This text is from a personal announcement card I printed on the occasion of "Snail" being included in the Painting Center's (NY, NY) winter invitational show, December 1997.
_________________________"no step is lost on this path. . .
and even a little progress
is freedom from fear."Slowly, steadily, the snail made the ark. I remember the happy children laughing and playing on one side of the room, and the sad ones, silent, standing apart from each other in a loose group in the middle of the room, and the teacher looking out the window all afternoon, her black cowl screwed down on her eyes. Worry and worry--worries were paid off finally with regrets from a moment of wonder. Huddled alone together all life long--or almost. How have you lived, wise one? How did you put it all together--whispering leaves of fulfillment at nightfall, intimations of mortality riding sunward on dustback--to make it ring like a bell in the lonely night? How do you fill the cold air? Are the Lovers constellated there, still? "I want to love more open than before, let love in at my door." Your words were delivered from an unannounced prosperity to mark the graves of passing minutes. I have heard that when one lights the candle of attention at those monuments, the beholder of the universe takes one more soft step forward.