Preface
Beginning the journey
(part I)
Beginning about 1981 my wife and I started a life as professional art fair artists working in a one thousand square foot studio in the Ozarks that housed Osage Pottery Works. Our livelihood was gleaned from selling at art festivals and similar events across a broad swath of America from Minnesota to south Florida and from Texas to Virginia.
For over four decades we traveled the country looking at the world through a windshield living the nomadic life. For me it was a contemplative time while daydreaming and imagining what is embedded in the landscape of America and what universal concepts tie the scenery to the ideas that have formed how I understand what I see.
Every nation has a difficult story. No society is immune to changing times and attitudes. The shifting sands of judgment cause dislocations and painful wounds in people and their memories. That is part of the landscape that rolls past my windscreen as we travel along. William Blake saw the entire world in a grain of sand just as I see millennia radiating from an oak tree or history gushing from a rusty iron post.
With my wife by my side we fought our way through storms, drought, economic collapse, riots, grave illness, and the life of an artist. Never a great economic success but the compensation came in other ways. We had a "freedom of the mind" that is in very short supply today.
I was never afraid of driving down a gravel road or across a ford to get somewhere and in my attempt to understand this world I pushed myself into uncomfortable places. I spent many years studying our history from the perspective of those most involved. I immersed myself in the formative pain of the American Civil War with the same gusto that I used when I participated in the Vietnam and the Civil Right era always trying to get close to a truth.
The same intensity was applied for over twenty years volunteering with twelve step groups and counseling people wounded by chemical dependency and other issues. Being raised an atheist I had little or no understanding of the spiritual crisis the people I was with were going through. This caused me to look at my own spiritual disabilities.
This induced me to contemplate my spiritual being and to study religion. I taught myself breath counting meditation and read volumes about Eastern philosophy and the perennialist thinkers in the West and was the co-founder of the independent study group, the Institute for Perennial Studies. I took a correspondence course in Jodo Shinshu (Pure Land Buddhism) from the University of Hawaii. While studying Shan-tao and the patron saint Amitabha I came to realize that this was another likeness of Lord Christ, both being avatars of Divine grace and love….
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