"The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking."
Albert Einstein

"Minds are very hard things to open, and the best way to open the mind is through the heart. Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games.”
Jonathan Haidt

"...one of the brain's functions could be to be sensitive to more and more subtle levels of being; the brain could then function more as an antenna to pick up such levels rather that as something that would be only the 'initiator' of action. As long as the brain is following only its own internal goals, then it will be occupied; and that's necessary in certain contexts. But if we consider that it's also necessary to reach or contact the unlimited, then there must be silence - a lack of occupation."
from On Dialogue by David Bohm

from sketchbook, May 21, 2009

"...I became aware of the world's tenderness, the profound beneficence of all that surrounded me, the blissful bond between me and all of creation, and I realized that the joy I sought in you was not only secreted within you, but breathed around me everywhere, in the speeding street sounds, in the hem of a comically lifted skirt, in the metallic yet tender drone of the wnid, in the autumn clouds bloated with rain. I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but the shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed upon us and unappreciated."
Vladimir Nabokov

"Memory really matters...only if it binds together the imprint of the past and the project of the future, if it enables us to act without forgetting what we wanted to do, to become without ceasing to be, and to be without ceasing to become."
Italo Calvino

"For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first."
Immanuel Kant

"We are created by being destroyed."
Franz Wright

"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it."
Hannah Arendt

"If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present."
Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion."
Georg Wilhelm Friederich Hegel

Portal, 17x11"

from the collection of Hathaway,

Baltimore, MD

"Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.
Seneca

"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth."
Marcus Aurelius

"The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

"A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
Walter Benjamin

"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."
Benjamin Franklin

"Religion is a story that the left brain tells the right brain."
Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor

"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."
Richard Dawkins

Alley Skies, 17x11"

from the collection of Molly,

Baltimore, MD

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."
from To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

'As a woman she's of the view that you don't bring children into the world to have them shot."
from Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada

Darkness is
Not seeing my hand
Fear is
Seeing it
And not trusting it

from The Secret Life of Lingerie by Iman Ibrahim

Self doubt is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget."
Arundhati Roy

"“Writer’s block! It doesn’t exist. You just long for ideas to go away so you have an idea of peace.”
Colm Toibin

"We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."
Joan Didion

Shimmerscape, 17x11"
now in the collection of
Simone Campbell Scott and Tom Scott

"The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others."
Carl Gustav Jung

"The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark."
Jeanette Winterson

"Most new discoveries are suddenly seen things that were always there.
Suzanne K. Langer

"No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others"
Rainer Maria Rilke

"A writer who keeps a personal diary uses it to record what he knows. In his poems or stories he sets down what he doesn't know."
Adam Zagajewski

ELEMENTARY COSMOGONY

How to the invisible
I hired myself to learn
Whatever trade it might
Consent to teach me.

How the invisible
Came out for a walk
On a certain evening
Casting the shadow of a man

How I followed behind
Dragging my body
Which is my toolbox,
Which is my music box,

For a long apprenticeship
That has as its last
And seventh rule:
The submission to chance.

Charles Simic

"Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected."
from The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy