One Flesh........

"There is nothing that enters a man from outside which can defile him; but the things which come out of him, those are the things that defile a man."

                                                                                                        Mark 7:15

"Dispite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage."

                                                                                           Billy Corgan 

  "In First Corinthians Paul tells wives to submit to their husbands" my friend says as he speaks over my other friends who are getting married, "but it's not what you think, it doesn't stop there!  The next verse down tells husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church.  And you know how much Christ loved the church?  He died for her and that is what husbands are called to do for their wives............"  He grinned and stumbled as he spoke on about husbands duties to their wives, the submission of the wife was the crux and he seemed to pick up momentum and confidence as he consulted his notes after getting over the controversial topic of "submitting wives."  My mind wondered to Jesus, the subject I guess of the hole talk, and I thought about his death.  This is what a man was called to do for his wife?  It seems there was always so much talk about Jesus' death but his life seems to gather only passing glances from his followers, didn't Jesus also live for the church (his metaphoric bride?).  How did he live for her?  We all know how he died for her but how did he live?  Later my friend who conducted the ceremony got up and gave a toast to the bride and her new husband.  He told the bride how much he loved her but he was really glad that she would never live with them again and that he was happy that her husband was taking over what ever responsibilities he himself felt for her.  But that he also loved her.  My brother told him he was full of shit when he walked off the stage.  He hardly responded to the challenge and I felt sorry for him.  Helplessness was written there, the look of "what else could I do?"  The question was in his eyes as he looked at me and then looked away.  I saw him, in that moment, dying every day for his wife and his helpless rage at not being able to live for her.  All the retaliation that was given him now was a passive aggressive speech.  There is nothing to live for any more, only things to die for and I felt that crown of thorns pressing down.  

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.