The current geologic  age, the Holocene, began when the last ice age ended and wooly mammoths and giant sloths began to die off. Humans had already been around for a while–building fires, making tools, developing language, leaving their handprints and paintings of animals real and imagined on the caves of Lascaux. Today, those images seem like premonitions. For although our species […]

Suddenly, in the museum of birdsong I remember the brightness of his flaxen hair. How my boy lit the nursery room himself. As himself. That was why he could not sleep. Could not lie still in his crib, had to hoist himself over the railing, patter around the braided rug in his footed pajamas climb the creaking rocker, horsehair stool, […]

The Myth of Erysichthon and his Daughter: An Invitation to Radical Metamorphosis “There are many people who can change once and stay that way forever. There are others who have the power to change as often as they like.  Mestra, daughter of King Erysichthon, had this power.” …So begins Ovid’s ancient myth –not with a description of the all powerful, […]

“Do not cite the deep Magic to me. I was there when it was written.” —The White Witch  C.S. Lewis, Narnia series   One incredible January, Winton Woods Lake froze solid. Some fathers made fires on the ice and kids played crack the whip. Mr. Nassauer had given me a kitchen chair to push on the ice but this afternoon […]

    “Why did you separate me from the earth? What did you stand to gain?” –Anohni Hopelessness album, 2016 It seems to me that the separation Anohni sings about is at the root of all our problems. I know the feeling from deep grief or depression. The long way out requires sleeping outside on the ground, walking by the […]

Painting can be a form of prayer.  Since  last weekend’s mass murder in Orlando,  I have tried to stay with the images as they emerged, to follow them.  But  words and their associations come anyway. Orlando. My connection isn’t Disney World, which wasn’t built til I was out of high school, but  the lovesick fellow in “As You Like It.”  I […]

  Amazing!  The black bear population has quadrupled in the Lehigh Valley since the 1970’s, even as our wild lands have shrunk.  We pave over 4 square miles of open space per year, but have nevertheless managed to ‘bring back’ the bears. They wander through the 25,000 acres of remaining  fragmented forests,  moving from one pocket woodland into another, criss-crossing suburban […]

We moderns learn by a systematic method of divide and conquer. We start with the separation of spirit and matter. That is okay because the consensus is that we’re the only ones with spirit or soul, the top of the evolutionary heap, our pets coming in a close second. We learn a lot this way, but not everything, and even […]

About 20 paintings of Iceland and other dark places will remain up throughout February at Fox Optical and Gallery, and (weather allowing!) Tim and Mike will be open for First Friday reception February 7th. I’m posting this essay, hoping it may entice some of you to come out and see the pictures, or to look further into the ‘flickr’ gallery […]

I remember the potter said, why he makes what he makes when he makes it: Make what moves you, most. Making, I say, moves me most. By the River I make tracks where vole and rabbit, fox and hopping birds already left their skittering script. I don’t know cursive. I only print my two mute boots across their snow poetry, […]