BREATH IN, BREATH OUT

BREATH IN, BREATH OUT.  What is rather amazing about this simple action, is that sometimes you see something on this earth through the eyes that God gave you, and you suddenly feel nothing but that breath on every square inch of your body.  This is that moment, in a dissected visual flash of my mind.  Oxygen (blue) and the blood (purple/red) that oxygen feeds moving in and out of the body.  I was at the Prague Castle earlier this year looking at the stained glass in this ancient vessel of soul and prayer.  Its power seemed magnified in every chip of glass thoughtfully put into place and with out intention magnifying the light into this blessed space flooding into each breath of mine.  With a mass of people streaming around me, I barely noticed their bustle of movements.  All I could feel was the breath in my body being fueled by each refraction of light that my eyes were fortunate enough to see.  Later that night, while thawing out in a warm corner of a pub with a good beer, I sat and sketched a small idea of these lines out.  That was a pretty good day.  Just breathing.  

11"x14"

A MATTER OF THE HEART

This is a matter of the heart.  Or at least that is where its motivation comes from.  In the literal and figurative sense.  A friend of mine called upon me to see if I cold do something for a friend of her preparing to have their fourth child.  Something the Dr's told her would never happen, because of the Mother's heart condition.  But alas and God Bless, her heart had healed and therefore, they were able to bear this fourth child.  My friend shared something with me that she had read, that helped her sum up this said matter of the heart.

BE HUMBLE FOR YOU ARE MADE OF EARTH.
BE NOBLE FOR YOU ARE MADE OF STARS.

Humility and nobility are fully loaded words that, when tapped, have an awesome power in bringing peace and power to your life.  As I've aged, certain songs from my childhood come to have new meaning to them.  As I wrote the first sentence of this paragraph, the song by Jon Michael Montgomery, Life's a Dance, began to play in my mental radio.  The chorus mainly..."Life's a dance you learn as you go, sometimes you lead sometime you follow."  To feel the ultimate blessings in life, to understand the other (or darker) side of that blessing is needed.  They come hand in had.  Sometimes we lead, and others we follow.  Sometimes we feel esteemed by nobel, sometimes we feel brought down and humbled.  I totally see where my friend drew these two things together in regard to her friends 'matter of the heart.'

It took me a bit of time to settle on what I wanted to do with this.  I started this tree on an International flight recently with lots of time and fortunately smooth air, and at one point I had a swing hanging from the tree - which obviously didn't make the final cut.  I couldn't settle on what I wanted to do here...I was thinking about stars but was drawing a tree???  So I sat on it, drew some other things, that in the end felt too forced or intentional.  I came back to the tree.  The tree is like the heart in here.  Its lines somewhat resemble the lines you see in an image of a heart. The straight lines (humility)...FOCUS, SETLLE DOWN, THINK STRAIGHT is what I kept feeling.  But I didn't want it to be so stale.  I had to balance it out, so I threw some 'stars' (nobility) in the middle. Flowing through them both, are the matters of the heart that give life...to FOUR BLESSED CHILDREN and have lived the life that they have as a family.  Their family tree has just grown.  

7"x11"
SOLD