"Hercules was slain by a magic shirt he had donned in all innocence, its poisoned fabric immediately fusing with his own skin, burning on his body like boiling oil. He could not cast it off again except at the price of his very life.

Groaning, roaring, and finally mad with the pain, this invincible man tore his own skin and flesh from his bones along with the shirt, laid bare his bleeding sinews, his shoulder blades, the red cage of his ribs, and inside it, lungs burning out, his heart. He fell. And the light from that day gathered in seven ponds, into which the wretched man's blood and sweat dissolved, seven mirrors that bore the image of the sky,- clouds, shadows, emptiness. Then it was night. But the light of the seven ponds remained and rose up, stars among the stars of the firmament."

from " The Last World" by Christoph Ransmayr

from the sketchbook,

reflections in lavalette canal

"Each forest outline, each pond, the course of each river had glided itself through the hands of Arachne the weaver, the deaf mute, for whom, so Echo said, her loom was a window trellised with threads, looking into a garishly bright and soundless world...

Echo alone would have been capable of understanding her explanation and of translating for the Roman how her tapestry was of value to the deaf-mute woman only as long as it was still growing, stretched on the frame of her loom's beams and shafts. Once completed, whatever landed in this moldy room would be pulled out again only when a smelter or a farmer wanted to decorate his sooty walls with a beautiful landscape gave her a sheep in trade, whereupon Arachne would simply cut the ropes binding its legs and let it run wild on the stony terraces of the cliffs."

from "the Last World" by Christoph Ransmayr

"Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion."
from The Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

prayers

24x16"

now in the collection of Teresa Indjein

"Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?"
— Laozi from the Tao Te Ching

flashing fishes

now in the collection of Amy, North Carolina

22x16"

"The two most powerful warriors are patience and time."
Leo Tolstoy

"Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world."
Harriet Tubman

"...a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing it to be seen hiding."

Anne Carson

"I do not want to die, even if Hans and Karl should die. I do not want to go until I have faithfully made the most of my talent and cultivated the seed that was placed in me until the last twig has grown.... since I am to be the cultivator, I want to serve it faithfully. Since recognizing that, I am almost serene and much firmer in spirit. It is not only that I am permitted to finish my work - I am obliged to finish it. This seems to be the meaning of all the gabble about culture. Culture arises only when the individual fulfills his cycle of obligations. If everyone recognizes and fulfills his cycle of obligations, genuineness emerges. The culture of a whole nation can in the final analysis be built upon nothing else but this."

from the Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz

deep blue

16x22"

in the collection of Jonathan Palevsky, Baltimore

from an article in The New York Times about the sex abuse cases of Bishop Vangheluwe and Roman Polanski:

"....If this is in part a morality tale — permissiveness corrodes virtue, illicit urges undermine restraint — is morality itself a relative concept?

That question seemed likely to be asked more searchingly this week after the Vatican issued new rules about the handling of priestly abuse, listing pedophilia in a catalog of other supposed grave crimes including “the attempted ordination of women.”

“What I did, supporting the ordination of women, they saw as a serious crime,” said the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, an American priest excommunicated less than two months after he participated in a ceremony ordaining women. “But priests who were abusing children, they did not see as a crime. What does that say?”...."

"Sometimes I think creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things- like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale."

David Mitchell

"It was as if with time he had transposed everything he was capable of saying and writing to the realm of his poetry, to rhythmical language or perfected prose, and in the process had turned mute in the world of everyday speech, of dialect, of screams and fragmented sentences and phrases."

from The Last World by Christoph Ransmayr

from the sketchbook-

N.E. corner of Patterson Park Ave. & Madison St.

"She looked up at me, and the whole world disappeared. Like there was just us, like there would always be just us, and we didn't need magic for that. It was sort of happy and sad, all at the same time. I couldn't be around her without feeling things, without feeling everything."
from Beautiful Creatures Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl

harbor blossoms
now in the collection of Jim & Alley Tierney

22x16"

"...he failed to say the words that normal, heartsick people want to hear: life is not a cosmic accident, not evidence of a punishing al powerful god. Instead he ground his teeth against his desire to tell them the truth: god is helpless. We are at the mercy of our own radical freedom, and all god can do is take into god’s self the grief, the violence, the sublime acts of kindness, the good sex. God comes to us from the future, and has only one gift: the lure. We are lured toward truth, beauty and goodness...the lure is pulling at our hearts like some lucid joy inside every actual occasion and all we have to do is ... say yes."

from The Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel

from the sketchbook- fireflies in the park