We were seated next to one another on the plane,
The old man and I-
Both of us working desperately on our art
Knowing we would land soon.
Your friend is dying, I observed from looking at his art.
Yes, tonight probably.
What do you need friend?
Just to make some art for him as a gift.
That’s enough!
We cried when the plane landed.
Neither of us finished yet.

Evening’s gift, a simple pause to be:
“I could stand here all night and just look at the sky with you. But I have to get back to my delivery”, my deliverer driver said tonight. She was Italian and her name meant Joy in that musical language. Her family works down the hill, I know them well.
I said ,”Why don’t we just pause in thanks for life together for a second.”
And we did.
She could’ve stayed there forever. She needed it more than me today. Sometimes, just the invitation to pause and be, is all we need.
Sometimes, it’s just healthy to share a pause with one another, in simple thanks before an evening sky. Here we are together in this instant, alive. What a nice evening gift.
Nice to have a moment of pause with a daughter, just staring up at the sky for a moment, which felt like hours, and seemed to extend the eventing into eternity, where all our forever names dwell.

Today, people walk their dogs
Past many flowers
As hawks fly overhead, considering….
It is a good day.
Of course, high above us today
On this hill, war jets cut through the sky. Yet
Just above them, angels are singing
And talking to the dogs hawks and people.

Life occurs in layers.

Random mid-rashic notes on re-entering America: Trying to hear the Voice of Love daily.

As the roar of America’s elections take over the airwaves, I’m still-and even more-listening for that pure still quiet Voice of Love, which defines, names claims and contextualizes us all, and sets up a kind dialogue between friends.
We were in the womb, and something loved us, and brought us out, and gave us names and meaningful paths. That’s enough to be thankful for.
It becomes a discipline here, as the frequency and volume of America will break your ear drums, but hopefully not our heart drums.
As an artist who perhaps listens too much, it is a hard and easy time to hear what is Real.
The Voice of Love inside us is both quiet and enormously loud, (Elijah noticed this existentially!) once we tune into that station. Love toward ourselves, others, and something perhaps a bit bigger than us. Love is whispering our real names daily. But she requires us to tune in.
Every time I fly back into this country, I need noise reduction headphones on (reduce the “noise” to hear the Love-start in yourself!), but then if I listen well enough beneath all the daily dialogue and rhetoric/ entertainment of the moment, until I hear the tone of Love, that kind true fatherly voice….we go deaf to hear..I hear the poem of you, as a beautiful endless one worth listening to forever.
But to overhear this level of dialogue between us, requires a bit of focus-some spiritual radar!
They turned the volume up here, so I’m going back to older frequencies of being human.
Of course, I wish the politics and nations could take days or even years of silence, so we can all have room to hear the inner voice of Wisdom (knowledge applied in Love). To be a safe place for dialogue, discussion or active listening-would be a great calling now for “leadership” nations. That requires humility and depth listening.
Will that happen. Perhaps, one day, but for today, I scuba dive daily spiritually, until I hear, feel sense, that strata of Love, towards myself, others, and even the nations as they contend. And treat them all, including myself as friends.
The Voice of Love can be found everywhere, but it takes some time to learn to listen well daily.
I was at 911 it was easier to hear the voice of Love that day, (monochrome) than now. We must need to tune in on a deeper level than ever then. I’m trying. To channel love you have to hear it daily, hourly. Love is the ultimate context to interpret our text.
Perhaps, this is the best instant in history to consider the voice of Love, beneath and within us all. If, God is Love…..every-time we love or are moved by love, we enter in…..to our own names!

In the cognizant part of my day
When I could just play,
Before the Texas sun stole my mind
And only my heart was left here; I
Made three paintings and titled them all
Like Adam, naming animals;
Wrote a poem or two, helped
My elderly neighbor with her groceries
And watched birds and squirrels to see
How they do it. Get through the day
That is, and out-strategize the heat.
I must also read the desert fathers today,
And see what they had to say about it.
I’m sure a few made art also
To get by. Or just prayed all day.

Napkin poems

What then? Go fight another war
Or make art past death
Be a star which shines down
After dying in silence. for thousands of years.
Or like a squirrel keep burying nuts
That one day will be huge oak trees!
//
Go enjoy the day, you say again today.
So, I will. But so many days beat that simple joy
Out of us. Until, just to enjoy a friend’s face
In the right afternoon light, is enough
To want to die or live again.
//
In terms of sleep
It is a free cinema
With every genre imaginable
Waiting for us, like death itself
To sit in the cool dark red-curtained viewing room
And wait for the credits to roll.
//
I never wanted to go to bed as a kid
Felt I’d miss something of what the grown up’s must know by now.
I was wrong. They knew little, and I was not wise enough
To go dream. Death must be like that. A kid
Trying to stay awake, when he should be content
With dreaming.
//
I’m by now just about empty enough
To sing a real tune. He emptied Himself
To be. And me, I’m still so full.
But the longer I go, the more empty a become
Come to Me all who have empty glasses
Ad I will fill them, He whispers in the dark.
//
Moses went up into the dark to hear
The forever words….
The people were afraid—you go, we’ll stay here
At a distance. We see the lightening and hear the thunder-you go.
So he did, and told them all he saw and heard.
By that time, they weren’t staring at the mountain
All they saw was gold. And he told them
Then, how they had been tested and refined
By what they chose to look upon.
The stones broke open the words in their hearts….
Eventually.
No one wants to go up the dark mountain
And carry down the weight of the words exchanged there.
But he did. And those tablets still speak
To those willing to listen in the dark.

Moses was a weight lifter.

Working with this new gold metallic paint today. Just playing with circles and space. I dig gold. It’s like Klimt without the beautiful women:)!
These are in love with circles space, and strangely embryonic. Often mine are about sky and underwater; these are something else.
Anyway, I fell in love with gold today. I don’t clean my brushes well, but I do love color well. And I do love shapes forms and lines and the universe, especially the hidden music that is constantly here, when we listen, even in rudimentary ways—ie through painting circles!
Painting really does have sound implied!
I often paint in silence so I can hear the music.
Lines, rhythm notation is floating all around us.
We get to recreate the universe daily, or at least tune into it! Songs are just floating in the air waiting to be played.
Every time I see a plant canvas or pick up a camera, I feel potential. What does this shot want to say, which conversation does it want to overhear.
The coming away from prayer or art is the hardest. You’ve been aware of the layers of life, and have to pretend there is only one. But the imagination and the spirit cannot be imprisoned. God is uninterrupted. But we interrupt Him all the time.
I have a dead friend, who told me I was a real fine artist. I never mastered a medium, but I think he was talking about something else. Art is depth listening, an invitation to others to hear what you saw. It’s not really about the artist, it’s about what they saw.
Art is an invitation to the unseen circus all around us always!
In my dream, my whole part of heaven was made of potential. Stacks of old brooms, abandoned circus tents, left over wires, whale bones suspended like Calder pieces, levitational rooms with old costumes…..everything waiting to be art again.
What else can these brooms do, but sweep, my mentor used to say. And he would make two headed brooms and hang them on the wall to make the point.

The best way to talk about God is art. The true mystics got this. That He deserves an invitation rather than a doctrine. The best medium is art.
Jesus left no systematic theology. He left stories and riddles-or parables. He left a symbol we are invited to climb into! The main one about Him, told by those nearby Him.
When He did formally teach, He told stories and koans or parables. This was normal for Rabbis then. They realized that God is both ineffable and effable. That He is namable and the One who cannot fully be named.
But all the great mystics spoke in creative language in order to invite us towards God. To show us the gate or door (or, even a door bell for those of us who can’t hear well, when someone comes to the door and knocks!), but not to tell us everything which was on the other side. Jesus speaks of a “Kingdom” borrowing from the Roman Empire.
And then describes this kingdom using metaphors and symbols.
Mysticism is not anti-rational, but rather trans-rational or supra-rational. It speaks in symbol and stories like the Song of Songs. It speaks of intimacy with the Divine in metaphor and symbol—like a poem between two lovers.
Jesus used parables when inviting people to enter into the Reality of His Father’s Realm. He did not leave us a systematic philosophy or theology. He left us an invitation. His method was the symbol of His Own Life and then His cryptic but enterable tales and parables. The Kingdom is like….similes and metaphors were His pedagogical method. Telling that.
God can be named, and can’t. An invitation to encounter God is more useful than a thousand books about God.
St John said, God is Love. The most abstract and true thing ever said.

And the truest. But how is love encountered. The rest of His gospel is stories and tales of signs and wonders, miracles and tall tales—just tall enough to walk inside and know.
John and Jesus left us invitations! Our mailboxes are filled with them by now. Do we want to go to that banquet or not? The mystics went! Let’s join them.
Art invites us to participate in the Reality to which it is pointing. That’s what Jesus did. If you have “seen” Me, you have perceived My Father.
Jesus was the finest art ever.
To the degree we engage our whole selves with Jesus and His stories and parables, we enter into the reality to which they both point and participate. That is how to read the Bible. And certainly how to encounter the art of Jesus.
Thomas Merton pointed out in his book on Zen, is that the Zen masters were trying to guide people into and encounter with ultimate reality, which was outside of language, but which was not anti-linguistic. Language itself is symbolic.
Jesus is called The Word. The Living Word. He is the pure symbol of what He Himself is. He is the Word which doesn’t stand to represent the Word, but is the Word. So He is the ultimate art.
Art invites us to participate in the reality from which it speaks.
To be mystical, in our culture, implies anti-rational. I would suggest, that mysticism is just to engage the whole self in encountering the Ultimate. When we listen to music or look at great art, we are trying to “enter into” what is Real. The Pure image of what is, as it’s been called. Jesus is said to be the exact representation of God. The Pure Image.
So we, who are made in His image, are wise, to fix our gazes on Him, as the pure invitation to know and be known by God.
Art is the shortcut into Reality. As you see in Tolstoy’s “Confessions”. The whole book is him overcoming an overly rationalistic view of God, but it ends with him telling a dream. The dream is what lets you into what he discovered in his life.
Being to being, deep to deep living, requires us to enter into what each symbol participates in.
Mysticism is taking out the trash while being aware of God.
When everything in your life becomes a “spiritual” practice of encountering and collaborating with God, you’re a mystic.
Love God, and do whatever, as St Augustine, who may or may not have been a mystic said.
My point here, is that art—the language of symbols and forms-is the most direct method of presenting what is Real. And what is Real is the gospel. That God so loved the world…..
Mysticism is just to be expectantly reliant on something Loving which is larger than us, and was here before and after us; to humble ourselves enough to know we are kids in this Universe, and find our names as we lean into upwards and within to The One who knows His Name and is the Father of all names.
The symbolic, one strata of meaning, is the quickest way in.
King David prayed to become a living symbol or portent for others. Jesus was the ultimate port. And, we in His Image, are signs and symbols pointing to the Great Creator of names!

The reason even the Western masters like Kandinsky spoke of painting from the Transcendent, was that the only way to express the aquarium we are all in, is through art! It’s the closest proximity and the best form of invitation to Life. Art addresses our conscious, unconscious and every level of who we are–the gospel requires our entire being to awaken to know it! Art is the best sort of language for that type of transformational encounter! And the gospel isn’t new news. It’s ancient, and requires ancient techniques to be expressed well. When we worship, we employ art. And worship may be the highest form of art. That makes sense. Given, us being human!

Considerations I’m having…..

In Zen paintings, the subject is The Absolute, but the medium to encounter it, is the little simple boat. I wanted to add what Elijah saw—that the Absolute is replete with sound, color and characters-animals staring at angels!
Yes, it is trans-rational, but not absurd, rather teeming with life, as even a single pond is. Nowhere we look lacks life on every level. Life is teeming with life! Silence filled with music. There is no Void. No place without life. “Even hell is filled with souls!”
Kandinsky wanted to paint music. Jesus spoke in koans and parables to invite us to encounter Reality. If you want to know what He is talking about, you have to dive right into the parables to know.
Reality is relational, and requires depth encounter to be known.
A good painting just shows more of what is already really there, or here.
We see the three big influences on western art in the 20th C being: Zen (the version coming from Japan); Freud and Jung’s theories, and existentialism. We might add some form of Neo-Marxism.
Each deal the nature of Reality in different manners. And each lead to different forms of art.
Great art is a like staring through a key hole into a previously unseen room which was always there, but needed an opening to be seen through.
Just as the act of prayer, allows us to tune into the larger ongoing conversation, so art, lets us see more of what is already there.
And what is already there, is more that the artist’s unconscious, unless they are incredibly narcissistic. And even then, great art, goes far beyond self expression—it is overhearing self and Being conversing.
Even when Van Gogh mirrors himself in his self portraits, he is aiming at something Absolute. His white stone forever self. The particular poetry of God he was and, I’m sure still is!

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What I’m learning. First century context to Jesus life and ministry. Then the three major streams of influence in the 20th C.
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To live in simple thanks for each day. A thankful life—being to Being.
The idea of wabi in Zen—poverty or simplicity. Just being thankful while taking out the trash. Adding to that—to consciously BE WITH the Spirit of Christ as you do all things. Life as collaboration.
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I’ve always wanted to guide people to the circus or the Big Top larger Reality space, so we know how wondrous it is. Back in the day, that was the Jones ( circus family I traveled with), or travel, itself; or hidden cathedrals in the forests of Europe.
. But it has always been His Kingdom Big Top, I wanted people to believe in. That magical space and place which is always right here.
The Kingdom is not just coming, it is here. I believe, for I have seen enough to know.
Even music or movies is reminding us of what’s just behind the veil.
Life is mystic, you don’t have to be a mystic to know it—just look at any good art. There is more than meets the eye, once the I opens to it.
At first, like St Paul, it may seem blinding. Like in Matrix when Neo is reborn, it is at first hard to see. But then the new or always Reality becomes familiar.
As in CS Lewis’ “The Great Divorce”—the grass no longer hurts our feet once we get used to it.
My art and life is about pulling back the veil and saying, there is more to Life than meets the Eye; and in doing so, I hope, with St Paul, that your eyes may be enlightened to see far more than we all imagined! Jesus came to bring sight to the blind—that’s all of us!

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My other life theme is that we all are named. We all are not just loved, but have nuanced names which want to be pronounced. To be named is to be loved. And Love is all that knows your name.
Once, loved, we are able to love and be safe places for others to find or hear their own names.
The thesis is that God wants to pronounce His own poetry. And we the poems.

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If we look at Zen, Existentialism and Psychoanalysis-we see the big three lenses of the 20th C.

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Painting is like meditation; writing is like overhearing more layers to the conversation.