The Museum in Dublin has hung my painting. You can walk right in off Parnell Square, no charge, and there it is. I remember walking in seeing Jack Yeats, Camille Souter, Patrick Scott. My painting is called “Fragile Hold.” I know it is a whim to hang it or to take it down. Put it back into storage. Usually they drag them out when you die. That is, if they hear about it.

Little things happen. There is a rubber band on the stairs of the art building. It has been there a few days. I thought about picking it up. No one has. A little circular drawing – brown rubber on the wood – it casts a soft thin shadow. You can walk in out of the parking lot and there it is. No charge. So many little drawings on display. November trees swept clean of the last leaves – twisting, turning – the trust of life pushed up from the ground, up and out. I can see them from the studio window with the river behind. It is called “Hidden River.” Slow, thick, cold moving silently, dragging its debris towards Philadelphia. The highway runs along beside with its constant flow, constant noise. People who live by the river try everything to cover the sounds of traffic – fountains, water wheels, dripping , pouring, splashing – anything to cover the unholy roar, the twenty-four hours a day rumble.

The deep roar of a large waterfall will shake me, resonate in me, deafen me, but still fill me with awe and a deeper sense of belonging. Yes it says, this power, this sound is you. The roar of the traffic unsettles, alienates. My body objects. The shaking of the ground, the constant sound, the hum of our cities, speaks of a betrayal. My body, my nature says this is not me. We know we are older than this! We are better than this! We look to the river as it endlessly struggles to cleanse. We are this – this purifier, this affirmation, we are water, we are the trees. We know this because in the drawings, in the music, in the poetry, we experience it. The power of the trees, black, loaded with energy, stretched out across the winter sky, echoes our arteries, our structure, our energy paths, our internal rivers.

There are other drawings we can’t see with our eyes: the water touching the root; the turning of the soil in the dark; the gifts of worms; the food settling in our stomachs. The sources of life. The drawings put in storage. The parts we put out of sight.