Mike Finch Jr. was glad he was leaving America. He had taken flights before, but not as long as this one and none as far. As the plane continued to circle and climb, he could see the blaze of lights of the city he was born and grew up in, grow smaller and smaller, a string of lights for the Yuletide season. He had picked one of the worst days of the winter to fly out. It had been snowing steadily all night long, and this morning he had to help his father, Mike Sr., shovel the snow from the driveway. However he was glad because where he was going it would be summer, and warm. If only man had the ability, and of course the sensible instincts of migratory birds, he would go north to south in the winter and vice versa.

Although his mother was worried (only abstractly Mike had thought) about this trip, Mike had delibrately picked Christmas Eve for the flight. "To get away from the whole cloying Yelutide Jingle Bells drama and to begin in the new year in a new country", he had told his elder sister when she had asked why couldn't he wait until after New Year's to leave, since he wasn't going to start work until February anyway.

Night and solitude. Why ask for another, when this music that anchors itself into you, an abstraction more concrete than the others who left you, is always true, true right to it's bones?

Imagination is the only door out of the prison of daily despair.

Life has a richer taste to the soul that is hungry and mad, even if one suffers more as a consequence.

The only worthy goal of all art is God, yes, to know the final mystery.

Poetry is the last shell of language that covers the human heart. One has to break even poetry, to know the heart.

Writing should be a process that flays open the heart and spilts it open - a expansive red sky.

If one doesn't travel, either with the feet of the body or the feet of the mind, one dies.

Inspite of intense loneliness, all artists must persevere, for in art lies redemption.

[1]

Walking by Hummingbird Lane, you see grass flaming golden embers – the whole field is covered with glowworms. If you were a scientist, who you are sometimes, you would perhaps try to explain why those insects chose to gather at that particular field, and why and how they emit those flashes of light. But during these moments of dusk you are simple man, capable of only hunger and wonder.

You stop and watch. Your mind becomes empty and enters what the Celts called the Book of the World – this always subsumes and is greater than all the Books of God written down and endlessly recited by men. You observe your skin shivering and an inescapable feeling of gratefulness shooting through your nerves. Perhaps this is what a Satori – awakening - feels like. Some of this is always seen on that whole smile you see on the face of the Buddha – the Awakened One. When he was asked by someone to explain what or who is God, he stayed silent. And that silence perhaps is the most perfect poem ever not written down.

[2]

Peavine Creek is where he always stops. This is where he can touch the flowing palm of time if he wants to. But usually he stands still, leaning forward, eyes closed, listening to the varying sound of water, constantly flowing over rock and gravel. He is becoming intimately familiar with this sound, he carries this sound with him and it sleeps next of his ear, on that big bed of his, awash with half read books. It had rained all day and so the sound is a steady hiss of churning foam – a woman, perhaps with the heat of Bizet’s Carmen, dancing flamenco. He can hear her shoes tapping out love and death, the Morse code of all poetry.

A man’s imagination wants to be creek, if not a river. And all imaginings eventually become the sea. And what is the true nature of the sea – perhaps God? This he hopes will be drunk by someone else, a madman running the water in a canoe or a steamboat, a Mark Twain say or some meditative sage quietly fly fishing for trout, a Norman Mclean say, to produce more and more and more imagination. A chain reaction of imagination that will drown the world choking on trivial shit, like a Biblical Flood.

[3]

I enter the forest and leave my other selves behind me. The forest has changed as I have changed. The undergrowth is thicker; the forest floor is covered with new ferns – in this section mostly the Christmas fern. And the bronzed birches of winter have transformed themselves entirely by donning green leaves, which are shaped like some early man’s flint arrowheads. The wooden bench in the first hollow, on which I had lain and gazed at the cold blue winter sky, has rotted and collapsed – is this the intelligence of nature taking over the intelligence of man?

Walking up to the clearing on the top of the hill, I notice a section of rotting tree trunk shaped like the head of a primal bird or fish. I immediately pick it up. It will be a nice addition to the other piece collected on a previous trip that resembles the skull of a wildebeest. The piece of bark underneath is crawling with ants, termites and other insects I don’t the names of. I take them with these pieces of wood, these Renewable Sculptures. A lines from Ecclesiastes – that slim chapter of the Old Testament, perhaps the only one worth reading in that book – will be the motto for this gallery of sculpture: ‘All go to one place; all are from dust and all turn to dust again’.