just returned from a week long meditation retreat with alan wallace
it was an amazing experience of silence and meditation...as he trained us in the practice of shamatha and described his plans for the santa barbara institute for consciousness studies

so i have much catching up to do...and much spiritual practice to incorporate into my daily life...and many new ideas for artwork...here's the latest piece i completed before the retreat...a commissioned piece for a friend...it's called "she's a paradox":

(quote beside heart) "you join the symphony of spirit not by abandoning your instrument and dabbling in all of them. you only join the symphony through mastery of your own unique instrument, even as you listen to all the others."


(quote beneathe conjuring fetus) "my whole ambition in the pictorial domain is to materialize the images of my concrete irrationality with the most imperialist fury of precision...paranoic-critical activity organizes and objectifies in an exclusivist manner the limitless and unknown possibilities of the systematic association of subjective and objective 'significance' in the irrational."


(quote beside yogini on her head) "prisoned in his paved cities, blindfolded by his impulses and necessities, man tends to disregard the system of nature in which he stands. it is only at infrequent moments when he finds himself beneath the stars, at sea perhaps, or in a moonlit meadow or on a foriegn shore, that he contemplates the natural world - and he wonders. yet it is his essence to wonder. on some primeval hilltop perhaps half a million years ago the first man raised his eyes to the sky and wondered. at that instant, transcending himself and nature, he left behind his animal forebears from which he sprang: the questioning spirit of man was born, and with it the initial spark of his philosophy, religion and science. his earliest graves, in caverns of age-old rock, bespeak of his awareness of the mystery of existence and of realities beyond immediate space and time. in the regularities of nature - the march of days and seasons - and in the irregularities - the caprices of lightning and volcanoes - he saw the will of supernatural beings. only yesterday, as his own brief history is computed, did he win the key to nature's outer ramparts. this was the idea of causality, telling him to seek in natural causes the explanation of natural events."


explanation to buyer "i started out by picking the color...and had so many nice shades of purple to work with...then as i sifted through the images...a kind of theme emerged...which really became powerful as i layed it out...i think of it as a kind of portal looking in on reality as it manifests..."