As I walked deeper into the woods I noticed a change in the atmosphere... not the air, the atmosphere... the feeling, the sense of a presence.  It was subtle, but very real, as though I had wandered into a parallel universe.  I was in the same woods, but I wasn't in the same woods.  I was standing in the unknown.  Not the unknown of a B movie spookiness with a threatening underscore of warning unknown.  An unknown whose pulse was inhumanly more serene and more present. Though I'm not sure if it was more present around me, or I was more present to it. Unintimidated, I walked deeper into the place that seemed to be waiting for me. Expecting me.   I became aware that, although I had no destination in mind when I started this stroll, the woods did.  Ahead of me was a face.  A big face.  Or head.  I wasn't sure.  I approached the face and saw that it was made out of stone.  Its cheeks and forehead of crumbling blocks; it eyes of windows; it's gaping mouth of what was once a door.  An abandoned chapel, overgrown with vines, dappled in branches.  And more.  Off to the side, a grave.  And the grave's headstone.  Old and bidding.  I went to it.  The carved lettering, barely discernible, had been worn by decades of soft Irish days.  But what could be read was this: Died 31 May 1930 at the age of eighty-one years.  I noted with irony that I was born on the 31st of May.  I brushed the moss off the name above the dates. It read: Catherine Dunne.  She was born in 1849.  And she was my great-grandmother.  Today, when I take my walk in the woods as I often do, I wonder if I will be invited back into a magical space, right next to where I am, where others wait for me.  

Morning Rain.

Waking to the sound of the rain gets to me like nothing else.  The paradiddle on the roof above my bed always means the day is going to be blessed, and I can't wait to look out the window and watch it pour.  Look, at all those drops.  It's a miracle.  A miracle I can walk in and feel and smell.  What can I say?  I get excited easily. 

On a recent morning walk, as I took in the sights and smells of the woods, I was reminded of the woods near my home when I was a kid, and how important a role all the woods since then have played in my life.  There's something about the woods, here in California or there and then in New Jersey, that simultaneously settles me down and excites me.  Inspiration in the play of light; reassurance in the vivid complexity of every branch and leaf.  So much has gone before me in the woods.  All of life.  Centuries.  Millennia.  And walking through that now taunts me with the mystery of my connection to it.  An unspoken meaning surely treads beside me, beyond my ability to fully comprehend or express it.  Which is the draw to the woods, still, and its power.  The joy is experience, not explanation, in that silent search. 

Summer nights.

I watched these boys play with the sunset in the tide pools as Galway Bay heaved sleepily around them, settling in for the long, quiet, black night... the Bay, not the boys... and I was reminded of how my brothers and I played similar end-of-the-day games a thousand years ago on the opposite side of the Atlantic at the Jersey shore.  It was the same salt air, and it was turning suddenly and surprisingly cool, as it had back then when it tightened our skin with every drop in degree.  Those were the days.  I have to remember to remember them.  If it takes coming to Ireland to do that, than so be it.  

Corazones Unidos para Guatemala

Tucked away behind the iron doors of a simple cinderblock building straddling the unpaved fringes of San Juan Alotenango lies the scrappy anonymity of one man's hope.  Asociacion Corazones Unidos para Guatemala, Hearts United for Guatemala, operates the only school in this region, providing an education and a noon meal for sixty pueblo children five days a week.  As well, the school offers semi-annual medical and dental check-ups for every child.  All of this is free thanks to the efforts of Carlos Humberto Aguilar, a young ex-seminarian who scours the residences and businesses of this town and the ones surrounding it for handouts, loose change, and leftovers, when he isn't working at a nearby university to support himself.  In his spare time, a concept I found incomprehensible, he repairs, paints, and decorates the place.  Most remarkable are the smiles on the children's faces, on the face of the local young girl he has employed to teach them, and especially on the face of Carlos himself.   He is not exhausted, but rather exhilarated by the school's success.  It is a success he is quick to disown as his.  He says it is the effort that succeeds.  The "effort" being God's hand in all of this.   In a land whose every town and building is named after a saint, there ought to be a marker for Carlos.  

Point of View

No one person's view of art can be the same as another's.  No one person's view can be truer or better.  What's important about the view is not what is being seen so much as what is being felt by seeing it.  By what is being understood in the context of the viewer's experience, not the artist's experience.   Surely, art, in order to mean anything at all, has to mean as much to the viewer as it does to the artist... though it will not mean the same thing.  That is the paradox and the value of art - its inherent ability to expand, and deepen, and clarify the viewer's life, at the expense of exposing the artist's.  That is why art is so great, and why the artist's life is so awful.

Taking a Break

Sometimes we just have to step back from the hustle and bustle and chill.  I was taking a break from studying to take some pictures of those around me taking a break.