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Arbor Day

Today, National Arbor Day, observed on the last Friday in April and celebrated in all 50 states, I’m celebrating SOUL, (Sustaining Our Urban Landscape) a group reforesting the urban landscape of New Orleans. 🌳 The official birthplace of Arbor Day is Nebraska City, Nebraska, brought about by the tree-loving secretary of the Nebraska Territory, and in 1872 when he proposed a tree planting…

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Physical Plane Life

watercolor by NW 2024 She takes off into the light. Then the light changes. Darkness comes. watercolor by NW 2024 There’s no going back, only turning on the light from inside. And steady she goes, through the night. Though we be the light of the soul, when we enter the dark of physical matter and become dark to suit the territory, it doesn’t change the light from within.

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Tree of Love

A Tree in Brooklyn, photo and watercolor by NW 2018 We know the Tree of Knowledge. We’ve basked in the Tree of Light. All that’s left is the tree of love, the heart of the matter, to feel what we see. And know in our hearts to be true.   

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On This Valentine's Day

On this Valentine’s Day, give me the beat-up heart...

The Heart, by NW Feb. 2024 On this Valentine’s Day give me the beat-up heart, the one with a hole in it (that may be a pearl) the heart that’s been stretched and pummeled, kneaded to brokenness to bleed and breathe life into things that will beat and beat forever n’more.

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The Chinese Lamp

This is the morning I remembered this was the lamp beside the phone that rang with the news Kennedy was shot.

drawing by nw 2024 This is the lamp I turn on before daylight, and the first I turn on when night starts to fall. This is the morning I remembered this was the lamp beside the phone that rang with the news Kennedy was shot. We had our coats on. My mother had kept my sister and I home from school so she could take us to a matinee of “No Coward Soul is Mine,” the title of a poem by Emily Bronte.…

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Valuing the Darkness

Watercolors by NW 1980s ‘Love and Light,’ glorious as they are, don’t necessarily hack it when the answers you need are found in the darkness. The opposite of light is dark, but the opposite of love isn’t hate; it’s fear. Fear of our own darkness can lead us away from the light that can only be found within. I saved this meme I came across years ago and only found the other day when I was going…

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The Story of Red and Green

watercolor nw 2023 When there was only the sun and the sea, Yellow and Blue, they fell in love and created Green. But no one had ever seen Green before so they didn’t know where it was until that laggard Red came along. When Red with the longest, slowest wavelength showed up next to Green, they could finally see it, especially when it snowed. Which is why at the end of the year when Yellow…

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A Periscope for the Ages

watercolor, nw 2023 This new kind of periscope looks like the old version and does the same job of allowing us to see what’s above the surface of the water, but in this case it’s the waters of the Piscean Age, and it’s giving us a preview of our ascent to a higher plane of consciousness, the light-and-love-filled air of the new age of Aquarius. Like all new gadgets it comes with instructions. A…

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News from the Heart

If a ball of fiery light came hurtling through space, cooling off as it came through the atmosphere to land on a Brooklyn corner, it might well resemble this pearly-white module I saw in a dream. I was across the street and only saw it from the back, its odd, rounded shape like nothing I’d ever seen before, almost as if a huge glob of white paint had landed on the sidewalk. It looked hard and…

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Riding the (New) Waves

Waves in my Legs, watercolor I felt the waves in my legs long before I heard we live in a sea of vibrations. So I was concerned and thought there was something wrong with me. They started a few days after a friend took me to see the ocean at night. Could it have been that? It was cold that night. A cold night in November that became noticeably colder as we got nearer the water. But it was…

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Do You See What I See

Seeing with the inner eye

I’m standing on the subway platform waiting for the train. Everyone is looking at their phones. I looked at mine at home so I’m looking at the wall on the other side of the tracks. It’s a grubby brown with patches of white. No wait. Not patches, shapes. I see a green-bowered glade, blue sky beyond. There’s a couple in the foreground. The animals have gathered around. I reach for my phone to take…

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When the Light is Green

Red-Amber-Green. Stop-Wait-Go. Simple directives delivered by color can keep life running smoothly as well as the traffic. All you have to do is keep an eye out. Which is what I did one long ago summer night in New York when all the lights were green and the car sped down Lower Broadway as if we were on a direct flight to Venus. I didn’t have to know then that not only Venus but the heart chakra…

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Decoding the Spiral

We hear the narrator say, "Behind the chaos of these times a new order is being born within the human soul," and we see the chaos behind the spiral, its coils like damaged springs, loose, unpredictable and without a center they wander hither and yon...

While the symbol of the spiral might represent an order in nature’s growth as it expands and renews itself, it can signify our own expansion too, as seen in the first few frames of Behind the Chaos, a video from A Tree of Light. Chaos isn’t difficult to imagine. We have more than enough examples in both life and art. We hear the narrator say, “Behind the chaos of these times a new order is being…

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Bridging the Gap

I’ve seen ‘the bridge’ represented in all sorts of ways, but none of them ever captured the idea of what such a crossing might be like until I saw these two paintings by the contemporary British artist, Richard Wincer.

Richard Wincer http://richardwincer.co.uk/ Bridges as we know them come in all shapes and sizes and are made from all sorts of different materials, but their purpose is the same, to get us from one side to the other. And then there is the bridge of consciousness between the human and spiritual realms known as the “Lighted Bridge.” (http://atreeoflight.org/resources/lighted-bridge) On one side…

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The Path 1982

Standing in front of my painting, seeming to protest the Path is too steep. (1982) It’s 1982. I’m talking about my new work and he snaps my picture in front of the nymph or sprite I called her, beckoning me to follow her up the path. I’d never heard of the Path in those days, the one known as the Path of Ascent, the Path of Return to Source, the path of light that ascends, stage by stage,…

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Paddington Mouse

Sketchbook, NW 2023 I know enough by now to know that if I forget something important it will come back to me in a dream. I know to write the dream down and remember where so that if I forget it again, I’ll know where to look. Such a one was the dream I had last summer about a mouse dressed as Paddington Bear. He came to remind me that everything is a gift and stop being picky about what turns…

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Drawing is Dangerous

They say we need more beauty in the world, but sometimes all we have to do is see the light that is already here. I saw it in this study of a mouse whose life was ebbing away.

Pastel by NW 2023 Drawing is dangerous. It shows you what you are seeing, how little or how much, or how skewed your perceptions might be. Writing is dangerous too, as it reveals what you know, and maybe what you didn’t know that you knew, and puts it in black and white on a page. This a story of Light and Dark. Last year when I saw signs of a mouse in my house I called the exterminator. This…