From an urban monk:

The early monks did have the advantage of cultivating silence alone in their cells, and then could go plant potatoes with their brothers or sisters. They did have that advantage as compared to cultivating silence and a listening spirit in heavy traffic. I’m sure in that sense, caves were a bit more conducive to prayer. But few of us have caves in our lives. Jesus seems to have kept finding gardens. That we can do, or even parks. I think the old practices are still possible regardless.

Making art for me is also a sort of urban garden.

And if the final city is a gardened city with streams as Revelation seems to image, then it must be possible to meet God in our busy city lives.

Anyway, those caves, probably had snakes and scorpions anyhow. I prefer city parks.

When the world trade centers fell, a great piece of art was also lost along with so much else. I was there, and forgot about that piece, as there were more important things to tend to than art. Yet, years later, I realized that huge piece was also buried in the same rubble as everything else…..

Art lost at 911: a thank you note to Joan Miro:

Women, birds and the moon
Are still good meditations, Miro. Thanks John
Thanks for turning our attention upwards and inwards
During the wars, and rubble making contentions.
Thanks instead for making constellations!
Not escaping war, but contextualizing it at least, and being buried
With it. 
And again sorry we did not have a funeral for your piece at the world
Trade centers that day. Art to ashes
And ashes to .art But there are few funerals
For art these days. And world trade
Isn’t the safest place for art to dwell, it seems.
But thanks for that maquette in Milwaukee though later.
Hopefully there will be no wars there.
Your grand painting beneath that same rubble
Of all wars is probably still reflected in the pools there somehow. Thanks for making it anyway. Perhaps
People enjoyed it in their last moments!
So about that painting bro. I was there, but had
People on my mind. No time for funerals for art in this life.
Wish I could’ve grabbed it for you though.
But it was way too big for that day.
But here’s my art eulogy for it, anyway.

From a particular tree shaped like a bear, I’ve been watching for over 30 years——

What bear tree knows:

Bear tree wears sunset daily
Bear tree stares out over the bay to keep watch
Bear tree is the bay watcher
Bear tree saw the 60’s and long before
Bear tree had kids smoking pot and writing poems beneath his branches
Bear tree survived the pandemic
Bear tree saw the city become a ghost of herself
During Covid. But even before no one could afford to be here,
He overheard.
Bear tree sat alone when the Mission district went silent
Bear tree sat with the city of homeless in all the parks
Bear tree remembers the charcoal circles that distanced us when under
Shut down. Bear tree as a kid can even remember the deployment after Pearl Harbor. And his dad Big Bear Tree remembered all the gold rushers frenzy
His Father those who lived here before the Europeans brought chocolate and
Their love for gold. Baby bear tree has heard the long story
And keeps looking out over the bay this evening in a pastels glory
Standing on a fog line that seems to never end.
Bear tree is looking bare these days, but has a little girl-she may
Have moved across the Bay to get a different angle, or….
She’s run off somewhere like those kids in the 60’s, he thinks-
She stood watch with him for eras…
But she’ll return to see the rest of the story, he’s sure
Tonight bear tree is watching the elections, and hoping for the best
So he can keep watching over this bay.
I met bear tree only 30 years back, and he got taller over time
But now he looks thin, but determined as they say. Bear tree won’t die
He told me. My leaves will just blow into the bay, and my skeleton
Become art, before the great fires comes
“Bigger than men’s wars,” he says.
But he’ll keep watching, he told me.

About my funeral, just since you asked (but no worries you have many years to plan it!), I’m sure you would want to know (if I have any friends left on earth at that far future point):

Simplest way to choreograph my funeral, though I have much more complex ones, where people have to go and find objects I’ve hidden around the world, and make art from them, then return together and make a film about what they found (but that plan takes a huge global team), so I came up with a simpler one- make my casket out of painting canvases, and have every one come and collaborate in painting it. Each a prayer for me, or based on a cool memory they had. That would make for a simple funeral for all, and a cool casket.
Sometimes, caskets are a bit boring to me, having grown up doing so many funerals. I want mine to be performance art. Of course ,there would be a documentary film with interviews, and would be edited and given as gifts to all who came. Art is meant to be given away. I’m really into art giving. I do that even in my old creative workshops. Making art responses to another person’s art, and then giving it as a gift of seeing that person. But for a funeral, I like my simple casket painting idea. But don’t put me in a museum afterwards—too many alarm systems! I might never get out!
I’m not being morbid, I’m just art planning my cross over art projects!
Lots of people don’t plan their funerals. I work with elderly, I know. I think it’s wise to plan on how you want to be celebrated. Mine is performance art, with a bit of adventure! But the painting the canvas coffin part, could occur anywhere, and I think is.a practical funeral, for those who aren’t mobile or adventurous!
I’ll keep working on the eulogy, but that could take another 40 years, at the very least! So we all have plenty of time!

Art invites us into the impossible possible around us daily:

I had a dream that I was taken, what seemed like upwards, but may have been through a huge lateral gold curtain, into what my guide called, “The Realm of Impossible things”. It was filled, in addition to every sort of art supply, old umbrellas, top hats, bowling balls, huge canes and almost anything you would ever want to make art from. Theater props, piles of purple feathers, huge and small glass balls and every other sort of impossible object that only an artist could see a purpose for. Like my old mentor, who I’m sure had a little hut there, as it seemed like a village of artisans, with his two headed brooms he used to make-“Just in case you need to sweep both corners at once,” he used to say to me.
When he died, we used those two headed brooms at his funeral (true story!).
Anyway, in the dream, I felt that every object has a potential other use than what it was originally intended for. A coat, as with kids, could become a tent. A hat, a bowl for confetti. A whale bone, a cane and so forth. Everything had potential or possibilities.
This is exactly how I see thing daily. And I think is a common “curse” blessing for all artist. In that it makes it difficult to go pick up the mail, or do grocery shopping, as one is always seeing the symbolic level of meaning around them.
So we get bored with assigning something only to its primary function. A book is also a doorstop, or a potential stairwell for cats. Aren’t we always just opening up the “other” possibilities of the daily things around us.
Yesterday, a fork became a scalpel in making my painting.
Comedy works similarly, I think—“What else could this subway be?”
Artist work by symbolic associations. And this realm I was guided in, was filled with ellipses, or things which would also be used for….
I love those sort of dreams. I felt right at home in that part of The Kingdom.
It is said that artist invent, but I think they just see what else something could bee seen as-what else is a broom or a rose. For, as we know, a rose is not just a rose!
And that we dream at all, proves it.
Artist are seers, meaning we see more layer of meaning to everything. Or we see things more in the larger context.
Art just makes us aware that there is more than meets the eye to life around us! Kids of course, already know that. But we forget that Reality isn’t flat. It’s dimensional. Elijah saw heavenly armies around the earthly ones.
And we tend to make studios which are filled with objects of possibilities—impossible possibilities. As life itself is. That we breath, sleep and wake up, and even that we make art, is a sort of common daily miracle. But art reminds us that we live inside a miracle.

What I have really touched

What have my hands actually touched?
A girl’s broken ankle at sunset, was best
Or most real yesterday, I think. Her feet smelled like perfume from France.
A cat too lame to make it across the road
And had to be picked up, slowly, as cats do-but knowing her name, by instinct.
Felt like a touch or tag at least.

a sketch pad, a back pocket bible and a crayon–enough to save a life or two, I’m sure.
A sunset in a canyon too gorgeous to name now-but
My eyes only touched her.-still it felt that real.
The rest I did. Lots of slaps on many backs.
A man off a bridge in Paris, and few held dead body’s hands
As 911 became an icon.
Every time I touched something, in Love.
That’s what I knew. Or, What I really touched.
Lots of soil and blood, and people’s eyes as they passed
In closing….I suppose
That’s what I really touched.
I mean, what I loved well.

What have you actually touched?

your hands must remember.

What the desert taught me:

Over time, Texas became my spiritual desert. Not just that it was hot, but that it cut me off from any other source for meaning but God. My usually ability to make friends everywhere I went, and audience for my gifts, intimate peer support—all the things which kept me bouyed up in the past-weren’t here. It was just me performing for angels; and then the angels faded, and it felt like just me on a bare stage, hoping the fat lady in the back whose clap I could still hear, was Jesus.
If you are a theatrical person like me, it is hard when rehearsing with no audience. I play off audiences well. My humor requires a live conversation. So when God took away the audience, I wasn’t sure who I was for a while.
First He had to become my only audience, then, He had to ask me to stop performing for Him, even, and just be. That was the death part.
The mine en scene felt like that Samuel Becket play, Waiting for Gadot. I was just standing in a wasteland with one dead tree and me. And man, it was lonely.
But He wouldn’t go on relating to me solely through performance—even the performance of good or ministry. He wanted me to see who I was when not performing, when just being with Him. We would sit for hours in the back of the theater, watching no one perform. He wanted just to sit there with me, with no show, just us.
Then out there in that desert, theater watching a non-performance with Jesus, suddenly something appeared. An enormous Big Top tent!
Ok, get up there son, and do your thing, now that you don’t have to! Now that you can be visible without performing. And come off stage as soon as you don’t feel like your really collaborating with me. And sit here again in the back, just being. I’ll bring popcorn, I promise.
That’s how it was back then in Texas. And that’s what the desert taught me.

You know when you are too tired to know what you desire. That was the whole Summer that year in Texas.
My friend was pregnant on top of it, and I was trying to mc art happenings to keep the neighborhood inspired. We were suffering for our art, we told ourselves that year.
In truth, it was simply too hot—even for art. Our minds or imaginations no longer worked. We were monkey machines going through the pre-prescribed motions of life. We weren’t really living. Not because of the heat exactly, but more due to a general malaise which it only intensified, amplified—made overtly obvious.
None of us were happy. And we were all Americans, so we were doubly unhappy that we weren’t happy. No smiles that year. No white teeth or white sneakers. We were just too hot for appearances.
We used to do outdoor cinema on the sides of buildings back then, and I remember that Summer we kept showing Lawrence of Arabia to try to take courage from a very white man making it through the desert.
That year we also worked through several several director’s whole oeuvres so we could sound smart by fall.
We did Felliini, Kurosawa, Hitchcock, several French new wave directors and threw in some New Hollywood at the end. I think we even watched American Graffiti while actually making an outdoor mural. We were ambitious, young, half naked half the time, and very hot that year. We were just being ourselves, which is enough in itself. To be or not to be was our basic existential quest. Whether in a bar or temple didnt matter to us. We just wanted to be home with ourselves, and then potentially guide people home. And, if we were lucky, the art would be good.
The best thing about that Summer was the long nights.
We sat on porches sipping rose wine from rnorthern france, and talking about all our favorite mise en scenes in every movie ever. And why they were great.
We talked a lot, but mostly at night-luquascious us. The days snuffed or smothered all possibility of intelligent conversations. Everyone had no IQ until nightfall.
Anyway, my friend was pregnant, so we didn’t see her at all during the day. She was reading Tolkien and binge watching Columbo and other reruns on Cozi -tv.

America’s nostalgia can’t go back very far, but you work with what you got, in terms of memory. Old 70’s cop shows, comedy reruns like the Honeymooners, sad episodes of Mash, which never got old….war and humor, can get you through Summer.
Well, that was that summer anyway, and she had her baby, who eventually became a poet. So, it was a good summer, despite the heat.

My studio:
Half red old novels
Theology books well thumbed
Old journals
A bible I was given in France
From a man trying to kill himself
A long two headed broom from my mentor
Knives and hats from my grandfather
Photo after photo
Old cameras everywhere
Undeveloped film in each corner
Lights people gave me for my art
Super 8 film in un-matching boxes
Shoeboxes of paint of every color
My endless collection of all types of pens
Illuminated gospels
Hasidic literature
All the major sacred books
In many translations….
Botanical illustrations….
Foreign language books
Every type of speaker
And recording devices all the way back to the 70’s/
I will record life as I live it I wrote on my wall as a kid
Along with my first long word-beautiful.
I was hoping even back then
That life really is beautiful, as it claims to be.
Books on writing about writing
Maps, maps, maps
All the cities I loved and lived inside of.
Pictures of old friends on every wall
Pictures of new ones on my computer
Things to print make and make beer.
Equipment of all sorts.
A rare copy of the baghgavad Gita
Which highlights Arjuna’s questions like a red letter addition
Of the New Testament highlight’s Jesus’.
Signed copies of all my favorite poets
Who I got to meet.
Robert Bly, Philip Levine, Galway Kennel and the gang.
Even the late great clown and king—Allen Ginsberg!
Who I met during my art school days.
And was the only man I ever met who actually carried a hurdy-gurdy!
What a howl that man had. He could bellow and get a crowd going!
Photos of my mom and my wife—all over.
Birds, fish, and musical notes on every painting.
The daily music of the spheres, I suppose.
My endless drawings of a man on a tightrope
Walking between worlds….that and my red chicken man
Whose skin is disco ball-my only self portraits to date.
All the sketches of Paul Klee and Kandinsky.
And most of Chagall.
Many books by my professor friend on Van Gogh and God.
Every translation of every bible ever.
So many things I used to know.
Photos of all my cars through the years—
69 Kharman Ghio, 68 Saab, that 60’s Volvo I out bided
A politician for.
My dad’s books in many languages! Love translates!
Recordings of my mom singing operatic worship from Jerusalem
And in many spaces over the years.
Pictures of my grandfather and I just sitting on some sofa, being.
No photos of Jesus, but Jesus tacit in it all.
God became His Own art! That’s what my studio
Says.

Someone asked me which of the many cities you have lived in and loved, do you love the most? What a hard question!

As i experience cities as people, and i love many people–my heart has a wide circumference!

In terms of daily living, i would say Antwerp and Prague, but Jerusalem was so layered, it was like a poem which you just couldn’t get to the bottom of. But in terms of my identity, i think Antwerp would be up there. She values good conversation for its own sake.

The friendly curious creative way there, and blend of cultural perspectives in open friendly jazz like dialogue. And i like ports, where cultures converse.

In terms of American cities–i like Cambridge, Mass (where i went to art therapy grad school) lots! And of course, San Fran for the depth of lifelong friendships i made there. And of course, Richmond, Virginia has a soft spot in my heart, as i studied art and religion there with my remarkable mentor and made many life long friends. And Spring is hard to beat in that region of the world.

But Austin and Albuquerque have also been faithful friends to me. Just thinking about cities I’ve loved today, as i write a little article about my own life’s long love story. (a comedy to be sure!) Cars, cities and people, it is called. I’ve been blessed to live an adventurous life! Thankful to have loved so many.