It's Time

 

“No I am not roaming aimlessly

through the alleys and bazaar

I am a lover searching for his beloved”   —Rumi

For years I have been satisfied with enough money in the bank to travel extensively and not worry about a “home”.  After my oldest daughter died at age nineteen my marriage dissolved. My ex-wife bought my share of our home. Debt free, I realized I had lost my sense of having roots. The world called me to explore. Grabbing my art supplies and camera, I took off wandering.

Sometimes, when returning to live in my hometown of Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, I would go to a beautiful home and think, how wonderful to own property. Then I would search my soul to see if I had desire for such ownership. It wasn’t there.

I have been to the Taj Mahal, the Vatican halls, in mountaintop palaces. And I have been rapturously at peace and content sitting on earthen floors in houses of baked mud in Egypt. I have felt at home on the back of camels in Morocco or on elephants in Thailand. 

Then, impressed by somebody’s home and thinking, “do I want this?” the answer came back no; I have more. The grandness of the earth and its glory is my home.

I rented . . . and could come and go.

When a homeowner, I had always cultivated gardens. Afterward, I noticed an apathy about doing anything “rooted.” Might I be depressed? I wondered. Perhaps the loss of my beloved Naomi had torn me. When she left this earth, some part of me went with her.

I have been with Amy now three years.We married two years ago. For the past two years I have made a summer garden. The feeling of wanting to stop and settle, to be content with small things has come back. 

This week I sent money to a bank account in Germany. It is the downpayment on a home in Oaxaca, Mexico. The German woman who built it lost her partner and decided to move back to her native country. Now, Amy and I are moving from our native country to live in that magical Mexican house we found and love. We will own it outright.

It’s time.

“The world is one country and mankind its citizens”  —Baha’u’llah

Arranging To Be Free

Me, in Venice, 2007

Time sometimes flies like a bird, sometimes crawls like a snail; but a man is happiest when he does not even notice whether it passes swiftly or slowly.

-Ivan Turgenev

 I have two months to set my affairs in order before leaving on prolonged travel. In July, I travel to Michigan and Wisconsin for art shows and will probably spend three weeks on the road. Then in August, I will be busy consolidating my life so that beginning September, I will be free to live in Venice, Italy. From there who knows? 

Consolidating means selling off possessions and arranging to be free. I have done this before and so know what to expect.

 

Venice, just before sunset . . .

It is strange that the years teach us patience; that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting.

-Elizabeth Taylor

Essential Substance Of Life

Self-portrait, taken in Montevideo, Uruguay

Matrix is a word that I arrive at often when thinking of my creative process. During my one-year sojourn around the world, I intended to disappear into the matrix, and from there, let my creative energies flow. What does it mean? For me, matrix describes the essential substance of life from which everything is born. It is always in flux, receiving the dying forms and casting forth the newborn upon the shores of existence.

The perfect place from which to create is one of boundlessness. A musician is in the flow and notes seem to come from out of nowhere. A painter is fluidly creating his painting and his marks sometimes are surprising . . . he has gone outside his boundaries and is in the realm of discovery.

Creation is timeless, and when an artist is creating he often is not aware of the passage of the moments. He begins, and when he looks up again, is finished, and then wonders, where did the time go?

Self-portrait, Paris, France

True Currency

I believe experience is the true currency. And among experiences, the practice of virtue is of the highest value. Money cannot hold memory, cannot inform or teach, and although it represents happiness to most people, essentially, it is inert and without life.

Four years ago, exactly this time of year, I lived on a houseboat in Kashmir, India (see my blog, My Astonished Eyes.) My floating world was Dal Lake, at the foot of the Himalayan Mountains. Water lilies drifted all around, and my houseboat was very comfortable with hand carved wood decoration throughout. I met local people who came to visit me and sell their crafts, and my servant Mansoor would paddle me to the nearby town of Srinagar.

Perhaps, a financial analyst would have advised me to keep my savings intact and not spend the way I was spending then—traveling around the world. The USA economy had begun a freefall and my savings were falling like most everyone else’s.  Yet, I was hungry to experience life in all its facets.

At the time, I called my existence and traveling THE DREAM. Along the way, I made paintings, took photographs and wrote. My bankroll was diminishing, but my inner treasury was growing rich with vivid life experience. Going forward without fear, I trusted that since I am DREAMING, a bigger hand controls destiny, and furthermore, scenes change—including scenes of birth and death, but EXISTENCE in THE DREAM only transforms—never ends.

Someday, THE DREAM will unfold my death. I believe I will witness this occurrence and then, step onto a different stage to continue to be in awe of how fantastic and inspired is the universe and its Creator.

All Things Pass

Today, instead of writing much, I am sharing a picture. I took the photo at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, in Berlin, Germany. I was there this time of year, four years ago. During those days, I wandered across the city, camera in hand, prepared to meet the unexpected, and thriving on chance and surprise to fill me with awe.

The photo is mysterious, in that the angles are sharp and clear, but a blurred figure is running among the rows of concrete slabs. You the viewer do not know it, but he is pushing a baby carriage with a little child. It is strange to be at this memorial, and find people playing games there. Little children dart in and out of the rows, playing tag, and hide and seek. You can hear their laughter. They seem unaware that during the holocaust, over 11 million innocents were killed, including 1.1 million children murdered.

Underneath the stone slabs are exhibit halls that detail the slaughter of Jewish people during the reign of the Nazi’s—1933-1945.

“All things pass...Perhaps the passage of time is a kind of healing, or a kind of salvation granted equally to all people.”
― Mizuki Nomura, Book Girl and the Suicidal Mime

To see more artistic photography by Steven Boone, go to Graphixshoot

The Present Time

My mother’s walking has slowed, but not her reading. For as long as I can remember, she has read at least five books a week, and I notice that she has kept up the pace even in old age. Her neighbor is also an avid reader and goes to the library regularly, bringing my mother piles of books. It is a familiar sight in my parent’s home—stacks of books on the dining room table. “You are traveling now,” my mother spoke, “and have gone around the world, but I find my adventures in reading.”


My parents receive three newspapers each day: The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Santa Barbara News-Press. We agree that the New York Times is best, and remarkably, each day delivers facts, stories and data from around the globe and in many different fields of interest.

Since there is now a laptop in my parent’s home, I am hoping that they can enjoy it. My mother has declared she has no interest, but I have introduced her to something that may change her mind. Google Books is incredible. Thousands of volumes are available for free after an account is established. Incredibly, you can select a book and be reading it in less than a minute. Furthermore, you can adjust the type size, and scroll through pages with just one finger.

Monday I leave for Brazil. People have asked me, “Are you excited?” I reply that what excites me the most is the here and now. Just being alive is exciting, and my perception is that THE DREAM is a single entity. In other words, every moment is part of the one preceding it, and the one to come. I do not divide them but live in the universal. The present time gives me all that I need.


Next week I will be writing from Rio . . . and carnival!

River Flowing Peacefully

I have been traveling for six months now, and today I wondered, where am I? Of course I know that I am in Florence, Italy, but there is a part of my mind that blurs places so that, put simply, I sense I am alive in the matrix of the earth, entirely different than a specific locale invented by man. Furthermore, my sense that time is a logical sequence of events, dissolves, so I lose track of the days and hours . . . it is all a river flowing peacefully—I do not hurry it or slow it, only drift in it and observe the changing elements.
After leaving my daughter and her friend in Brindisi to catch a ferry to Greece, I drove to Bari and reunited with friends. Immediately they absorbed me into the life of southern Italy. We ate octopus and watermelon, strolled through streets of polished white stone, and felt the welcome relief of “mistral” winds that blew away some of the summer heat. Italians are social creatures almost to the extreme, so they always act in groups and if they perceive you are alone, they want to welcome you. I spoke with Lucia about this and she acknowledged that Americans are different and can sometimes be uncomfortable with the attention, preferring their independence.
On the way back to Florence, I stopped for a night in Urbino. It is a World Heritage Site and Lucia had suggested it as a place where I could get a real sense of historical Italy. It is a stone city built on a hilltop. I found it enthralling and have included a picture here on my blog.
Friday I returned to Florence and had my temporary tooth waiting at the dental office. For the next week, I am living in a quiet apartment, on a street with many convenient shops, close to the Arno River and near Piazza Santa Maria Novella.
The mistral winds of imagination take me to Berlin next Sunday.

Shifting Sands Of Time

FRIDAY, May 4
People who know Venice understand that it is beautiful and grand, a place of joy, and also sad. Bells ring, violins play, and there is laughter in the streets and from the café’s. Lovely footbridges arch over innumerable canals. Walking in the narrow passageways, the little common plazas called campos offer meeting places throughout the city. Shops offer art, finery, delicious food and drink, as well as everything else needed for comfort and convenience. To feel deeply all this, is also to understand that Venice is a castle made of sand, always crumbling bit by bit. It is ephemeral, like a dream. Everything creaks and sways, and the walls crumble. A feeling exists that it could all simply disappear.
Somehow, I relate mystically, and understand that beauty, comfort, and fortune are likewise fleeting and even as a dream. Everything enjoyable is also disintegrating. The grand sand castle that is our earthly life today is gone tomorrow. So now, I live the dream, and understand that in the end, all is endless transformation and beingness, ultimately gathered up in eternal spirit. All we can claim is spirit, and we must be conscious of how it is eternal, beyond the shifting sands of time.