I go!  And when they shift to guilt and worry, sliding to far to constrain, I choke on a noose of my own making "Their freedom has now become their bondage." Brett said this week end.  I just finished two days with the delightful Mr. and Mrs. Townson.  I awoke in their "off the grid" house in the West Kootenia late last Saturday morning to wander up stairs with my guitar. "Dodging bullets in the sun, I hope that was the last one" Brett howls to a riff I start playing.  A new song is born as we pull secrets from the air about a man caught in something too big to handle.  The morning turns into afternoon and we hunt the scrap yard near the shop for a surface to paint on.  House paint gets dribbled and thrown, flexed and suspended before contact, a collaboration of wills and friendships. Brett and I paint together just for the hell of it, just to see if we can bend like reeds in the same wind.  These images are from those days. Just a grab at a time and a glance of a memory.  We talked exhausted into the night about our feelings on religion, that oh so delicate balance between relativity and cramped security: what parts of life are gravity and what parts are atoms and beyond!  Our basic conclusion, in case you are just dying to know and believe that at least one of us must be ingenious enough to figure it all out, is simply this: "somethings are basic truths, such as gravity, yet moral law can't be applied to life like say "gravity" is, it comes down to love and hate, "to hate evil and love good" yet we are easily fools for evil that is good and good that is evil.  This means it is a day to day walk in grace, mercy, love, and repentance but most of all love. Some how things are better that way.  And we are all crazed artist's with our hair flying, our desire flinging and our constraint held in the tensions of gravity.

I had the great honor to be apart of photographing 

two very dear friends of mine this last Friday evening.

Leslie and Todd have always been two people that 

I have loved deeply and have admired greatly.

Their loving personalities have reached out to all

who have come in contact with them and have given

me more smiles and laughs than I can count!  They

are engaged to be married this August and asked my 

friend Scott and I to photograph their engagement as

well as their wedding.  It saddened me greatly to 

leave the wedding photography to my good friend

Scott but I was lucky enough to be able to be apart of

their engagement photos.

Here is the art work I was able to do, just a try, just

a catch of the fire that surrounds their love for each

other.  I have to say that their commitment, one for the other,                                                     

goes beyond words and I believe it goes beyond

time, it has made my life better, and I believe it has 

and will continue to make this world we live in shine

deeper with the glory of God.

Thank you Todd and Leslie, thank you for being my 

friends, thank you for the love you share and 

thank you for being who you are.

The Cheshire Cat

"For some reason it has not yet trickled down to the man on the street that some physicists now are a bunch of wild-eyed, raving mystics.  For they have perfected their instruments and methods just enough to whisk away the crucial veil, and what stands revealed is the Cheshire cat's grin."

                   -Annie Dillard

--Here is to Ben......

"The Greatest Seduction"

"it was always without pretensions of loving or being loved, although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love, but without the problems of love."   -Gabriel Garcia Marquez  (Love in the time of Cholera)

  My cell phone doesn't work here; not that I answer it very often any way.  I can hear the river rolling outside and see the wet stone walkway flowing under the glowing branches of the birch as it leads to the front door.  I can feel the presents of Stryker Peak towering over my right shoulder and unseen through house and trees.  I love this place, I love it because I feel lonely here, I feel like it should to be shared with some one; that it needs to be shared.  I like this feeling because it is such a contrast from other parts of my life. (I too find my self filling my life with mediocre love and loving.  A safe love, a distant love, a survival love.)  I also feel like reading my Bible, now that I am here, and praying to a whispering God.

Feel it!  Do you?  The muse is here, it is buried deep under the compost of the dark forest, close to the winds of the peaks.  I feel it in wet morning light and breezes of all the past lover's touches.  I don't know what it means to be an artist, I am simply me.  If envisioned from the outside I see my self as silly.  Yet I feel it in some places and others it is memory that keeps me working, memory of all that which came before, with what ever this is that feeds the monster.  What is it that inspires you?  What is it; that cause and effect that swings your Newton's Cradle?  That blows holes in the top of your head and off you stumble as your own personal disco ball!  What do you think an artist feels like before he or she does something beautiful?  I try to fill my heart with all that is given, when it is give, and to take it with me as I go.  It isn't every where, you got to take coals and keep them bright and stoke the fire when needs be.  Art is never a wast of time, there is to much ugliness in this world of man, those of us who "can" have a responsibility to bring as much  light and beauty into the world as possible.  So stoke the fire, I say!  Stoke it for the bombs that are falling and the blood that is running, for the poisons leaching into the rivers, for the mother that cries, for the addict with wasted vanes and the little children abused.  It isn't enough to talk.

Art and Friendship

This is the past, frozen in imagery like the subject of many of the images.  Today was summertime with it's puffy clouds and hot sunshine marked off by the lines of cool shade. There are still pieces of springtime left though the melting of these pictures is past, at least in the low country.  It has been a slow summer in coming, just as a slow winter in leaving.  A night ago I a woke with a thin layer of ice on the puddles outside the door.

  These images were taken on two different outings with two artist friends of mine who are constant at keeping me in social contact when I am locked away with ideas and creation.  It was only six weeks ago; an age ago now that the sun has warmed the land to green.  I love their company, their creativity and forceful wit as I love these new warmer days.  

"I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly."

                                                                                                                                                                                     Anne Dillard

Some one has pushed auto-pilot, with out asking me, and this is my machine damn-it!  I know the brain is a muscle and not a jelly suspended in plaster holding two video cameras recording the world and erasing at random.  I know this........  Well, summer is here and with it's long days spent out side, in the sun, with the makings of money and the coming after-math of exhaustion.  I have dirt sinking into the pores of my hands.  I am a gardener this summer, as I have been for the past two summers, and like the past two summers I have found I live in polar opposites from one part of the year to the next.  Winter is at a sharp right angle to summer living; I don't know if this is mentally healthy.  I am guessing that it isn't, for any time you feel like you are on an upper level of the old Nintendo video game Tetras it is time to re-orientate and remember gravity!  It is summer time!!!  It is for a celebration of this crazy place - all the balloons are coming out bursting and then being reborn to just burst once again!  To sleep doesn't seem needed, there is just to much to do and every one is smiling.  I can't rip my self from my brother porch in the evenings, the flowers are still running colors in my mind, as we sip cold beer and watch the mountains play a slide show of shadows.  An artist must be still for a time, must be the sponge before the spout, everything the artist experiences becomes the expression and I believe all this.  Where the monkey and the wrench and the gears get put in the same room and start punching holes in the walls of my head is the apex between my inspiration and my self awareness. 

  I haven't done much for art in two weeks, or three.  I have to reming my self to not feel a certain nagging guilt or paranoia that once the engine cools it will never start again. "Are you avoiding your art?" a friend of mine asked me as she walked up to the porch last night.  It was me, Ben, beer, and the shadows on the mountains.  I laughed, it is all a person can do sometimes, when you just don't have an answer for the riddle.  So I sit there letting the tidal waves build inside me; I want big canvass, fresh smooth and ready to dance the color; fined form, in value, and it's speech!  I want to bury my head in Prussian Blue and breath Crimson!  I want to cut out my heart and use it as a stencil to paint an arrow to You!!!!!!!!!!!!  Do you get the point?  I don't have the canvass, the paints still are covered in caps and lid and all that remains is to sit on the porch and laugh with Ben.  It is summer time, the flowers are our party favors and we smile as if it had always been this way!