No matter how tired you get, sometimes you must answer to glory. 

The tulip chair. It is a chair wearing the mask of the tulip. When it goes into a bank to rob it, the teller will tell the police later "It was a tulip, but it didn't look right. I don't know. Maybe it had a wig on." 

If I could twin myself, and rotate through another dimension in which orange becomes grey and up becomes down, this would be my self portrait. 

Flame clouds and ash clouds paint in different styles, as the geometry of the road engineer scuttles underneath. 

The crane takes flight on Sara's breath. She is drawn into a reverie of a lotus, a hyacynth, and blood by the thousand hours of a woman's silken pain. This kimono represents the end of the world, not to the woman who got married in it, but to the world it represents. 

Nature is invisible to nature. In the countryside, our longing is the foreground object. We long for something big enough to hide in, without disappearing forever. We long for the silence in which we can finally hear the complete sound of our own name. Your spirit rushes toward these hills, like a child. You cannot call it back, without betraying the silence that brought you here. It is a love of lost things, your lost name, a silence which yields nothing until death. 

This is the fantasy of a city dweller who lives in the mummified rural dream. 

In the country, nature is invisible, and our longings are the foreground object. In this picture, we long for the love of the sturdy people who kept this granary full. We long to love the boundary between lawn and flower bed, as keenly as the line between action and death. The peacefulness of the whole scene draws us in, and crushes us. 

Here in beauty begin. 

Nature in the city. It is either noise or spectacle...except when it is the memory of a garden foreclosed. 

Sam wears the bridge. It is the steel argument of his crises, which span a river. The bridge is no metaphor or symbol here. It is a halo with rivets and eroded piers. 

Sara can be comfortable within the display of incomplete signs. Her smile erases the blank sign, and writes a moment on the incessant similarity. I follow the pointers, and am home. 

I have come to arrest myself. My crime is malfeasance of time. I have not respected its boundaries, its policy or laws. I will go peacefully. 

Sam has found the street sign at the intersection of his crisis and his dream. 

Shadow, symbol, shadow of symbol: the trinity of a message that rewrites itself as you read it. 

Father and son. What is flattened and filled with darkness yet coexists. The shadow cannot express the object's intent, but the shadow of intent can destroy the object. 

The hydrant waited years for a fire that never came. It was a soldier first, then a sentinal, then a symbol for all the good intentions of men which fit on grids. Finally it was a bubble -gum-colored lingam far from home. 

In the city, the individual works harder to be seen. But when it is seen, it is seen as a spectacle, not as nature. We seek our nature, but are captivated by our spectacle. 

In search of freedom, we could only find what was free. 

Sara tried to see the world through rose colored glasses, but they were all being washed after a big party at the hotel the night before. We settled for the blue. 

Standing in line. I hate it most of the time. This time it was more like a very linear party. 

We stood in line cheerfully. The lady monk who gave us instructions said she had seen lines four city blocks long in the rain...this was nothing. The Cambodians were by far in the majority, and they were very friendly. 

In the middle of a prairie suburb south of Minneapolis, a Cambodian Buddhist temple sprung up from the offerings of the Hmong refugees. Today we stand in line to see the relics of the Buddha and his principle saints, then nosh a little at the Cambodian culture festival across the way.

Underneath the golden umbrella, there were several saints relics. The lady monk who greeted us in line said to expect the relics to have the same presence as the saints themselves. I was curious and open minded, but a bit skeptical. As I approached Shakyamuni's blood relic, the relic of Buddha himself, my cell phone rang. It was my son, who had not talked to me in seven months, inviting himself to dinner. That was miracle enough for me. 

Barefoot, you might enter heaven. Bring water, in case the pumps are being fixed.