spiritual journey

A Painting Path (A Creative Process)

When painting, I struggle for equilibrium between spontaneity and purpose, freedom and planning, energy and control. After four years of painting full-time, of steadfast exploration, perhaps I am finally finding a rhythm. My most recent work, The Other Side, emerges from this path of painting. Sometimes someone will ask me how long it takes to…Read more A Painting Path (A Creative Process)

Equilibrium

I need to go. There is something the place will tell me, something my soul desperately needs to hear. There, windmills turn mindlessly. Like sentinels, they watch over masses paying homage at their base:  fields rippling, yielding to frigid wind. The stalks blur into an aggregate of stark, browned-out hills. The windmills guard comings and goings, my…Read more Equilibrium

Soul on Fire

The darkness comes for us all sooner or later. Terror not of our own making magnetizes us like a black hole into unendurable pain. It often starts with an ember, a spark we try to control. But it develops a life of its own, swelling into blinding heat, into raging fire from which there is…Read more Soul on Fire

Always (Love Never Ends)

  It's been about five years since my Dad left this earth. His departure shocked me and shook me to the core of my being. Of kindred spirits, he was one of the closest. The current of mutual adoration running between us was so abruptly cut off, I was left disoriented and blind, suddenly lost…Read more Always (Love Never Ends)

The Other Side

"The light that is hard won offers the greatest illumination. A gift wrestled from bleakness will often confer a sense of sureness and grounding of the self, a strengthening proportionate to the travail of its birth." Beauty by John O'Donohue, page 79.

Joy Hunt

Sr. Fidence was like a beautiful rose in my hand, but her fragrance drifted just beyond my grasp as she stood there barefoot, her white-draped physical being unable to contain an other-worldly joy. I didn't understand her at all. I wanted to, desperately. How, in the midst of despair and hardship, hunger and lack, did…Read more Joy Hunt

Surrender

  I feel his anguish as I paint. The hunger, the sting of salt, the despair. When there is nothing left to say or do, just shadows of essence barely clinging to the horizon. Then, the letting go. When every last vestige of control slips irrevocably into churning depths. When everything you fear most emerges…Read more Surrender

The Bird Must Fly

It's the heart splayed, soul displayed feeling. Vulnerable, that's how it feels to walk into a new gallery with art in hand, even if you already know your piece is accepted into the show. And even more so in a new city. A new city, and yet an old city. I graduated from the University…Read more The Bird Must Fly

Arise (2)

  Song of Solomon 2:10-13 “My beloved responded and said to me, ‘Arise, my darling, my beautiful one, And come along. For behold, the winter is past, The rain is over and gone. The flowers have already appeared in the land; The time has arrived for pruning the vines, And the voice of the turtledove…Read more Arise (2)

Arise

There you are, backed into a corner, walls closing in, ceiling compressing and floor heaving to meet it. Suffering has a way of whittling the world down into compact space with infinite feeling. Like a tiny dandelion in a vast open field, exposed. Like the deafening silence of lonely cries withheld in a crowded room, because no one will…Read more Arise