The Child’s Gate

Writing has once again claimed most of my time. I love it, though my other loves—painting and photography—wait somewhat forlornly in the wings. There are only so many waking hours in a day, and domestic tasks quietly insist on their share.

After completing The Weight of Air, my travel memoir, (available by donation) another project has taken hold: an autobiography written in prose-poem form. Epic in length, it has already grown beyond 6,000 words and is not yet halfway finished. Most poems average fewer than 300 words, so this one stretches the form considerably.

The work begins with my father and mother—their early lives and eventual meeting in Chicago. Then come my own beginnings: the arrival of my four siblings, the rhythms of our household, my father’s work in social justice, the moves, the schools, the growing up—alongside my mother’s struggles and her efforts to find balance. Graduation follows, then leaving home, mental struggles, and the uncertain steps into adult life.

The writing has now reached the time when my first daughter, Naomi, was born. Soon afterward her mother and I divorced, and her mother had to be institutionalized. The story carries both tenderness and upheaval.

Here is a small section from that writing.

The Child

Strong vowels formed her name:
Naomi.

For a season
three shared one bed.
Her mother’s breast was never far.

Light gathered in her—
blonde hair,
green eyes.

No sooner had she found her steps
than the hand began to draw.

In her father's studio
page after page
flew from her grasp.

At first
only bright scribbles—
then houses, figures,
the sun and rainbows.

A small school stood nearby.
She entered the circle of others.

A few years passed quietly
before the first fracture.

Something within her mother
turned against itself.

Hunger answered,
then denied.
Food taken in,
then cast away.

Voices rose at night.
Rooms held what could not settle.

Then the word was spoken:

Divorce.

It did not rest easily in him.
Yet it was received
as a narrowing path
that might still lead forward.

                _________________________________________________________________________

Writing these memories means experiencing them again. Yet the distance of time allows new insights to appear—quiet understandings that were invisible in the moment.

While completing a section describing Naomi’s early life, I came across a drawing she made when she was about six years old. It is so luminous it might have been made by an angel.

Through a trellised gate covered in flowers we see a young horse resting on a grassy knoll in the near distance. Around the horse’s neck is a red ribbon, the same red ribbon that winds through the flowers climbing the trellis. Behind the animal shines a bright sun, its red rays spreading outward, while a few soft white clouds drift across the sky.

The image suggests a threshold—a passage between the ordinary world and somewhere more protected, more essential. Yet the gate is not forbidding. It is a trellis covered in flowers, an invitation rather than a barrier.

Beyond it rests a young horse entirely at peace in its meadow. The red ribbon circles its neck and winds through the flowers, as if beauty itself has reached outward and gently claimed the creature.

Behind it all shines a bright sun, spreading warmth across the scene. Even the clouds drift without menace.

The drawing suggests that the child understood something wordlessly: that somewhere within her there existed a place no upheaval could reach—tended, flowering, quietly illuminated from within.

Perhaps children know this instinctively—that somewhere within them there is a meadow no storm can reach.

Memoir Writing - The Weight Of Air

Painting on the island of Kauaʻi, Hawaii, 2001

For four decades, my workdays were mostly spent with paint and brush, shaping canvases into worlds of light and form. Lately, that has shifted. My hours are given to words, to chiseling memory into narrative. A little guilt has crept in—I haven’t been producing much artwork. But writing, I’ve discovered, is equally creative. It is painting with sentences instead of brushstrokes, summoning images from the palette of experience.

The project at hand is my travel memoir, The Weight of Air. Its backbone is the year 2008, when for twelve months I circled the globe, living in 25 countries. Every moment seemed to demand documentation. I carried cameras, sketchbooks, and at first, even an easel and art supplies. I painted, photographed, and wrote—laying down a trail of evidence that life had shifted irrevocably. Those blog posts from the road became seeds, waiting until now to be pressed into the soil of a fuller story.

Route across the globe, Jan. 2008 -  Jan. 2009

The journey was transformative. Early along the way I stumbled into a mental and spiritual state I came to call The Dream. It was more than just heightened awareness; it was a trust, a surrender, an embrace of mystery. In that current, I felt carried, as though the world itself were the author and I merely a willing participant.

This perception—more than perception really, more like a state of being—opened me to deeper engagement with the world around me. Barriers fell, just as in real life dreaming. It is said that to understand mysterious, indecipherable happenings in dreams, one must become what it is that must be understood. For instance if being trampled by an elephant, to become the elephant as well as the one trampled. So I was unafraid, because I was everything happening all at once.

Section from the current chapter, called Northward to Hanoi. Part 1

"Within a day, a cabin had been booked on a Chinese junk, a flat-bottomed sailing vessel now outfitted as a floating hotel, yet still bearing the elegant lines and fan-shaped sails of another age.

What happens to time and space in dreams? It seems youthfulness exists in dreaming because events occur that are not bound by physical law. All sorts of fantastic actions and experiences occur in dreams, and the occurrences are effortlessly woven together into a symphony of events. 

So it was in Hanoi: guided by THE DREAM itself, within two days of arrival I was carried out upon a Chinese junk with eight fellow travelers and five crew, moving almost without sound across the mirrored waters of Halong Bay—a UNESCO World Heritage Site."

Old ladies, near Hoi An, Vietnam

Now, nearing the end of the memoir, I find myself in Vietnam once again—at least in memory, shaping it into words. Soon the path bends toward Malaysia, then Australia and New Zealand. Within three weeks, the odyssey will be complete on the page, though its reverberations still echo daily. At last I will hold the memoir as a complete volume.

I have been an artist all my life, but this work reminds me that creativity wears many guises. Whether on canvas or in prose, it is the same impulse: to bear witness, to shape experience into something that can be shared, something that endures.