The journey toward our beauty is a magnificent struggle. Achieving an integrity between what we believe and how we live is a challenge worthy of the gift of life. A thousand obstacles stand between ourselves and the honoring of our truth. A thousand distractions. (A thousand ego-generated delusions). To dive down, find the beauty, nurture it and offer it to the world is magnificent. Staying with your beauty, your truth, your integrity is difficult, but out of these things comes meaning, and meaning is all-transcendent.
~ from JOURNAL NOTES by Rod McIver ... "Heron Dance" #19
I try to be like water. Water goes to the humblest, lowest places and provides moisture. My place in the world is pinpoint small, but it goes down deep. The residents of this bleak, barren, and disjointed community have taught me that there can be profound wisdom, wonder, and love in a place of almost total despair. Our neighborhood may be nothing like the pristine hallways of a gallery, but we do art here. Our art holds our feelings, the feeling that we care deeply -- like water, like life.
~ from Lily Yeh in "The Other Side," July/August 2004
