The Story: Soul

A soul is hard to paint because it has no outline of its own. The painting lends it one: a circle, open at the center, blue on the night side, fire on the day side, and a horizon under it so the circle has somewhere to stand.

I am the nothing creating a something. The first line is not a loss. It is a beginning. The white inside the ring is not absence. It is the room where a life has not yet been crowded. From that room a stroke begins. Blue gathers. Green follows. Orange breaks the rim and keeps going, because a something, once started, does not ask the circle for permission to continue.

I am the beginning, the middle and the end. The ring holds all three at once. What looks like a single gesture is a life seen from far enough away that yesterday and tomorrow share an edge. The drips under the circle are the middle, still falling. The fire at the right is the end that has not agreed to be an end. It runs out along the horizon as a line of light.

I perceive and decide. I act, and thus, I am. The poem refuses a soul that only watches. Perception is the blue. Decision is the turn from blue to flame. Action is the stroke that leaves the circle and enters the open field. Being is not a prize at the end of that sequence. It is the sequence, still wet.

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Three words, and the painting will not rank them. The circle keeps yesterday in its curve. Today is the place where the color breaks. Tomorrow is the pale field to the right, not blank, only not yet written. A soul that can say all three without fear has already made peace with time.

Soul is a Painted Poem about the maker inside the making. It does not hover above the body or the mind. It stands on the same horizon, draws a circle around a nothing, and then fills the world from that circle outward. The signature sits low, where the light has already traveled.

Collection:  Architecture of Stillness