(NOTE: An abridged version of this photo essay was originally published in the Spring 2021 Issue of the Maine Arts Journal – Union of Maine Visual Artists / UMVA Quarterly) “I know of a cure for everything: Salt water. In one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.” — Isak Dinesen As the pandemic began to surge in early 2020, my wife Charlene and I left our winter home in Southwest Florida and drove back to […]
August wanes. Tucked among skyline branches and the wild tangles of roadside ditch thickets are patches of prescient leaves bold enough to prophesy impending end times. The last days of the deciduous.
I stare deep into a puddle full of autumn and feel her gazing back at me. There she is. Floating just above the cracked pavement. Drawn in glistening sunlight on the surface of fresh-fallen rainwater. At the center of a psychedelic-technicolor landscape vividly alive with the fiery hues of October’s fresh death.
Earlier today, as I sat on a stone wall outside the historic Thompson Farm House along the Shore Road of Ogunquit, I witnessed a monarch butterfly end its final flight.
The young boy was sitting completely alone just outside of the ancient Byzantine walls of Rhodes, Greece. Setting up shop on an uneven scrap of torn cardboard, waiting for an audience amidst forgotten pieces of plastic garbage.
Last summer’s fruit still clings to the end of thorny rosa rugosa stems along the Marginal Way cliff walk in Ogunquit, Maine — even as spring sunlight coaxes new growth elsewhere along the thickets.
To be born creative, is to enter life inextricably conjoined with an exquisite hindrance. We emerge into our lives governed by powerful innate urges; the insistent curiousity to experience new things; the exhausting swoon of constantly witnessing beauty in places others may not see it; an irrefusable necessity to obsessively *convey* through brush strokes, words, images, forms, or dance.
This is how it is everyday. Eyes open against pillow. I feel like I’m always waking up. I twist my neck to check the digital clock. It’s too early or too late. I’m either awake and ready for more sleep, or sluggish and slept too long.