For Japan

http://www.savethechildren.org.au/

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2011/03/13/japan_earthquake_tsunami_relief_efforts

even a small donation will help the relief effort.

Noren in Naoshima

wall painting in Naoshima

Go'o Shrine by Hiroshi Sugimoto, Naoshima

Seto Inland Sea, Japan

what you sing to comes.

i woke up last night around four, thinking about all of the work that i have been making, and planning my day. My early thoughts are always intertwined with students (i finished teaching at 9:30 last night.) - things I should've said, things I wish I had said... and always hoping to be better, more clear and insightful and articulate.

I am balancing many streams at the moment, cups in the studio, a big mosaic/mural, small drawings, small sculptures wanting to be made. I was leafing through a sketchbook from about 4 years ago, I can't believe how many of the thoughts, drawings and ideas have found their way into the world. I thought I couldn't draw then, I was so hard on myself, I have been putting the time in, and can feel the effects, like any practice. Honing, honing... I have always written or drawn in some form, keeping a record. It still amazes me to find things that I have tracked, and followed and dreamed about have a way of appearing, sneaking up on me. Reminding me to be careful what you ask for. Be prepared to receive it.

lucid maps of stillness

"Words begin as description. They are prismatic, vehicles of hidden, deeper shades of thought. You can hold them up at different angles until the light bursts through in an unexpected color." Susan Brind Morrow

"Winter on the Colorado Plateau has not been arduous, only a thin cold without storms, a lucid map of stillness. Caught in the abrupt instant of its rising, our faces take the tangerine sun, our backs dissolve to silhouette in the brilliant dazzle of its incandescent beam. The nights come less as a smooth pause than as a steep, enduring purity of eye-blind dark. The mesas creak and stain in the frigid air audible only if I lay my ear to them. The colors in their flanks-- terra cotta, blood-red, salmon, vermilion-- bear the temperament of iron."

from "the Anthropology of Turquoise." by Ellen Meloy

I remember reading this to a friend while we were sitting in a truck in Philadelphia. This week I flew into and out of and back into snow covered landscapes, and thought of it again.

research phase

r long, chinati foundation

odessa shed

ice flow maroon bells

sun shadow photo from http://3.bp.blogspot.com

Girl on boulder photo from http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net

all i want to do today is stay home and read books...

early january work piling up- lots of things cooking, new design work, a new semester to get ready for, and a 90 day yoga session to start. I love January, it always feels like the time to hunker down and get some thinking done... here are some of the things that I am looking at and thinking about.

what a semester

Happy holidays. So happy that there is time to catch up on sleep and reading for a little while.

I'm in Chicago with my brother and his family for Christmas, the drive out was great, f-l-a-t, plenty of sky, sun and snow on the ground.

"the hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life. Its so easy to make it complex."

Yvon Chouinard

image from the George Nakashima workshop near New Hope Pa.

re entry

some of my favorite shots, always changing streetscapes

re entry to Philly has been a little rough, but things are going well, now that I am back on schedule and through the first week of school. I love being back in the library and the studio.

work is flowing.

peace

the blue of distance

"...we treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to aquire it, rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance. If you can look accrose the distance with out wanting to close it up, if you can own your own longing in the same way that you can own the beauty of that blue that you can never be possessed? For something of this longing will like the blue of distance, only be relocated, or assauged, by aquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them...

Simone Weil wrote to a friend on another continent "let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated" for Weil, love is the atmosphere that fills and colors the distance between herself and her friend. Even when that friend arrives at the doorstep, something remains impossibly remote: when you step forward to embrace them- your arms are wrapped around mystery, around the unknowable, around that which cannot be possessed. The far seeps even to the near. After all we hardly know our own depths." R. Solnit