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This figure, clearly a dog, was found on an ancient piece of New World pottery in a Los Angeles museum. For hundreds, if not thousands of years, humans have shared their lives, hearts and homes with canine companions. For a relationship in which there is no common language, we seem to understand each other very well. And a home with a beloved dog seems and feels happier, to me at least.

If you've lived long enough, you will inevitably have to say goodbye to one (or maybe many) of these four-legged friends. And people's grief for their pets is as real and heartfelt as any can be. I've often thought it a shame that our lifespans are not equivalent, or even close. I'm certain there are many scientific reasons why this may be so, but I am convinced that dogs are much better students at learning unconditional love during their Earthly existence and graduate sooner than the rest of us bumbling bipeds.

I have known and loved a line of dogs in my life, their antics and personalities each a quirky marvel of magnificence, their joyfulness and playfulness a constantly moving model of how-to-be in this world and their patience and undying loyalties, quiet and gracious gifts held close to my heart. That we honor them in our heart as well as in our art seems a given.

We leave the two-lane for a single lane paved road that moves from the grassland valley up into the oak-forested hills. Summer has turned the ground cover a golden yellow and the canopy above a sharp, dark green. The deep veined crevices of the oaks make them feel old to me and, I'm told, some of these are hundreds of years old. We are on a trek to look at a hunting cabin for a group event in a remote part of the Tehachapi Mountains. Here, bears and mountain lions outnumber people. This land, a working ranch, is undisturbed except for wayward cows and wild pigs. We turn a bumpy corner to find a golden eagle drinking from a cow trough and it takes startled flight, lighting upon an oaken branch to settle itself.

My companion, a biologist, shows me the telltale sign of trees distressed from drought. I feel an odd sense of heartache at this for reasons I can't explain. He says the trees give up on parts of themselves, allowing those parts to die and eventually fall away. Cells at the periphery of these areas are poised to crank up again should water relief come. Sacrificing some to save the whole seems noble to me, but then everything about oaks seems noble to me. And I feel blessed to be here amidst these old masters.

I captured this image of an oak back in the Spring. The colors behind the tree are the green and wildflowers of the time. This one is called Oaken Dreams.

I was a teen when I heard the Don McLean song Vincent about Vincent Van Gogh and his painting Starry Night. I had seen the Van Gogh work in an art book we had at home and found it hauntingly beautiful. Any teenager could certainly relate to the pain of feeling like an outsider, of wanting to be loved and feeling unlovable and McLean’s song captured the tragedy of it quite well

Starry, starry night
Paint your palette blue and gray
Look out on a summer's day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul

Shadows on the hills
Sketch the trees and the daffodils
Catch the breeze and the winter chills
In colors on the snowy linen land

Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free

They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they'll listen now

Starry, starry night
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze
Swirling clouds in violet haze
Reflect in Vincent's eyes of china blue

Colors changing hue
Morning fields of amber grain
Weathered faces lined in pain
Are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand

Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free

They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they'll listen now

For they could not love you
But still your love was true
And when no hope was left in sight
On that starry, starry night

You took your life, as lovers often do
But I could've told you Vincent
This world was never meant for
One as beautiful as you

Starry, starry night
Portraits hung in empty halls
Frame-less heads on nameless walls
With eyes that watch the world and can't forget

Like the strangers that you've met
The ragged men in ragged clothes
The silver thorn of bloody rose
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow

Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free

They would not listen, they're not listening still
Perhaps they never will.

But, somehow, we grow past the loneliness and turmoil of the teen years. We hear new songs that add context to our lives. Still, I never lost my love for Van Gogh’s work and have taken every opportunity to see originals when I could.

So, I found myself one day at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I knew Starry Night was there among a million other treasures. It became the object of my intentionally slow quest, proceeding from one floor to the next taking in works, one after another, until I turned a corner and there it was.

I was stopped dead in my tracks.

Standing before it I felt overcome, I felt a timeless sense of longing, that burning sensation around the eyes just before they tear up, and at the same time, wonder, wonder at the color, wonder at the texture and reverence, reverence knowing that Vincent had touched, created, handled this work a few feet before me not so long ago. I felt moved.

The power of art is the power to touch us in a deeply moving way. It is as if to say ‘I understand now.’ Even though we may not, as we look at an incredible work, be able to verbalize what that understanding is. We find truth in it.

Starry Path (shown here) is my homage to Vincent Van Gogh.

It is the nature of mothers to feed and care for their young. It can be fraught with peril, regret and guilt like many other human (and maybe even animal) endeavors of any worthwhile consequence. And yet mothers carry on, I like to think, because they love their children in the ways they know how.

Some of my finest traits I got from my mom, my sense of adventure, my notions of right and wrong, my compassion for others and maybe, most importantly, my willingness to be open to new ideas and personal growth.

But motherhood is tricky. It comes with long, long, LONG hours, sometimes ungrateful and unruly children, an intense range of feelings and an endless list of things needing to be done.

How, then, have humans gone more than two or three generations? The only answer I can think of must be love. How strong must a mother's love be to overcome all these? Indeed!

Call your mom!

We took the road through the National Forest. It followed a long valley that drains into a steep and windey canyon with sheer walls that look like those sand-dripped beach sculptures, all deep crevices and spindly buttresses. That canyon opened onto a chaparral plain, except near the creek where alfalfa and other green things were being grown. Here, ringed by mountains, we stumbled on an old compound, a smattering of old adobe buildings (one being repaired or braced, at least, from the ravages of time). They belonged to a ranching family in the 1800s, a people who had obviously prospered in this forgotten place. It had all the elements needed for success, a perpetual creek, good pasture, and the ring of mountains to contain a herd of cattle.

Somehow, time passed this place by. Maybe when paved roads and automobiles became popular this place was just too far away. For reasons I will likely never know, nobody remains here. Maybe they did so well they could move to the city, building finer homes elsewhere, or maybe children or grandchildren had no interest in the ranching life. All I know is that the only sound I heard that day was the sound of the wind in the trees and across the barbed wire fences, the sound of the perpetual creek and the songs of the birds, the sole tenants of this lonely place.

There are a few key places in California where travel is constricted, not necessarily by traffic, but by topography. To go from Southern California to the Central Valley you must overcome the mountains that lie between them. Interstate 5 runs through the Tejon Pass here. But before there was an Interstate there was Highway 99 and before that the "Ridge Route" and before that wagon roads and before that trails the Native Americans used for trading with their neighbors. Most all of these lie on top of one another on the same ground in certain places.

Consequently, I have begun to think of this road differently. I think about the lives of people who traveled the same way I have, people who crossed this same ground in this same place but in completely different eras. Some drove Model Ts, some pulled ox carts and some traversed on foot, all with a purpose. Here in this little town where I now live so close to the Pass, in my mind's eye I see a horizontal axis, that is literally, a road. And I also see a vertical axis that is time itself. Each point on the vertical axis is the same road in a different era. And I wonder about the lives to be found at each point, what their daily concerns were, who they cared about, were they content or restless.

A road is more than a road when it is overlaid with the complexities of time. It becomes a construct that takes us to a far different place than we imagined, where we can surmise the ways we are the same or different than those who have taken similar journeys. I like to think that we are much the same by the time we have gotten to the Pass, we have overcome the hardest part of our journey.

The original image of The Old Road above was captured near the Tejon Pass in California.

There is a place in Laguna Beach, California where the homes, quite literally, are on the beach. They sit at the bottom of a steep bluff and seem to keep from getting washed away only because they rest on rock formations that make up the base of the bluff. Still, they are battered incessantly and I can't imagine the upkeep that must be required after storms and king tides. The battered foundations are one part of this composite image. The other is the small girl, captured initially by Farm Security Administration photographers back in the 1930s. Her appearance of hopelessness lends itself to the backdrop of sustained abuse.

We classify the unfortunate circumstances that befall families as "a broken home." Divorce, addictions, disorders, mental disabilities and illness, these and more are the causes of "broken homes." Over the years I have wondered if all homes are not broken in one way or another, not necessarily because I have empirical evidence or could site studies to that effect, but because all humans seem to have frailties to one degree or another. And these, we often share knowingly, or unknowingly, with others. Sometimes with little effect and sometimes with long-term, traumatic effect.

But I also wonder, in what ways, overcoming these effects makes us better and stronger people. I know I have met those who have said "I promised myself I would never do to my kids what was done to me." And many have kept that promise to themselves and those that failed, did so with regret and awareness. I wonder how we are shaped by these events, what skills we learn or truths we come to that we might not have.

I intentionally left the colors of this image muted or washed out. From the perspective of a child from a broken home, the world is dulled from despair. Later in life, we come to learn that, despite whatever storm comes our way, we realize we are still built on a solid foundation and with work we realize that we can be strong and beautiful right where we are.

I was oblivious the moment that it happened. I suspect there is a precise moment in time when the Earth's perceived wobble around the sun strikes dead center and the day and night are equally divided and the promise of longer days lies inarguably ahead.

The word equinox has Latin roots, equi meaning equal and nox meaning night...equal night (the implication meaning the night takes up as much time as the daylight). It happens only twice a year in Spring and again in Autumn. I like the implied sense of balance between night and day, especially after a seemingly long winter full of many dark times.

I like that I won't be coming home in the dark after work and that I can walk Max before the sun sets for the day. But one of the truly amazing things about Spring being sprung is that Nature has begun to change her wardrobe, the hills here have been overrun with wildflowers of unimaginable brghtness, especially the poppies. Torrents of orange appear to flow like lava down the hillsides.

Mixed with these are the deep blue hues of lupine and the yellows of fiddlenecks and lavendars and other shades of plants whose botanic and common names I know not, but whose presence I feel and appreciate all the same. And all these painted on a canvas of the bright green grasses fostered by the snows and rains of the prequinox.

I am ready. I am ready for some balance. I am ready for some hope of longer, warmer days ahead. I am ready for the return of color. And I am grateful that the Earth reminds us, as she so brilliantly does, that life surges forth so passionately that we can't help but notice.

Since I last wrote here I lost my younger sister and younger brother to cancer. I still find it hard to believe they are gone. I watched them grow and bloom into incredible people full of life and love. But their blooms faded early and watching the petals slip one by one was nearly unbearable. I must remind myself that below the ground the tulip bulb remains. This is what I believe about them, the true-ness of them lives on, the essence of who they were in this life, their verve and sparkle, that's all still there in the unseen world a few vibrational degrees away from this one we know so well.

Nothing about them is dead, save their poor bedraggled bodies, I still feel them at the ready. As though I might turn and catch sight of them. And I will when my own petals fall. I wasn't thinking of that when I shot the original image of this piece. Only that I might freeze a moment of beauty, who knew there would be a message in it?

It has been nearly two months since I have posted an entry here. It's not that it's difficult for me to talk about my work, I can muster a thing to say now and then about it. But the truth is, it hasn't been in me to talk about it. You may call it the vagaries of life, or anxiety or even depression if you want to. I find that the circumstances of my life seem overwhelming at present. When people I know are suffering, having to make difficult life decisions, or they are making heroic gestures despite incredible odds, as seems to be happening far too often these past many weeks. Then to write about my work, knowing what I know, seeing what I see, feels trivial by comparison, small words in a hurricane wind.

I know this difficult time will pass because, well, nothing stays the same for long, and my words will come back to me and feel like they mean something. I still continue to work because it helps me keep moving through. And, right now, I feel like that's what I can do, keep moving through life.