Sit. Sumi Circle. Sit. I remember the instruction from a Contemplative Art class I took fifteen years ago. Sitting motionless, eyes soft, feet on floor, and the blank, white paper, ink, brush. Pause. Lift arm-brush. Dip. Inscribe circle, unfurl line onto white space. I am revealed in the mark: a collapsed edge, unmet ends, a blob, a waver, a dwindling scratch. Everything is in the weight of hand meeting substrate through brush. This is marriage. Commit.

What is at stake, in this circle, in this line? My great success? My immanent failure? The voices yammer on, yet, almost imperceptibly, they also begin to recede. There is so much in that ragged little mark, the quavery and dented circle.

i walk the path between. to my left four lanes of traffic. traffic. traffic. sometimes it rushes. sometimes it is a black clot of oil. always it is impatient in its pursuit of destination. art is like a levee: on one side, this irritated flow of metal and mental, and the other:

the other side is ravens over cornstalks yellowing and an indigo sky full of storm.

at my feet is an exodus. an envoy from the mythic mind? there is satisfied beauty in the burnt umber wings with black bars, the domed head like the globe of a frog’s eye. they appear confused, made frantic perhaps by the mid-September heat or the crushed bodies of their allies nearby. many die on this humble bicycle road.

the envoy make their journey, adorned in colors that speak jungles and remind me that size is relative. they pull like a gauze veil, the empty, ominous, windy quietude of the wild lands behind them. they whispers, softly penetrating my racing mind.

THOUGHTS. WRITINGS. DETRITUS.