My Final Goodbye Union

 6-20-2023

Leaving on a Jet Dream

We leave Union/Jackson for the last time today.  “All our bags are packed and we’re ready to go.  The dawn is breaking it is early morn” and the truck waits to be packed.  I remember the first day we arrived 27 years ago.  A much bigger truck and family, six of us, and Sarah still a baby.  Today my lover and I leave alone, six came, four left years ago, and we are the last.  It is a beautiful day to leave, clear big sky, mild, and filled with promises.  I long for Fair Haven and it is a sweet leave.  I have had the greatest run here; allowed to live and build dreams I could never have imagined 27 years ago.  Our Wonder Mountain has been summited at long last and now we move to the next peak.  Onward and upward although a little older, a little slower but facing east, wind in our sails, great adventures await...we are leaving, leaving on a jet dream.  Goodbye "Dearest Union."              

Paved Paradise and Put Up a Parking Lot

6-18-2023

Retiring and moving have their powerful moments.  Yesterday was one.  We have returned to Union to move (Tuesday).  Home building, studio building, and dorm rental have all converged, so we are at it full tilt.  I had gone to the art department to return some things and I found it the way I always loved it in the summer, totally empty, the sweet quiet I had always cherished, filled with the possibility for my most imaginatively creative endeavors.  However, this time I was a stranger.  The house I had built was taken over by others.  I was out of place in my own palace, built perfectly to suit my creative efforts, my every creative need thought of and solved, everything created for my creativity, a 27-year tailoring to fit only me.  Now I felt oddly awkward, unsettled, I didn’t want to be here, too much loss, given over, taken.  I have no explanation—I have never felt it.  Sitting here now, the following day, I have tried to tell myself the story, to examine it as to know it but nothing is ringing my heart’s bell.  Here is the best I can do.  It was much like this must feel; being gifted a mountain meadow to make your home and 27 years gently pushing back the wild to allow you to live in creative peace, the earth, God, you alone being as creative as you can imagine. Then one day you were called away to another mountain.  After a brief period, you returned to get the last of your belongings only to find they had “paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

The first time I came to Union I entered at the other
end of this hallway and walked to the Art Dept. at this end.
I thought it was the longest hallway I had ever seen.

 

What An Artist Eyes See

I have a small dear child, a waif, as dear as any student I ever had…and as gifted.  I have seen their giftedness, known it was, and moved by it.  Over time they have become wounded.  Self and other inflicted–and their art tells the truth of it; the way only art can, the way only an artist can see; their deep and meaningful well is now being drawn forth in a bucket with a gaping hole.  Thomas Merton would say we are all just animals trying to make sense of the tragicness of life until the day a Savior becomes ours, and makes or remakes us human.  I spent years making work like an animal.  I know that work when my eyes see it.