FORMS OF PRAISE

“My work is loving the world.
Let me keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

Which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes
A mouth with which to give shouts of joy.”

From Messenger in the collection “Thirst”, by Mary Oliver

These paintings are my expression of astonishment, my form of praise.
Here is my gratitude for heart and body that feels the beauty of the world.
Here is my attention tuned to the fragile and the ephemeral, my soul in stillness
and in question, listening to these ethereal voices from another realm.
Contained in the fleeting life cycle of a flower I see all the pain and passion,
all the struggle and the ultimate surrender creating the beauty of our own existence.
Like love that blooms in the heart, flowers are fragile envoys of the sacred.
Arising and dying, arising and dying, awakening us to our own rootedness
in the divine.
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TEN THOUSAND FLOWERS

“The waters begin in the mountain snows, but when they flow to the sea, does not part of the mountain reside now in the ocean?”
Stephen H Buhner

In giving of myself to the practice of painting plants and flowers, I have felt the inseparable unity of the world. In devoting one’s attention to a particular manifestation of nature’s beauty the infinite is revealed. At the heart of the flower is the body of the world. The world of the flower is space and form, emptiness and presence, radiating inward and out, unified by a sacred intelligence possessing an intention for beauty. I perceive that the center of all things is spirit. In the shaping of petals, the painting of calyx and corolla, I began to ask myself “What are the limits of the organism?” I began to see that the flower is no more independent of its observer, than of its scent or stem or the soil in which it is rooted. This October past, in picking up the fallen fans of my seedling gingko tree, I heard the echo of 200 million years. I held the wind, golden leaves and the footprints of a dinosaur walking across my palm. I felt the intimate interweaving of the consciousness of all beings. All the whirling energy of the universe, all that I could see and breathe was breathing me, and all this energy was one living, breathing, and intelligent organism. I see that I am no more distinct from the landscape than the flower; we are inseparable. The ruby river of my blood, the cells and bacteria blossoming like microscopic flowers in the hidden chambers of the heart, the million grains of pollen dusting the leg of a bee, the nebulae of sunflower and galaxy: all the world is flowing into itself.

As I write this, I look at the potted blue hyacinth on my desk. Five long leaves rise like the slender fingers of a hand to shelter the flower’s central stalk. Pendulous ovals cluster tightly together, each one whispering to me of spring, each bud closed around the secret of a perfume yet to spill its seduction. I remember that 50,000 years ago, our ancestors the Neanderthals, buried their dead with whole flowers. In their graves were found traces of pollen grains. Left behind, beside them, this trail of dust tells me I am looking now at an ancient version of the blue hyacinth. I look again at the buds of my plant. I see a circle of radiating tears. Each droplet containing a universe of sorrow while holding the hope and promise of a wild, blue, bursting renewal.

“In religious art, the golden flower represents fulfillment, and when a human being tries to symbolize what it is they really want at the end of the line, very often one thinks of a flower. Yet that golden flower isn’t at the end of the line- you are living in it. The radiating petals, the mandala, the great circle of the flower is the galaxy you live in, and the whole universe radiating around you”.
Alan Watts
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STRETCH OUT YOUR HAND

I want to make you weep for the beauty of a line
I want your heart to break open with the ache of space
I want you to feel the absolute present entering through your skin
your breath, your eyes full of tears.
The way light suddenly streams forth and eternity reaches out its arms from the sky,
the blue heaven and all its clouds.
I want you to know love.
I want you to know the secret
of your own life.
I want you to know the meaning and the mystery
and all the shining splendor of your existence.
But I need you.
I need you to abandon yourself to the mad purity of the living present.
I need you to open your heart.
I need you to stretch out your hand in the dark.
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CEREUS BLOOMS AT NIGHT

Cereus grows patience like a soul.
One whole year guarding the dream within it.
Nothing in its twisted emerald stem to suggest its invisible core
the slow unfolding of petal and sepal,
into sudden explosion of fist-size bloom
trembling under moonlight.

Like all of us,
imperfect in awkward skins
secretly guarding our heart
slowly, slowly unveiling
in the beloved's reflected light
one delicate membrane at a time.
By love's courage transformed
we reveal our luminous centre.
Beauty becoming its own light in darkness
Beauty carrying its own death within it.

The cactus has one night of wild rhapsody
Bright burn of truth
consuming past and future.
We live the myth incarnate
over and over.
Each time we blossom
inside the breath of love
we die a little.
Some small piece of us
sacrified to fire
Purifying our inner lead
into the divine white flower.
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SHINING LIKE THE SUN

“There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun”
Thomas Merton

The leaves of the sunflowers
bear tremulous witness
to the wind's passing breath,
each branching green holding a heart
shivering in the shadowed light of evening.
This is the hour when the golden heads
cast vainly for their sun.
All the brightness of the day disappeared
and they hanging forlorn,
not seeing themselves turning into light
where all the shining gold is bursting from their crowns.
Ripe blossoms bright as flares against the coming dark.
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PEONIES

It is said that if you plant peonies too deep
the flower will never find its way to the sun.
Only the aculeate cuneiform of leaves
forever mouthing the lost. But these full,
round, ruby spheres of flame
bursting from green fists
were blind three years,
and now grow and hold in bright bodies
with glow unmistakable as the dying anchorite's face
of faith and praise turned toward her heaven,
abandoned red stems now curled round
as halos, heaviness dropping your heads
with the weight of rain
to pool the crimson stain of petals
bowing low to kiss the ground
where I see in the dark loam
the faces of women,
those gaelic poets buried
upside down
so no muse would trouble them
in the afterlife.
I am hearing their ossianic chants
trickling down
words like fingers blindly reaching
for the seed that will
always rise.
Lead them back
to the light.
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GRATITUDE

I am listening
With the night falling I am emptying myself into silence
into the tide of darkness I am listening to gratitude
I am saying thank you
I am stopping to remember the slow downbeat of wings
as the great blue heron sailed above the cottonwood trees
I am saying thank you
as the frogs suffocate in the stench of polluted ponds
as CNN broadcasts the news of the dead
I am saying thank you standing by the river
that feeds the distant sea and me
I am bowing my head in gratitude to the indigo hearts of iris
and the man whose deep heart entrusted them to me
I am saying thank you within the noise of beatings
and the cries of the destitute and the lonely
I am giving thanks for bread and the ruby wine
for blood, and poetry of word and nature
the rhythmic arrangement of leaves and language
I go on giving thanks in the knowledge of hatred, cruelty
and the sorrow of what is lost
I give thanks for the kiss given that afternoon my heart was sad and you noticed
I am giving thanks for breath and giving thanks for death
in whose hands the forests are falling faster than the minutes of my life
I go on saying thank you thank you thank you for the transitory and the true
Thank you for the bittersweet beauty of days
dark though it is I thank you
thank you for the light that always comes.
after W.S. Merwin
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THE RIVER IMAGINES ITSELF

The river imagines itself effortlessly.
Every future moment born
of its healed past
utterly new.
Each wave swallowing the last
with seamless suture
in the sinuous gravity
of its downstream fall
toward the resurgent sphere of the sea.
There is no wound
she will not suffer.
Her skin sweeps everything
away, each small death untraceable.
Every undulation arising transformed,
surrendered to the present
perfection of the moment,
guided by a blind current
feeling its breathless way
through the unmarked,
unbounded waters
of each untrespassed day.
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WINDSEA RUSHES THROUGH...

Windsea rushes through the cottonwood limbs.
Susurration of sound swimming the silver bellied leaves through the tangled net of sky and breeze. All the garden is a seething swell, awake and breathing the singing urgent spires of air. How lush the world is, ripe with beauty and anguish. How mysterious; this vale of vegetation, the rock, the deep embrace of indigo, the glittering blue abyss sheltering us. On this summer's silk, my own fragile boat of skin sailing buoyant wave of wonder. The red current of my blood mingled with the pale green force of each plant and stem rooted in this vast and trembling astonishment of earth growing us upward to the light. We are all a moving stillness, bright eternity pouring through us.

Everything arising and passing away, even this exhilaration, this sweet seed about to speak from its dark opening.
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HORIZON

The horizon has inspired me all my life.
Two mysteries, coming together
Pulling you to the edge of the world.
Like lovers, sea and sky disappear into each other.
There is not a line, not really
Just the aching sky and the trembling sea
Touching
And all the silent air, full of praise.
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LIBERATION

Though Blinded, We Know Love By Its Touch.
They say that love blinds you.
But I think it isn't love, but how we look at it that blinds us.
Once a star has exploded in your chest, there is no desire to gather back the scattered light. Love lives inside you forever, endlessly sending you its radiance to light the night. That is the nature of stars. They give it up, all of it. Stars are not diminished by their giving. They melt themselves down to the pure white stone.
The distillation of all they ever lived keeps on giving us their light, though their bodies have burst with the giving. And aren't we all made of light? Aren't we all ascendants of eternity's sea? When we can live with the darkness and still rise bright as stars, is not love our liberation?
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FLOWERS AS SUBJECTS

The blossoming of a flower is a temporal event, one bound by the inexorable movement toward death born within the seed, and within each of us. Their eloquence is momentary, a brief soliloquy against their own, and also our, mortality. I choose to paint flowers in all their sensuality and lyricism, their very rootedness in the terrestrial, to speak of the transcendence I feel in their presence. I think it was Jim Dine that said, “Painting is another form of praying”. Painting flowers is for me a gesture of love. It is an act to celebrate in my consciousness the awareness of beauty, the mystery and the wonder of human life. I think all humans are drawn to, and fascinated by flowers. They are with us in all moments of extremity. We offer them at birth, death, anniversaries, and every occasion of ceremony. We offer flowers for hope, for consolation and congratulation.
They surround us at death. Manet painted the bouquets brought to him as he lay dying. Some of Kafka's last words were instructions written on slips of paper that advised; "Please look and see that the peonies don't touch the bottom of the vase. This is why they have to be kept in bowls." And one of the last sentences he wrote: "How wonderful that is, isn't it? The lilac dying. It drinks, goes on swilling. It cannot be that a dying man drinks." I isolate the flower in deep space. The darkness of the background is suggestive of the creative tensions and the mysteries that shadow and make luminous my experience of an individual tuned toward the possibility of light. Light is an integral presence in my work. Brightness becomes a tangible, physical presence that is a metaphor for awakening to the presence of the sublime. The physical light is the light of inner potential for transcendence. Though we are part of the beauty of nature's cycle that marks a passage between youth and age and eventual death, our spirits are free to travel in infinite realms. In a world where it is all too easy to be seduced by the profane, I perceive these paintings as small cultivations of sacred space. A place to feel passionate, surprised and enchanted by the beauty of being alive.
August 27, 2005
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