The blog and I have this on-again, off-again relationship. I tend to blog when I travel, but not so much when I am at home. This year, I do not really plan to do any foreign travel. But I do intend to write more, so the blog is hereby reborn.

Over the last few years, art has become my favored mode of expression and creativity. I love painting! I love the freedom to express states of mind, states of being, glimpses of Big Truths, in colors and forms rather than in words. There is a wordless interface between consciousness and reality that tends to dissolve itself into a simple being-ness. Since childhood, I have been captivated by that interface, which I mostly found in nature during those early years. I was not a child who loved drawing or painting. I loved nature and words and poetry and stories.  I pursued a career in which writing – very precise academic writing – was required. I was pretty good at it, but it became too much of a thing in itself, a detour around that experiential interface with reality that I always had wanted to know about. So I started writing poems again, poems like this one:

Words are very good for telling

How to catch a fat antelope

Or where to find the ripest berries.

Words can soothe and calm.

Words can bring laughter.

Words can bruise like stones.

 The greatest truths of the universe

Are beyond words.

Words only whisper,

“It’s over there.

Go this way.

And when you get to the end

Of the words,

Keep going.”

And then I started making pictures, doing photography, painting.

Now I find I want to do both painting and writing. There is a triangulation of truth via mind, word, and image. And that is where I am now, exploring… trying to figure out how that works. More later…