• Inspired by Autumn Leaves

    I returned from a spiritual retreat at Mount Eagle, at which we studied the Enneagram. This is our United Methodist camp site dedicated to holy listening. Of the nine spiritual personality types, I happen to be a Four: The Creative. I’m “The Sensitive, Introspective Type: Expressive, Dramatic, Self-Absorbed, and Temperamental.” Fours are self-aware, sensitive, and…


  • Rabbit! Rabbit! Welcome to November

    My parents would often say, “Time flies when you’re having fun.” If this is so, I’ve had a one whale of a time in 2023. I don’t know where the time has gone, for I’d swear I just woke up in the bright new year of 2023, and now this year has grown a beard…


  • New Eyes, New Visions

    This week as I recovered from cataract surgery, a memory from my childhood finally surfaced. In the late 1950’s in my hometown, I had met an artist who could barely see to paint anymore because of her vision loss due to cataracts. Doctors hadn’t yet invented the modern replacement lenses and use of small incisions…


  • This is the Way

    Are we our works? Are we valued by our works? Is work a noun or a verb? The child in me asks these questions until the parent in me wants to answer, “I don’t know. Go ask Alexa!” We’ve all been there with the rug rats of our families and kinfolks. Children are curious and…


  • The Heart of the City

    Cities are growing organisms, each having their central growth from their place of origin. Some begin on a waterfront, as a place of trade. Other communities began along a creek, where people would meet to connect, trade, and settle differences in peace. These were safe spaces, welcoming places, but they existed only so long as…


  • Autumn Leaf Prints

    As the days grow shorter, the pile of leaves grows larger. This is Einstein’s equation for autumn. I know “Energy equals Mass times the speed of Light squared” isn’t really congruent with all those bags of leaves accumulating on the edge of the streets of the front yards in your neighborhood. It just seems that…


  • Dreams of Trees and Butterflies

    The saying is true: “If nothing ever changed, there’d be no butterflies.” Yet how hard do we humans hold to the past, even if we need to move on into the future? As an artist, I’ve always been caught between my desire to honor the traditions of the past, but also to move into the…


  • The Autumn Colors

    Robert Frost, in his poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” speaks to the transitory nature of fall colors: Nature’s first green is gold,Her hardest hue to hold.Her early leaf’s a flower;But only so an hour.Then leaf subsides to leaf.So Eden sank to grief,So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. When I was in…


  • Springtime Is A Golden Age

    Every nation has its Golden Age. Usually, it’s a bye gone time, located in the dim past, and remembered faintly only by the oldest of the old. My Golden Age is my childhood, for I spent much unfettered time out in nature, whether it was in the backyard, the neighborhood, or at camp. I was…


  • Spring Trees Renew Our Hope

    Picasso is often thought to have said, “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” However, just as we tend to view anything on the internet as true, along comes a meme from Abraham Lincoln reminding us of the exact opposite proposition. As one of my old debate team mentors in high…