An exhibit of 13 paintings has gone up at the marvelous Nurture Nature Center in Easton, PA, and can be seen there until July 11.  I am so glad to have these dream images hung in a place dedicated to understanding and caring for the earth. The Center relies on Art and Imagination as well as Science and Technology to ‘get people talking and thinking’ about local environmental issues.  I hope my paintings in this context will draw people into their own dreams, encourage appreciation for our mysterious and unconscious connectedness. Everyone has access to an inner ecology that the rational mind obscures, maybe even pollutes.  For “…along with the other animals, the stones, the trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters within a huge story that is visibly unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world.” (David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous)

Thoreau went to the woods because he wished to live deliberately.  He wanted to deal with the ‘essential facts of life’ and learn from these so when he came to die he wouldn’t discover that he had not lived. I go into the dream world for a similar reason.  Working with dreams—painting their images, speaking with their characters– brings me into an imaginative consciousness where essential meanings lie.

            Not meanings in the way of directives, though sometimes my fierce desire for ‘essential facts’ makes me strip mine the dreams for such clarity.  But dreams are  more like poetry than prose.  Maybe like riddle. And mostly wordless even then. They are pure image. And, it seems, pure Esse.  Being. It is exciting and compelling  to live deliberately with the raccoon and turtle and lion and peacock, to meditate on these creatures that wander into my dreams.  It is ultimately humbling to take them as they are. To imagine, and re-imagine.

”If we  come back to any dream that has been important to us, as time passes and the more we reflect on it, the more we discover in it, and the more varied the directions that lead out of it. . ..  the depth of even the simplest image is truly fathomless.  This unending, embracing depth is one way that dreams show their love. “ (James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld)