In the middle of the afternoon you climbed into bed, lifting the covers away and over in one swift motion.
The rain on the roof was a lullaby.
The rain on the roof was a pitiful pathetic fallacy.

Your heart like a jellyfish.
You said it like a mantra.
“I am beautiful.”

Pencil crayon
2011

You ask,
“Why are my hands so small? Why are they so incapable of cradling the world?”
 They are too full covering your face, knotting in your hair, wrapping around your own knees digging into your own stomach. 
You tell yourself
“No excuses.”
 No excuses.
 Yet you wear the expression of a victim. 

Sleight of Hand
Pencil crayon
2008 

Perhaps your existence could be compared to the sensation of rubbing your eyes. Look up from the palms of your hands and see fragments of light dancing in your vision. You mistake them for living creatures.

Perhaps you are mistaken for a living creature.
Perhaps you are mistaken for eyetricks.  

Sometimes
Sometimes…

Sentences begun in such a fashion flow melancholy and wistful.
Sometimes you wish that gravity would release its hold or reverse, allowing you do fall upwards into the great expanse of sky. Yet you realize that, even if you do ascend, you would not recognize yourself within that impossible cloud-spattered blue.  

Untitled
Digital photography and collage
May 2012 

A hot wind has been blowing into your ear from the Great West. Does it bring with it the dust of the plains, gasping for water water water?
Each year we mutter at the abnormal weather, but there has always been a period of drought.

You’ve spent the last few weeks searching for summer employment. You let perhaps fifty of your resumes loose in the world but thus far you are unneeded.
You have never had a hard job. You will likely go through life feeling that you’ve never worked a difficult job. There is always another whose been through more, who has surpassed greater obstacles.
Does that discount your trials?

 Someone told you that you must have been given this time to do something.
Something.
What have you done? 

We are bombarded with ways to better our lives but how many do we really adopt?
How many made a difference?

“Please believe me”, you want to say,
“You do not deserve what you put yourself through.” 

Fragile
Pencil crayon
2010 

You were riding home at ten o’clock at night. The shadow of your bicycle moved beneath you, manipulated by the streetlights. You had a terrible nostalgia. An awful vertigo.

Where does the spark of life reside? Is an isolated appendage (an arm, a kidney, an ear, a lung, etc.) an animate object or an inanimate object? 
Where can the ether of the soul be found?
You thought of a Joni Mitchell song: “I remember that time you told me love was touching souls.”
“Tell me,” you say, “tell me how I can free my soul.”

Experiments in Volume
Marker
April 2012 

You think the mayfly must be the wisest creature in the world. Not elephants or tortoises with their wrinkles and creases and many many many years of wandering, but the mere mayfly.
Not humans with their overthinking and underestimating and endless discoveries, but the minute mayfly.
The average lifespan of the mayfly lies between half an hour to one day. They learn everything they need to know about their existence and the universe in less than 24 hours.
How long must that span of time seem to them? Do their minutes pass as years to us?
And what about the giant barrel sponge which lives to be 2300 years old? How does time pass for such creatures?
Assuming, of course, that they sense time, that they think and marvel and delve for meaning.  

You lost your morning learning the guitar. The pads of your fingers are redred and tender.
“Glory glory!”
You wanted to shout it out your window into the suburban streets. 
But it’s been done too many times for too many wrong reasons.
Glory glory!
You wanted to write in down in great black letters.
But it’s shape reminds you of oozing red and black. Remove the “l” and it’s violence.

So instead you held your glory inside and kept strumming the guitar.

At what point in our knowing another person do we recognize his/her soul?

You like to scribble candid shots of people on the bus, eating lunch in the cafeteria or sipping coffee in a cafe because it’s easy.
Not the technical part per say — the eyes always come out a little melancholy and disproportioned. But there is so much potential for story in the drawing of a person. It’s revealed in the tilt of the head, the shading around the mouth.
Is the soul illuminated in two-dimensional blue pen? 

Scribble
Pen
February 2012
 

We are so afraid of falling 
That we forget the welcoming water.

Come.
Let the river catch you in your fall.
It is a good time to go bathing.

Wind and Water Series - Swimmer
Pencil crayon
April 2012